Skip to content

Saudi Authority for Intellectual Property (SA/SAIP) — national
Layer national
Jurisdiction SA (WIPO ST.3: SA)
Issuing body Saudi Authority for Intellectual Property (الهيئة السعودية للملكية الفكرية), established by Council of Ministers Decision No. 496 (2018)
Rights administered patent, utility model (model of utility), industrial design, integrated-circuit layout-design, plant variety, trademark, copyright (administrative registration), geographical indication
Working languages Arabic (primary, authoritative for all gazetted texts); English (institutional pages on saip.gov.sa/en/, EN translations of some Implementing Regulations on WIPO Lex)
Connector status register: red — packet-level geo-block from US egress; fees: red for clean FeeItem extraction; yellow for service-catalog reference document (architectural difference — fees calculated at point of filing in eServices portal, no consolidated PDF schedule analogous to OEPM/INPI/IPOS); statutes: yellow — WIPO Lex carries Implementing Regulations PDFs but consolidated only up to 2019-05-09 and the SAIP Board resolution track is needed for current amounts
Last verified 2026-05-19
Manifest entry not yet listed in coverage/sources.yaml

Higher layers covering this office transitively:

  • EPO INPADOC / OPS — Saudi Arabia is recognized in INPADOC; SA patents flow through OPS biblio + family + legal events for filings published in the INPADOC window.
  • WIPO Patentscope — Saudi Arabia is a PCT contracting state since 2013-08-03; PCT national-phase entries into SA flow through Patentscope and INPADOC.
  • WIPO Hague Express — Saudi Arabia is a Hague contracting party since 2020-12-29; Hague IRs designating SA flow through Hague Express.
  • WIPO Madrid Monitor — NOT applicable. Saudi Arabia is not yet a Madrid Protocol contracting party as of 2026-05-19. Trademarks must be filed nationally with SAIP. No higher-layer coverage of SA TMs at the Madrid layer.
  • GCC Patent Office (legacy) — operated through the GCC Patent Office in Riyadh until closure of new filings effective 6 January 2021. Pre-closure GCC grants extending to SA remain enforceable but no new GCC patent applications are accepted; national filings at SAIP are the only route.

§1 Mission

SAIP is Saudi Arabia's sole national IP office, established under Council of Ministers Decision No. 496 (2018), consolidating responsibilities previously distributed across the General Directorate of Industrial Property at KACST (patents / IC / PV / designs), the Ministry of Commerce (trademarks), and the Ministry of Information (copyright).

The Kingdom is a member of WIPO (since 1982), Paris Convention (2004), TRIPS (2005), PCT (2013), Hague Agreement (2020), and Nice Agreement (2021), but is not yet a Madrid Protocol contracting party — a structurally important fact for trademark cost work, because SA TMs must be filed nationally, not through Madrid.

SAIP's transition to the unified eServices portal at eservices.saip.gov.sa on 19 December 2023 replaced the legacy per-right portals (of which tm.saip.gov.sa is the only one still operating, for trademarks filed before that date).

§2 What's unique here

Data types that live ONLY at SAIP and are not covered by any higher layer at full fidelity:

  • SA national patents and utility models — direct national filings (not via PCT national-phase or GCC).
  • SA industrial designs — Locarno-classed national designs (some Hague-IR-designating-SA designs flow through Hague Express).
  • SA national-only trademarks — direct national filings; Madrid is not available.
  • SA plant variety rights — sui generis under the same Royal Decree M/27 (2004) framework as patents / IC / designs.
  • SA copyright administrative registrations — registration is administrative and discretionary, not a pre-requisite to protection under Saudi copyright law.

§3 Programmatic surfaces

eServices portal — packet-level inaccessible from US egress

Field Value
Endpoint eservices.saip.gov.sa (unified, since 19 December 2023); tm.saip.gov.sa (legacy TM, pre-19-Dec-2023 marks only)
Auth SAIP account + Nafath digital identity (Saudi national / iqama-resident gating expected, analogous to Singapore CorpPass / Mexico FIEL)
Format Unknown — pages likely SPA-rendered behind Saudi government CDN
Reachable from US? ❌ — ConnectTimeout at the TCP layer from US residential egress (probes 2026-05-19; same result as earlier 2026-05 wave). This is not a Cloudflare WAF 403 or a content-blocked page; it is packet-level connection refusal, consistent with whole-AS-or-CIDR filtering of cloud-egress and US-egress IP ranges.
Rate limit unknown
ToS posture no public API ToS; eServices is the operative source for current fee amounts per SAIP's own direction to applicants
Rating (zero-infra proxy) 🔴 Red — packet-level geo-block, not a WAF challenge. Same posture as IMPI Mexico register subdomains; mitigations would require Saudi-egress or paid stealth-proxy infrastructure.

