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IPOS Singapore (SG) — national
Layer national
Jurisdiction SG (WIPO ST.3: SG)
Issuing body Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS), a statutory board under the Ministry of Law
Rights administered patent, trademark, design, geographical_indication, plant_variety (and copyright is administered by IPOS for policy purposes; registration is not required under SG law)
Working languages English (primary, authoritative for all statutes and manuals)
Connector status register-side: skipped (no usable public REST + Oct-2020 patent freeze on the one open API); fees-side: ready to build (yellow → green; the prior wave's "SSO stochastic rate-limit + First Schedule URL unknown" finding is superseded — see §4); statutes-side: planned (revive the 2026-05 worktree under current StaticLawCorpus standards)
Last verified 2026-05-19
Manifest entry not yet listed in coverage/sources.yaml

Detail surveys:

Higher layers covering this office transitively:

  • EPO INPADOC (via regional/epo.md) — SG patent biblio + family + legal events for filings published in the INPADOC window. This is the operational substitute for SG patent register data.
  • WIPO PATENTSCOPE — PCT applications filed at IPOS as a receiving office; PCT applications designating SG as national-phase target. SG itself is NOT in ASEAN PATENTSCOPE (no national collection mirrored to WIPO; the seven other ASEAN members are).
  • WIPO Madrid — international TMs designating SG (SG is a Madrid member); national-only SG TMs remain IPOS-only.
  • WIPO Hague — international designs designating SG (SG joined Hague 2005-04-17); national-only SG designs remain IPOS-only.

Rating: 🔴 Red — No API

IP2SG transactional APIs Singpass/CorpPass-gated to SG-resident entities (filing-side only); data.gov.sg collection 281 biblio-only with patents frozen Aug 2018→Oct 2020; Digital Hub is ASP.NET __VIEWSTATE HTML. INPADOC + Madrid + Hague cover the cross-border slice. Jump to access details → View on the atlas →

§1 Mission

IPOS is Singapore's single national IP authority — patents, trademarks, registered designs, geographical indications, and plant variety protection, all from one English-language statutory board. It is materially smaller than KIPO or USPTO (SG is a population-5.9M city-state) but punches above weight on policy infrastructure: it operates a modern mobile-first filing platform (IPOS Digital Hub since 2 June 2022, plus the IPOS Go app), it administers the Singapore IP Strategy 2030, and it hosts the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center Singapore office at Maxwell Chambers — a regional ADR node since 2010. For agents, IPOS's authoritative value sits in the SG-national slice that escapes higher-layer coverage: SG-only trademarks, SG-only designs, and the SG substantive-law corpus. The register-side proxy story is materially weaker than the policy-infrastructure story — see §3.

§2 What's unique here

  • SG-national-only trademarks — Madrid IRs designating SG are visible via WIPO Madrid; pure SG-only TM filings live only in IPOS.
  • SG-national-only registered designs — Hague IRs designating SG are visible via WIPO Hague; pure SG-only designs (and pre-2005 backfile) live only in IPOS.
  • Singapore-IP statutes corpus — Patents Act 1994 (Act/PA1994), Trade Marks Act 1998 (act/tma1998), Registered Designs Act 2000 (Act/RDA2000), Copyright Act 2021, Geographical Indications Act 2014, Plant Varieties Protection Act 2004, Layout-Designs of Integrated Circuits Act 1999, and the IPOS Act 2001 (Act/IPOSA2001). English-authoritative, version-controlled, free.
  • IPOS Director-General decisions — TM oppositions and patent oppositions are first-instance administrative decisions issued by IPOS Hearings; not reproduced by any higher layer.
  • English-language Patent Examination Guidelines (~4.3 MB PDF) and the parallel TM Work Manual / Designs Work Manual / Patents Formalities Manual at the IPOS Guides tree.
  • Singapore International Commercial Court (SICC) sits inside the General Division of the High Court and hears cross-border IP disputes — relevant context, but case law is paywall-gated at LawNet (subscription) with eLitigation providing free docket browse.

