Resident and non-resident filings: resilience in domestic patenting
While non-resident applicants continue to make up the majority of standard patent filings, Australian resident applications increased in 2025, against broadly stable total filings.
Australian applicants filed 2,810 standard complete applications in 2025, up from 2,578 in 2024 – an increase of 9.0%. As a share of total standard complete filings, residents accounted for 9.3%, up from 8.5% in 2024 and the highest share since 2021.
Figure 2.2
Standard patent applications in Australia by residency, 2016 to 2025
This increase should be interpreted carefully. Unlike trade marks or designs, patenting in Australia is not a broad barometer of business dynamism and commercial activity. Instead, resident patenting reflects activity by a relatively small subset of firms engaged in R&D-intensive and technologically specialised innovation.
Nevertheless, the resilience of resident filings mirrors trends seen across other IP rights in 2025. It is also consistent with international evidence that, when facing uncertainty, firms tend to concentrate patenting on higher-value or strategically important inventions rather than withdrawing uniformly.9
Non-resident filings declined modestly in 2025, from 27,909 in 2024 to 27,538 (–1.3%). As a result, the non-resident share eased slightly to 90.7%. Analysis later in this chapter suggests that global patent portfolios are being rebalanced – with changes in cross-border collaboration and shifting country-technology footprints in patents filed in Australia.
Locations of origin: global rebalancing
In 2025, the United States remained the dominant source of standard complete patent applications in Australia, accounting for 40.8% of filings. China was the second-largest source at 9.7%, followed by Australian residents at 9.3%.
Figure 2.3
Leading overseas locations of origin for standard patent applications in 2025, and origins with high growth or decline1
While these headline shares have shifted only gradually, changes within countries are revealing.
- US-origin filings declined in absolute terms (–5.0% from 2024 levels), continuing a longer-term easing in Australia.
- China-origin filings increased markedly (+13.4%), reflecting ongoing growth in applied and industrial technologies and continued outward engagement by Chinese firms.
- High growth in applications was observed from Singapore (+29.0%) and Finland (+20.3%), while filings from Belgium (–17.8%) and Spain (–13.6%) declined sharply.
Diverse factors are likely to have shaped these movements, including technological competition, portfolio rebalancing, and policy developments in major overseas markets.
Collaboration and fragmentation in international patenting
Beyond aggregate counts, the structure of patent applications provides insight into cross-border collaboration in innovation.
In 2025, the number of standard complete patent applications involving applicants from different countries fell from 1,525 to 1,297 – a reduction of 228 applications, or almost 15% – even as total standard complete filings declined by less than 1%. This divergence indicates that the shift reflects more than a simple volume effect. The share of total filings that involve international collaboration declined from 4.9% in 2024 to 4.2% in 2025.
The decline in international collaboration is heavily concentrated among filings from the United States, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, which together account for around 70% of the overall reduction. Further declines were observed for Japan and China. The pattern is not mechanically explained by shifts in overall foreign filing shares.
At the same time, Australia-linked collaboration has remained comparatively resilient. The number of foreign-origin applications that included at least one Australian applicant increased from 115 to 120 applications, even as overall foreign filings eased.
Taken together, these patterns are consistent with broader evidence of growing fragmentation in global science and innovation networks. For middle-power economies such as Australia, this underscores the growing importance of targeted international cooperation to sustain innovation performance as global innovation networks adjust to evolving geoeconomic conditions.
Endnotes
- Focuses on high volume locations defined as those above the median for total number of applications received in 2025.