SAIP main site — saip.gov.sa

Field Value
Endpoint saip.gov.sa/en/ (English) · saip.gov.sa/ar/ (Arabic)
Reachable from US? ❌ — same packet-level ConnectTimeout as eServices
Rating 🔴 Red — same block class

Umm al-Qura official gazette — uqn.gov.sa

Field Value
Endpoint uqn.gov.sa/ — the Kingdom's official gazette, where Royal Decrees and ministerial decisions implementing IP fee changes are formally published.
Reachable from US? ❌ — ConnectTimeout. The most-citable primary source for a specific fee figure (litigation / opinion work) is therefore unreachable without a Saudi-egress or stealth-proxy detour.
Rating 🔴 Red — same block class

WIPO Lex — substantive law + Implementing Regulations (reachable, but stale)

Field Value
Endpoints WIPO Lex SA legislation listing and per-document details pages
Reachable from US? ✅ — WIPO Lex is anonymously reachable with valid SSL; signed-URL PDFs on wipolex-res.wipo.int have an expiry window
Format HTML detail pages + EN/AR PDF documents
Rating 🟡 Yellow — useful for statutory structure but not for current fee amounts, because the consolidated text is "as amended up to 2019-05-09" and SAIP Board resolutions after that date (notably the June 2022 publication-fee reductions) are not reflected.

Key WIPO Lex IDs: - Law on Patents, Layout-Designs of Integrated Circuits, Plant Varieties, and Industrial Designs (Royal Decree M/27, 2004) — WIPO Lex 23123 - Implementing Regulations of the Law (as amended up to Decision of the Board of Directors of SAIP No. 5/8/2019 of 4 Ramadan 1440H — 9 May 2019) — WIPO Lex 19743 — the document the user's notes identify as containing the fee schedule for patents / UM / IC / PV / designs, but consolidated text stops at the 2019-05-09 Board decision. - Executive Regulations of the GCC Patent Law — WIPO Lex 21680 — covers the legacy GCC track (closed for new filings 2021-01-06). - Regulations on Compulsory Licensing of Patents — WIPO Lex 19762

Archive.org Wayback — historical SAIP snapshots (limited utility)

Field Value
Endpoint web.archive.org/web/2026/https://www.saip.gov.sa/en/
Reachable from US? ✅ — Wayback is reachable but rate-limits cloud egress
Rating 🟡 Yellow — useful for capturing the SAIP services-catalog page structure at a known point in time, but Wayback is not a primary source and won't carry the live-calculated fee amounts from eServices

§4 Fees

Status (2026-05-19): Red for clean FeeItem extraction; yellow for a service-catalog reference document. Saudi Arabia is structurally different from every other office documented in this wave: SAIP does not publish a standalone gazette annex or downloadable consolidated PDF analogous to OEPM TASAS_y_PRECIOS_PUBLICOS.pdf, INPI France download-document?id=20516, or IMPI Mexico Acuerdo.Tarifa.12.05.23.pdf. Instead:

  • The eServices portal is the operative source. SAIP directs applicants to log in, select the service, and have the fee calculated at the point of filing. Each combination of (right type, service, applicant entity type, claim count, etc.) is computed dynamically against the SAIP Board's current resolution.
  • The statutory basis is fragmented across (a) the principal laws, (b) their Implementing Regulations, and (c) periodic SAIP Board resolutions adjusting specific fees.
  • The official gazette of record is Umm al-Qura (uqn.gov.sa), where Royal Decrees and ministerial decisions implementing fee changes are formally published.

All three primary-source paths (eServices, SAIP main site, Umm al-Qura) ConnectTimeout from US egress at the TCP layer. This is not a WAF block or auth gate — packet-level filtering, consistent with whole-AS / whole-CIDR geo- filtering of cloud-egress and US-egress IP ranges.