§3 Programmatic surfaces

IP2SG transactional APIs (filings + renewals)

Field Value
Endpoint https://ip2sg.ipos.gov.sg/RPS/WC/API/APITokenRequest.aspx
Auth Singpass / CorpPass + IP2SG account + manual approval; CorpPass-gated to SG-resident entities
Format JSON / REST (filing operations)
Rate limit Not published
ToS posture Designed for SG-resident filing agents; not contemplated for unaffiliated SaaS redistribution
Rating (zero-infra proxy) 🔴 Red — filing-side, identity-gated, no read-side benefit
Primary source eServices entry · Digital Hub launch circular (2 Jun 2022)

Hard skip. SG-resident-only identity gating + filing-side scope. No bibliographic read REST is offered at this layer.

data.gov.sg "IPOS applications API" — collection 281

Field Value
Endpoint https://data.gov.sg/collections/281/view — three datasets: patents / trademarks / designs
Auth None for read; API key (waitlist) recommended for production
Format JSON envelope {"items":[...]}
Rate limit 10-second buckets; 429 on overrun; enforcement live since 31 Dec 2025
ToS posture Singapore Open Data Licence — permissive, attribution required
Rating (zero-infra proxy) 🔴 Red — patents frozen Aug 2018→Oct 2020; query is lodgement-date-only (no search); biblio-only
Primary sources API overview · Rate limits · Privacy & terms

The licence and the technical surface are both clean. What kills this as a register substrate is the patent coverage hole (~5 years stale, unchanged since 2026-05) and the query semantics — ?lodgement_date=YYYY-MM-DD is a daily-walk, not a search. Useful as a secondary incremental feed once trademarks/designs freshness is empirically pinned; not a replacement for the authoritative register.

IPOS Digital Hub — HTML front door (search, journals)

Field Value
Endpoint https://digitalhub.ipos.gov.sg/FAMN/eservice/IP4SG/MN_BasicSearch (and MN_AdvancedSearch, MN_Journals, MN_TmSimilarMarkSearch, MN_TmIcgsSearch)
Auth None for read
Format ASP.NET WebForms HTML (__VIEWSTATE)
Rate limit Not published
ToS posture Public read
Rating (zero-infra proxy) 🔴 Red — brittle __VIEWSTATE scrape; not a proxy substrate
Primary source IPOS Digital Hub entry · Digital Hub launch circular

Replaced the legacy IP2SG UI 2 June 2022. The legacy ip2.sg host still serves the simple-search forms. Worth noting, not worth wrapping.

Singapore Statutes Online (SSO)

Field Value
Endpoint https://sso.agc.gov.sg/ — slug-addressable acts and subsidiary legislation
Auth None
Format HTML / PDF; no documented bulk export
Rate limit Not published
ToS posture Public read; government work
Rating (zero-infra proxy) 🟢 Green — clean static corpus, same pattern as ipo_in_statutes / dpma_statutes / legifrance_ip / tw_trade_secrets
Primary source SSO portal · Attorney-General's Chambers SSO page

Canonical, free, English-authoritative, version-controlled. This is the win.

IPOS examination + work manuals

Field Value
Endpoint https://www.ipos.gov.sg/about-ip/patents/guides/ and the parallel TM and Designs trees
Auth None
Format PDF (chaptered); circulars at Circulars and Practice Directions
Rating (zero-infra proxy) 🟢 Green — static PDFs, predictable URLs
Primary source IPOS Guides

Same corpus shape as MoPP/MPEP/TMEP, single-fetch ingestion.

§4 Fees

Status (2026-05-19): Ready to build. The earlier wave's finding ("stochastic CloudFront rate-limit on SSO, First Schedule lives at a separate sub-URL we haven't pinned") is superseded — IPOS publishes the per-right schedule as native HTML on six dedicated forms-and-fees pages plus an aggregate landing, all reachable on first hit. SSO returns 200 OK with full content (Patents Rules at 471 KB / 141 tables) — any earlier CDN-throttle finding was transient. SSO is the statutory primary source; the IPOS pages are the practical extraction target.

