IMPI Provisional Refusal
Your Mexican trademark was provisionally refused. What it means, the deadline, what it costs and what Mexico does not require. For foreign trademark holders.
If you filed through the Madrid System and designated Mexico, a provisional refusal is not a rejection. It is IMPI telling you it has an objection and giving you a window to answer it. Applications are lost at this stage far more often than they are lost on the merits, because nobody answered in time.
Send us your refusal, we will read it today
IMPI examines every designation and raises objections routinely. The common grounds are a similar earlier mark, a description of goods or services it considers too broad or too vague, or a formal defect in the filing. None of those are fatal on their own.
What is fatal is silence. If no response is filed, the application is treated as abandoned. You do not get a second notification, and the mark does not quietly sit there waiting. It goes away, along with your filing date.
That filing date is usually the thing worth protecting. Losing it means refiling behind anyone who filed in the meantime, including whoever prompted the objection.
Deadlines in Mexican trademark practice run from the notification date printed on the document, not from the day it reached your inbox or your US counsel’s inbox. By the time a refusal has travelled from IMPI through WIPO to your firm and then to you, part of the window is already spent.
Mexican law provides additional two-month periods to comply with an IMPI requirement, and they are inexpensive: the official fee is $178.64 MXN per additional month, about US$10 (Art. 31 of the IMPI tariff, plus 16% VAT). An extension request is $162.20 MXN per month, roughly US$9 (Art. 30, plus 16% VAT).
That is worth knowing before you panic. The extension is not the expensive part and it is not discretionary in the way foreign holders often assume.
Your exact deadline depends on the date on your notification. Send it to us and we will tell you what it is, at no cost and with no obligation. That is a five-minute answer, and it is better to have it than to estimate.
Get your deadline confirmed
You need a representative in Mexico. The Federal Law for the Protection of Industrial Property requires foreign individuals and companies without a Mexican domicile to act through an authorised legal representative, and to designate a Mexican address for legal purposes. This is not optional and it is the reason foreign holders cannot simply reply themselves.
You will need a power of attorney. No power of attorney was needed to file. To reply to a provisional refusal or an opposition, one is required where the person replying is not already the registered representative. If you were filed through Madrid, that is normally your position, which is why this step surprises people at exactly the wrong moment.
But it does not need to be notarised, legalised or apostilled. If you have handled refusals in other Latin American jurisdictions you are budgeting for a notary, an apostille and a courier, and building two weeks into your timeline for it. Mexican trademark prosecution requires none of that. A signed power of attorney is enough.
That is the difference between a response you can file this week and one you cannot.
The official fees are fixed by law and published. They are the same for a Mexican company and a foreign one.
| Official fee | Cost (MXN) | Approx. USD | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Each additional month to comply with an IMPI requirement | $178.64 | ~US$10 | Art. 31 + 16% VAT |
| Extension request, per month | $162.20 | ~US$9 | Art. 30 + 16% VAT |
| Study of an opposition, if one was filed | $4,296.74 | ~US$245 | Art. 14b + 16% VAT |
Amounts are from the IMPI tariff published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on 15 March 2024. USD is approximate, converted at the Banxico FIX rate of 17.5130 MXN per USD published on 24 July 2026. The peso amount is what is actually charged.
Our fee for preparing and filing the response is quoted per case, once we have read the refusal and know what is being argued. You will get a fixed number, not a range.
Your US or European counsel cannot appear before IMPI, and generally cannot tell you what a Mexican examiner will accept in a description of goods, or how a particular prior mark has been treated before. That is not a shortcoming on their part; it is a jurisdiction they do not practise in.
What we do is narrow and it is all we do: Mexican industrial property, for companies based somewhere else. You will deal directly with the attorney handling your file, in English, and you will know what it costs before we start.
Talk to us about your refusal