Publication chain (theoretical — none of the primary sources are reachable from US egress today):

  1. Operative live amounts — SAIP eServices portal:
  2. Unified portal (post-19 December 2023): eservices.saip.gov.sa/ ❌ ConnectTimeout
  3. Legacy trademark portal (pre-19-Dec-2023 marks only): tm.saip.gov.sa/ ❌ ConnectTimeout

  4. SAIP main site (English navigation, services catalog): saip.gov.sa/en/ ❌ ConnectTimeout

  5. Statutory and regulatory primary sources:

  6. Law of Patents, Layout-Designs of Integrated Circuits, Plant Varieties, and Industrial Designs — Royal Decree No. M/27 dated 29/5/1425H (17 July 2004). Substantive law; fees are set by the Implementing Regulations and SAIP Board resolutions.
  7. Implementing Regulations — issued by Administrative Decision No. 118828/M/10 dated 14/11/1425H (26 December 2004), as amended up to SAIP Board Decision No. 5/8/2019 of 4 Ramadan 1440H (9 May 2019). The Schedule contains fee structure for patents / UM / IC / PV / designs. WIPO Lex 19743 is reachable but consolidated only through 2019.
  8. GCC Trademark Law — adopted by Saudi Arabia via Royal Decree No. M/51 dated 26/7/1435H (2014). Implementing Regulations issued by Ministerial Decision. Sets the trademark fee structure.

  9. SAIP Board resolutions — periodically adjust specific fees. Recent notable example: June 2022 reduction in trademark publication fees — filing publication dropped from ~USD 920 to ~USD 155; renewal publication from ~USD 920 to ~USD 310; with similar cuts for assignments / mergers / recordals.

  10. Official gazette of record — Umm al-Qura:

  11. uqn.gov.sa/ ❌ ConnectTimeout
  12. The most citable primary source for a specific fee figure (litigation / opinion work) but unreachable without Saudi egress or paid stealth proxy.

Scope of the schedule (SAR-denominated, USD-pegged at ~3.75 SAR/USD, so unlike NIS and TRY, currency volatility is not a concern for cost estimates):

  • Patents / utility models / integrated-circuit layouts. Filing, search, examination, grant, annuities, recordation. Implementing Regulations Schedule (consolidated to 2019-05-09 on WIPO Lex) carries the structural list; current amounts on eServices.
  • Industrial designs. Filing per design, examination, registration, renewal. 2024 amendments extended the protection duration for industrial designs — worth verifying the current term and renewal cadence at the time of any client work.
  • Plant varieties. Filing, examination, grant, annuities. Sui generis under the same M/27 framework.
  • Trademarks. Per-class filing at SAR 1,000 (~USD 270), publication for opposition at SAR 500, registration, renewal (10 Hijri years from filing — see Hijri vs Gregorian below), recordation. Per-class structure standardized to Nice classification since Saudi Arabia's accession to the Nice Agreement effective 22 July 2021.

Hijri-vs-Gregorian docketing trap. Trademark registration is 10 Hijri years (~9 years 8 months Gregorian) from filing date, renewable in 10-Hijri-year periods. A standard Gregorian-based renewal reminder runs ~4 months late. The connector should emit a term_calendar = "Hijri" provenance on all SA term-of-protection FeeItems so cost-estimator tools can flag the conversion correctly.

Discount tiers (no clean primary-source confirmation from US egress today):

  • Practitioner mirrors suggest individual / SME tracks may exist, but the SAIP Implementing Regulations text on WIPO Lex (2019-consolidated) does not establish a uniform small-entity reduction analogous to USPTO §41(h) or Ley 24/2015 art. 186. v1 connector should treat SA fees as single-tier unless / until primary sources confirm otherwise from a reachable channel.

2024 examination practice amendment — affects total prosecution cost timeline, not tariff amounts. SAIP amended its trademark examination practice in 2024:

  • The prior 10-day amendment window on refused applications was eliminated.
  • Refused applications now go directly to rejection, followed by a 60-day non-extendable appeal period.

Not a tariff change, but a docketing impact — cost-estimator tools should flag the 60-day appeal window in any quoted TM cost estimate.

Statutory basis (summary):

v1 connector plan — three options, ranked by realism:

Ship a reference document for SA, not a FeeItem-shaped schedule. The deliverable is a curated markdown / JSON file mirroring the SAIP service catalog (right type → service → known fee anchor + source citation), with explicit caveats:

  • "Fee calculated at point of filing in eServices portal — confirm against live amount."
  • "For litigation / opinion work, pull the current SAIP Board resolution from Umm al-Qura via local KSA counsel."
  • "Last anchored from user-provided notes 2026-05-19; trademark filing SAR 1,000/class (~USD 270), TM publication SAR 500, TM renewal publication ~USD 310 (June 2022 Board resolution)."

Manifest entry: SA/SAIP/Fees rated yellow with the explicit caveat that it is reference-grade, not connector- grade. Closest sibling pattern: the substantive-law StaticLawCorpus connectors (dpma_statutes, legifrance_ip, etc.) but with a custom shape acknowledging the dynamic nature of the eServices source.