Publication chain:

  1. Primary statutory source — Singapore Statutes Online (sso.agc.gov.sg):
  2. Patents Rules — First Schedule "Fees payable" at SL/PA1994-R1. Subsidiary legislation under the Patents Act 1994. Current consolidated version reflects 01 Sep 2025 amendment by S 538/2025.
  3. Trade Marks Rules — fee schedule at SL/TMA1998-R1. Subsidiary legislation under the Trade Marks Act 1998.
  4. Registered Designs Rules — fee schedule at SL/RDA2000-R1. Subsidiary legislation under the Registered Designs Act
    1. (The earlier /SL/266-R1 slug in this file's prior revision was outdated.)

  5. Plant Varieties Protection Act / Geographical Indications Act / Layout-Designs of Integrated Circuits Act — each has its own subsidiary-legislation slug on SSO; v1 can pin Patent / TM / Design and follow up on the three sui generis rights later.

  6. IPOS forms-and-fees pages (practical extraction target, reachable as native HTML — verified 2026-05-19):

  7. Patents: ipos.gov.sg/about-ip/patents/forms-and-fees-singapore/ — note the -singapore URL suffix; the user-known /about-ip/patents/forms-and-fees/ 404s. 9 tables on the page; the primary fee table is table 1 (102 rows) with shape Form code | Description | Fee. Form codes are PFn (e.g., PF1 = Request for Grant of a Patent at S$170) with NA for non-form items.
  8. Trade marks: ipos.gov.sg/about-ip/trade-marks/forms-and-fees/ — 4 tables. Explicit "From 1 April 2026" effective-date markers in the page body.
  9. Designs: ipos.gov.sg/about-ip/designs/forms-and-fees/ — 3 tables. Note the URL is /designs/, not /registered-designs/ (the user-known /about-ip/registered-designs/forms-and-fees/ 404s).
  10. Geographical indications: ipos.gov.sg/about-ip/geographical-indications/forms-and-fees/ — 3 tables.
  11. Plant variety rights: ipos.gov.sg/about-ip/plant-variety-rights/forms-and-fees/ — 3 tables.
  12. Copyright: ipos.gov.sg/about-ip/copyright/forms-and-fees/ — 4 tables. Copyright is non-registrable in SG; this page covers tribunal / Copyright Tribunal fees.

  13. Aggregate landing: ipos.gov.sg/about-ip/forms-fees/ — note the hyphen-less slug. Links to all six right-type pages and to the 21 July 2025 circulars.

  14. Practice circulars (fee-change announcements) — IPOS hosts these on the same forms-and-fees pages. Three were issued together on 21 July 2025 and contain side-by-side old/new fee tables in Annex A:

  15. Patents Circular No. 3 of 2025
  16. Trade Marks Circular No. 3 of 2025
  17. Designs Circular No. 1 of 2025

Circulars list, on a row-by-row basis, every changed fee with the old and new amounts side by side. They are the single best documentation source for what changed on 1 Sep 2025 and 1 Apr 2026; the SSO Rules are the binding primary source for what the current rate is.

Two-phase implementation — 2025-09-01 + 2026-04-01. Most of the announced changes took effect on 1 September 2025; a second tranche took effect on 1 April 2026. The two biggest April-2026 line items are:

  • Patents: examination review report fee → S$3,200.
  • Trade marks: amendment fee → S$60 per class.

If a connector serves fee data near either implementation date, the IPOS HTML page is the source of truth (it shows the current effective rate); the circulars contain both old and new rates for back-dated fee estimates. The connector should track both effective dates and surface "in effect from" provenance on every FeeItem.

Trademark filing — pre-approved database lever (S$240 vs S$410/class). A real cost decision for US clients filing broad specs:

  • S$240/class if the applicant adopts the IPOS pre-approved goods and services classification database in full (no custom specification text).
  • S$410/class (up from S$380 pre-1-Sep-2025) for custom specifications.

The connector should emit both as distinct FeeItems with a specification_type = "pre-approved" / "custom" provenance tag. This is a material cost lever — for a broad US filing covering, say, 15 classes, the difference is S$240×15 = S$3,600 vs S$410×15 = S$6,150.

