What Happens If My Trademark Application Is Rejected?

A formal refusal is different from the more common outcome of abandonment — refusal means the Registrar actively decided against your mark, usually after a show-cause hearing where the objections weren't overcome.

Your options after a refusal

• Appeal to the High Court. Since the Intellectual Property Appellate Board was abolished in 2021, appeals from a Registrar's refusal now go to the intellectual property division of the relevant High Court. This is a genuine legal appeal, arguing that the Registrar's decision was wrong on the law or the facts.
• File a fresh application. If the refusal turned on something fixable — a narrower specification of goods/services, evidence of distinctiveness that wasn't presented the first time — refiling is an option. The tradeoff is real: a new application means a new filing date, so any priority advantage from the original date is gone, and the government fee is paid again.

Why this is different from abandonment

Missing an examination report deadline results in abandonment — the application simply lapses, with no decision made on the merits. Refusal means the Registrar actually considered the arguments and ruled against the mark. The distinction matters for what happens next: abandonment has no appeal (there's no decision to appeal), while a refusal does.

Why this outcome is avoidable more often than not

Outright refusal, as opposed to a resolved objection, usually reflects a mark that had a real, hard-to-overcome legal problem from the start — often a name too descriptive to be distinctive, or too close to an existing registration. A properly done clearance search and classification review before filing, covered in Step 1 of our trademark registration guide, is what catches this risk before you've paid a fee and waited months to find out. See our complete guide to examination reports and objections for how to respond well before it ever reaches this point.

Get help with an objection or opposition