Tokyo leads a top-200 city leaderboard of USPTO patent grants, with 665,990 — but these are grants since 1976, not all filings worldwide
Asked:“patents files by each city around the world”
The broadest directly browsable city ranking found covers 112,640 city labels worldwide; its fetched page exposes the top 200, totalling 9,252,736 patent grants across those rows. Counts are USPTO patent grants (not applications), 1976 through Dec 31, 2025, per Patent Leaderboard.
Scope warning. This is a useful top-200 preview, not a complete table of every world city or every patent office. Counts reflect US patent grants only, so cities filing mainly at other offices are undercounted. Seven labels — Tokyo, Yokohama, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Nagoya and Lo Wu — appear more than once under different location records; they are kept separate and flagged, never summed.
Top 25 cities by USPTO patent grants, 1976–2025
Bars: patent grants. ◦ marks a city label that appears more than once in the leaderboard. Hover a bar for inventors and grants per 1,000 residents.
Findings
Japan and Korea dominate the very top: Tokyo (665,990), Yokohama (433,972) and Seoul (302,043) outrank every US city; San Jose is the top US entry at 293,137.
patentleaderboard.comPer-capita intensity tells a different story: Palo Alto shows 1,506.1 grants per 1,000 residents and Sunnyvale 769.9, versus New York's 11.5.
patentleaderboard.comThe counts are USPTO patent grants, not applications: rankings are built from PatentsView / USPTO bulk data covering grants from 1976 through Dec 31, 2025.
patentleaderboard.com/methodologyFor globally comparable first filings by location, the open Harvard Dataverse dataset geocodes 18.8 million patent documents with inventor and applicant locations, released CC0.
nature.com
Methodology and alternatives
What this leaderboard counts
USPTO patent grants — “Rankings reflect the number of patents granted, not applications filed” — built from PatentsView / USPTO bulk data, covering grants from 1976 through Dec 31, 2025. methodology · about
Worldwide first filings, open data
“Geocoding of worldwide patent data”: geoc_inv.txt and geoc_app.txt on Harvard Dataverse — 18.8 million patent documents with inventor and applicant locations, first filings invented in 46 countries, 1980–2014, CC0 public domain. nature.com · iiindex.org
City-comparable PCT counts
OECD allocates fractional PCT applications to Functional Urban Areas by inventor postal address — comparable across cities, but limited to OECD and accession-country geography rather than every city worldwide. Also see PatentCity, an open CC-BY-4 century-scale database. patentcity
Data: Patent Leaderboard city ranking page fetched showing the top 200 of 112,640 city labels; 200 rows rendered here. A “patents” number is USPTO patent grants 1976–Dec 31 2025 (PatentsView/USPTO bulk data), not applications, and not filings at non-US offices. Repeated city labels reflect separate location records at the source and are flagged, not merged. No map is drawn because the rows carry no verified coordinates. Alternative worldwide-filings datasets (28 evidence rows) summarised above.