Patent excess claims — steeper as of 1 Sep 2025. Threshold dropped from 20 claims to 15, and the per-claim fee doubled from S$40 to S$80 for examination requests filed on or after 1 September 2025. For portfolio-management workflows the implication is: voluntary amendment before exam request can save real money on claim-heavy applications. The connector should emit excess-claims as a per-claim FeeItem with a clear threshold note so cost-estimator tools can compute correctly.

Madrid Protocol designation fees are separate. For international registrations designating Singapore, the relevant amounts as of 1 September 2025:

  • Application / transformation: S$380 → S$410 per class
  • Renewal: S$440 → S$480 per class

These are paid to IPOS as the designated office (not to WIPO) and are surfaced via the SG Individual Fee notification on the WIPO Madrid system page. The connector should emit these as separate MadridDesignation FeeItems with the route = "Madrid IR designating SG" provenance tag.

Scope of the schedule (SGD-denominated, per-form structure):

  • Patents — filing (PF1 = S$170), search, examination, excess claims fee (per claim over 15 = S$80 for exam requests on/after 2025-09-01), grant, annuities (years 4 through 20), restoration, recordation, opposition, amendment, certification.
  • Trade marks — filing per class (S$240 pre-approved DB / S$410 custom), opposition, registration of changes, renewal (10-year), goods-and-services amendment (S$60/class from 2026-04-01), recordation.
  • Registered designs — filing per design, registration, extension (each 5-year extension up to maximum 15 years for newer registrations or 25 for older), recordation.
  • Geographical indications — application, opposition, recordation.
  • Plant variety rights — application, examination, grant, annuities.

Discount tiers (mapped to EntityTier):

  • No size-based small-entity rate. The Singapore schedule does not encode a US-style large/small/micro tier.
  • The trademark pre-approved-DB rate is not a tier in the legal sense — every applicant is eligible if they accept the canonical specifications. Treat it as a specification_type provenance, not as an EntityTier.
  • IPOS programme-level subsidies (SG IP Fast / ASPEC / PPH) reduce time, not tariff amounts. Not represented as FeeItem discounts.

Statutory basis:

v1 connector plan — SG/IPOS/Fees/{Patent, Trademark, Design, GeographicalIndication, PlantVariety}:

  • Source: the six IPOS HTML pages (the five right-type pages plus the aggregate landing for cross-reference).
  • Parser pattern: lxml per-page table walk, similar to HK/IPD and CIPO Canada. The main fee table is consistently at table index 1 on each right-type page, with shape Form | Description | Fee (or just Description | Fee where forms don't apply).
  • Currency: SGD.
  • Provenance metadata: every FeeItem gets in_effect_from (mostly 2025-09-01 or 2026-04-01), statutory_basis (the relevant SSO slug), and circular_announcement (the 21-Jul-2025 circular for the current cycle).
  • Freshness probe: quarterly hash check of the six IPOS pages + a SSO Rules-history poll for new S-numbered amendments since the recorded version.
  • Spec-type handling for TM: emit specification_type = "pre-approved" (S$240/class) and "custom" (S$410/class) as separate FeeItems on the filing row.
  • Madrid SG-designation handling: emit as separate FeeItems with route = "Madrid IR designating SG" to distinguish from direct-filing TM fees.
  • SSL note: Both ipos.gov.sg (isomer-hosted on by.gov.sg CDN) and sso.agc.gov.sg present valid certs; no verify=False required.

SSO "stochastic rate-limit" claim — superseded. The prior wave reported intermittent CloudFront 403s on SSO. The 2026-05-19 probe returned 200 OK on first hit for all three Rules slugs with full content (471 KB / 141 tables on Patents Rules). If a rate-limit reappears under load, respectful caching (TTL ≥ 7 days from one hit) and exponential backoff should keep us within the envelope.

