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This year’s first update of our EPC.App reference book to legal status of 1st April 2026 is completed. As always, the English and German versions are synchronized in content. This is meanwhile the 16th edition of our EPC commentary. It covers all Official Journal articles until March 2026 with thereby implied changes of EPC provisions and is intended to be used when starting preparations for EQE 2027 or EPAC 2026.

Key changes since the last update in November 2025 were: 

1. The new EPO Guidelines valid as of 01 April 2026. Interesting amendments therein provide more clarity
     
   • to the EPO’s practice after G 1 /24 with respect to interpreting the claims based on the description; there is now a clear distinction between restrictive features in the description being considered non-limiting and broad definitions of a term being used for patentability assessment (GL F-IV, 4.2 – open in EPC.App at A. 69 or A. 84) 
   • that the famous criteria for novelty of sub-ranges (narrow and far removed from the prior art), which had been subject to conflicting case law for a long time, have finally been removed and replaced by the gold standard (GL G-VI, 7 at A. 54) 
   • that in accordance with G 2/21, the scope of reliance on post published evidence is much narrower under sufficiency of disclosure compared to the situation under inventive step (GL F-III, 10 at A. 83) 
   • to the relevance of clinical trials as prior art and different patient groups as further medical uses (new GL G-VI, 6.1.2.1 + GL G-VI, 6.1.2.2 at A. 54) 
   • that accelerated processing in opposition is maintained even after termination of parallel infringement / revocation proceedings (GL E-VIII, 5 at A. 99) 
   • that filing an international application by a person not entitled under the PCT is cured in the EP phase (GL A-XII, 6.1 at A. 58) 
   • that the title given on the request for grant is considered to take precedence over the title in other documents (GL A-III, 7.1 at A. 78) 
   • that the re-evaluation of a unity objection under Rule 64(2) is not only for the original claims but also for the original prior art (GL C-III, 3.2.4 at A. 92) 

2. The EPO follows its long practice to raise fees every second year; on 01 Apr 2026 many often-used EPO fees increase by about 5%, whereas others with less significant amounts such as the filing fee or less frequently used ones such as the opposition and appeal fees are kept constant (OJ 2026, A2 at A. 2 Rfees) 

3. At this occasion, Rule 93 has been amended to remove the reimbursement of the fee for publishing (which had been abolished before) in terminated limitation proceedings (OJ 2026, A2 at A. 105a) 

4. The PACE program has been restricted to the examination phase only so that the filing of PACE requests for accelerated search is abolished as of 01 Feb 2026; according to the provided reasons, the EPO considers their timeliness in search to be so reliable that the possibility of acceleration requests would be unnecessary (OJ 2025, A69 at A. 92) 

5. The continuous modernization of processes at the EPO lead to the decommission of legacy Online Filing (OLF) as of 01 Jan 2026 (OJ 2025, A52). Shortly afterwards, the pilot project on DOCX filing has been declared to be successfully completed, whereby it turned into an official filing format as of 01 Apr 2026 (OJ 2026, A 19 at A. 75), including DOCX filing by email in oral proceedings (OJ 2026, A21 at A. 116). At this occasion, the filing of priority documents has also been extended to all electronic filing options. 

6. Already as of 01 Dec 2025, the registration of general authorisations has been limited to employees and is no longer available for professional representatives or legal practitioners (OJ 2025, A45 at A. 133) 

7.  A PPH program for Saudi Arabia (SAIP) (Saudi Arabia) has expired on 31 Dec 2026 (OJ 2025, A72 at A. 94) 

The above links to the online versions of the book can be followed when being logged-in. A free one month test account is available (does not extend automatically after expiry). 

Feedback from EQE users has been reviewed and further included in the current update. Special thanks go to Stephan Hübsch who provided many useful findings. As in earlier years, we also tested ourselves the current EQE 2026 with the version of EPC.App available before the exam. We believe it was possible to find sufficient guidance to all EPC questions of foundation paper F and main exam papers M1, M2 / D. Of course, it is always recommended to further enhance the author comments by own annotations for best results. We intend to add the consolidated rules for EP patents with unitary effect to our database in the next edition. 

As usual, all changes of the update are automatically included in the online version on the next login. And as part of our update service, changes are additionally indicated by about 75 brief blue update notes in the App as shown on the screen in the image above and further explained in the FAQs. Of course, self-edited user content from before the update is retained in the respective personal storage on the webserver, and can be exported into the printable PDF offline version so as to avoid time-consuming transfer of handwritten annotations to the new edition. This 2-minute youtube video illustrates the update process and related functions. 

To further avoid the need of replacing pages in a folder, a customized color paperback with up-to-date content and typed user comments can be ordered via our integrated high-quality print-on-demand service. 

For those who still prefer to start with a classical printed book, we published also the EPC.App April 2026 Edition as stand-alone black-and-white paperback. The book is available in English and German via Amazon. 

Stay tuned: A new version of the EPC.App online platform is coming in the next months. It will offer a more intuitive user interface, full adaptation to mobile devices, and several new functions for navigating and editing the content. At the same time, it will retain full backward compatibility with the current version as well as all personal content stored in the database. A separate blog post will follow for the release.