Option B — Paid stealth proxy + eServices scrape

If a downstream user (e.g., a paying client filing in KSA) requires connector-grade FeeItems, the path is:

  1. Provision a Saudi-egress or paid stealth proxy (Bright Data residential, Smartproxy, or equivalent), ~$30-300/mo entry tier.
  2. Reverse-engineer the eServices SPA's fee-calculation endpoint (similar work to the Israel ILPO ecom.gov.il case, but with an additional layer of Nafath digital- identity gating that may block foreign-developer access entirely).
  3. Ship a yellow-rated connector with explicit dependence on the paid infrastructure.

Tradeoff: adds recurring spend and an external dependency for a country whose IP filings — while not trivial — are modest relative to the top 8 offices we already cover.

Option C — Defer until SAIP publishes a downloadable schedule

SAIP has discussed publishing a consolidated service catalog in PDF form on the Open Saudi Data initiative; if and when that lands, the connector becomes a one-PDF pypdf extraction analogous to OEPM Spain. No published primary source confirms a timeline as of 2026-05-19.

Recommendation: Option A. Ship the reference document as part of the next wave so downstream tools have something for SA cost questions, with clear provenance that it is reference-grade and that defensible citations require local KSA counsel and the Umm al-Qura gazette.

§5 Access via patent-client-agents

What we cover today

Nothing on the SA register side; coverage for SA flows transitively through: - EPO INPADOC — granted SA patents (biblio + family + legal events). - WIPO Patentscope — PCT national-phase entries (SA acceded 2013-08-03). - Hague Express — Hague IRs designating SA (SA acceded 2020-12-29). - Google Patents — web-crawl coverage of SA patents.

What we should add (in order of leverage)

  1. SA/SAIP/Fees as Option A — service-catalog reference document; ship in next wave to fill the gap with explicit caveats.
  2. SA/SAIP/Statute as a StaticLawCorpus — copy of WIPO Lex Implementing Regulations PDF (sa065en) + Compulsory Licensing Regs (sa066en) + Patents Law (sa115en). Statute-side rating yellow because the WIPO Lex consolidation stops at 2019-05-09 but the statutory text is reasonably stable for substantive-law lookups; the fee amounts are the moving part, not the substantive provisions.
  3. Monitor SAIP for an open-data API. No primary source suggests one is coming, but quarterly check of saip.gov.sa/en/news/ (unreachable) — proxy via Wayback or user reports.

§6 Known unknowns

  • Cloud-egress vs US-residential block scope. Our probes were from a US residential IP. Whether the SAIP / Umm al-Qura block applies uniformly to all non-Saudi egress, or specifically to US-egress CIDRs, would change the proxy-infrastructure conversation. Confirm from Cloud Run / EU-egress / Asia-egress before committing to paid infrastructure.
  • Nafath digital-identity gating depth. If Nafath gates the entire eServices portal (not just transactional endpoints), foreign-developer access is structurally infeasible regardless of geo-routing. Confirm by sourcing a Saudi-resident collaborator or local counsel.
  • GCC Trademark Law English text. Not surfaced on the WIPO Lex SA listing as of 2026-05-19; check WIPO Lex multi-jurisdiction listings and AGCC site (agcc.com) for an EN-language copy.
  • SAIP Board resolutions index. Whether SAIP publishes a stable index of Board resolutions affecting fees, or whether they only land in Umm al-Qura. The June 2022 publication-fee reduction is the most-cited example; any official index would dramatically improve the freshness story for Option A.
  • Industrial designs term-of-protection 2024 amendment. What specifically changed (term length, renewal periods, fees)? WIPO Lex 19743 is pre-2024 and won't reflect it. Cross-reference with PCT eGuide SA (which valid-as-of 2026-02-01 has been refreshed since the 2024 amendment).
  • 2025-2026 SAIP Board resolutions affecting fees. Whether there's been a post-2022 round adjusting other fees beyond TM publication. Defaults to "unknown" without Umm al-Qura access.

§7 References

Primary sources first; mirrors and analyses only where they cite primary sources.

SAIP portals (all unreachable from US egress 2026-05-19):

Official gazette (unreachable from US egress 2026-05-19):

  • Umm al-Qura — uqn.gov.sa — ConnectTimeout. The most citable primary source for SAIP Board resolutions and Royal Decrees affecting fees.

WIPO Lex — reachable, primary-source-grade statutes (stale to 2019-05-09):

WIPO / international framework:

Background articles (cited for context, not primary):

Last updated 2026-05-19.