Notable IPOS acceleration programmes (named only — these are prosecution-time levers, not tariff discounts):

  • SG IP Fast (formerly SG Patent Fast Track) — accelerated examination programme.
  • Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) — bilateral acceleration; fee posture per IPOS PPH page.
  • ASPEC and ASPEC+ — ASEAN Patent Examination Cooperation. ASPEC has no public API; SG is not in ASEAN Patentscope national collections.

§5 Access via patent-client-agents

What we cover today

Nothing — SG is not in coverage/sources.yaml as of 2026-05-18. The earlier "IPOS Singapore statutes + manuals" worktree from the 2026-05 fan-out was never integrated and pre-dates the connector-standards sweep. SG patent biblio + family is currently accessed transitively via patent_client_agents.epo_ops.

What we should add

Revive the 2026-05 statutes worktree under current standards — primary recommendation.

  • Module name candidate: sg_statutes (mirroring ipo_in_statutes, dpma_statutes, legifrance_ip, tw_trade_secrets).
  • Scope: Patents Act 1994, Patents Rules, Trade Marks Act 1998 and Rules, Registered Designs Act 2000 and Rules, Copyright Act 2021, Geographical Indications Act 2014, Plant Varieties Protection Act 2004, Layout-Designs of Integrated Circuits Act 1999, IPOS Act 2001, and the IP (Dispute Resolution) Act 2019. Each fetched once from its SSO slug URL.
  • Optional extension sg_manuals: IPOS Patent Examination Guidelines, Patents Formalities Manual, TM Work Manual, Designs Work Manual, and the running Circulars and Practice Directions PDFs.
  • Why revive rather than close: the substantive-law layer is the only green SG surface, the primary sources are stable since the worktree was first cut, and the static-corpus pattern is well-trodden (four sibling corpora already shipped). Closing it means we lose SG agent capability for filings, prosecution arguments, and SICC dispute work for no engineering saving.
  • Cross-reference: queue in BACKLOG.md once the worktree revival lands; coverage/sources.yaml entry as SG/AGC/IP (or SG/IPOS/Statutes per the manifest naming convention used by FR/Legifrance/IP).

Next steps

  1. Cut a revival PR for the 2026-05 statutes worktree under the current StaticLawCorpus shape — copy from tw_trade_secrets as the smallest sibling exemplar, then walk through dpma_statutes for the multi-act case.
  2. Empirically verify TM and design freshness on data.gov.sg collection 281 before any future user-facing claim — the older survey's "TM current to May 2025" claim needs a 2026-05 re-pull.
  3. Monitor for an IPOS read REST. No primary source suggests one is coming, but watch news releases and the Digital Hub eService catalogue.
  4. Defer judgment on a thin data.gov.sg wrapper. Quality is licence-clean but utility is low without a real search interface; revisit only if a downstream agent asks for SG TM daily-incremental.

§6 Known unknowns

  • TM and design freshness on data.gov.sg collection 281 — primary-source confirmation that the TM endpoint and the Design endpoint are current to ≥ 2026-04 has not been pinned in this wave. Action: pull a lodgement_date=2026-04-01 sample.
  • Patent API freshness recovery — is the Aug-2018→Oct-2020 freeze permanent or pending republish? No primary-source statement either way; email data-feedback@tech.gov.sg.
  • API-key tier numerics on data.gov.sg — Rate Limits page describes the tiers but doesn't publish the per-tier numbers without registering.
  • Foreign-developer access to IP2SG transactional APIs — Singpass/CorpPass appears mandatory; no documented foreign route. Confirm via ipos_enquiry@ipos.gov.sg only if a paying customer asks.
  • SSO bulk export / Akoma Ntoso — no documented path on SSO. Ask AGC Legislation Division for an XML dump of IP acts.
  • IPOS journals storage budget — weekly PDFs since 2022. Per-PDF size estimate needed before deciding extract-and-discard vs. full mirror.

§7 References

Primary sources only — IPOS, AGC SSO, data.gov.sg, WIPO.

IPOS portals + service docs:

IPOS Digital Hub (HTML front-door):

data.gov.sg (IPOS open-data):

Singapore Statutes Online (substantive law):

Detail survey + wave:

Last updated 2026-05-19.