China–New Zealand PPH Pilot Program Extended for Five Years, Applicable from 2026/11/1

The China National Intellectual Property Administration announced on 2026/10/14 that, by joint decision of the China National Intellectual Property Administration and the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ), the China–New Zealand Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) pilot project has been extended for five years, from 2026/11/1 to 2031/10/31; the relevant requirements and procedures for filing PPH requests with the two offices remain unchanged.

Some background is needed first: this pilot was not a long-term project. Under the arrangements of the two offices, the China–New Zealand PPH pilot was launched on 2024/11/1, initially for two years, and was originally due to expire on 2026/10/31. This decision pushes the end date to 2031/10/31, joining end to end with the original term with no gap in between; for applicants who had already filed a request before the end of 10 or who are preparing to file one, there is no continuity problem.

PPH is a fast-track examination channel between the patent examination authorities of different countries or regions, speeding up examination through work sharing between the authorities. The China National Intellectual Property Administration also explained that, since the launch of the first PPH pilot in 2011/11, it has successively established PPH cooperation mechanisms with the patent examination authorities of 38 countries or regions, and the China–New Zealand project is one of them.

It should be noted that this pilot is bidirectional. The same arrangement applies both to Chinese applicants requesting accelerated examination from IPONZ and to New Zealand applicants filing requests with the China National Intellectual Property Administration; this extension takes effect for both directions at the same time. The difference between the two directions lies only in the two offices' respective request procedure documents, not in two different projects.

In practice, the general prerequisites for PPH include: there is a corresponding application before the earlier examination office, and at least one claim in that application has been expressly found allowable or patentable; the claims of the application for which accelerated examination is requested must "sufficiently correspond" to those allowable claims—differences arising from translation, claim format differences or a narrower scope of protection are permitted; and a request form and documents such as the earlier examination office's examination opinion must be submitted with the request. For the China–New Zealand project specifically, the requirements of the two offices' current procedure documents regarding eligible application types and priority relationships must also be met.

Two further points should be noted. First, "the requirements and procedures remain unchanged" does not mean "the term is locked in": under the current procedure documents, the two offices may still terminate the pilot if the volume of requests exceeds what they can manage or for other reasons, and they will issue notice before termination. Second, this announcement concerns only the extension of the term; it does not address fees, examination-period commitments or specific eligibility conditions; before filing a request, applicants should still check the two offices' current PPH request guidelines and assess, in light of the stage their own application has reached, whether they meet the conditions.

Source: China National Intellectual Property Administration, "Extension of the China–New Zealand Patent Prosecution Highway Pilot Project" (2026/10/14); request procedure documents for the China–New Zealand PPH pilot project (effective from 2024/11/1, originally due to end on 2026/10/31).
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