Answers · Pricing
How much does an IP audit cost, and what happens in one?
Updated June 2026
The short answer
Published pricing for IP audits is scarce, and the work is almost always scoped rather than sold at a flat rate. Across professional IP services, engagements commonly run from roughly $5,000 for focused analyses to $250,000 and beyond for enterprise programs, and most first engagements, audits included, land as fixed-scope five-figure projects.
An IP audit, also framed as an audit of a company's Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) processes, is useful for finding where your current process needs improvement. It answers three questions: what IP you actually own, what it actually covers, and where the gaps sit between that and what the business needs protected. The price tracks how many assets are involved and how tangled the ownership history is.
What happens in an IP audit
The sequence is consistent even when the scale varies. First, inventory: patents and applications, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, domain assets, and the key contracts and licenses that govern them. Second, ownership review: whether assignments from founders, employees, contractors, and acquired companies actually landed where everyone assumes they did. Third, coverage mapping: which assets protect which products and revenue streams, and which products ship with no protection at all. Fourth, gap and risk identification. Fifth, prioritized recommendations.
The deliverable is a register of what you own, a gap list ranked by business exposure, and usually a set of pruning candidates: patents whose maintenance fees no longer buy any business value. Audits routinely surface enough of those to offset a meaningful share of their own cost.
What moves the price
Four things, mainly. Portfolio size is the obvious one. Asset scope is the second: a patents-only review is a smaller project than a full audit that includes trade secrets, contracts, and licensing arrangements. Ownership complexity is the third, and the most underestimated: companies that have acquired other companies, used contractors heavily, or grown through founder-built technology tend to have assignment histories that take real time to untangle. Fourth, the depth of product mapping, which requires people who can read claims against actual products rather than checking that documents exist.
Timing also matters commercially. Most audits are triggered by an approaching event: a fundraise, a sale process, a new product line, or a budget review. An audit run before the event costs the same as one run during it, but the findings are worth far more when there is still time to fix what they surface.
Where lawyers fit in
Some audit findings lead to legal work: recording missing assignments, curing chain-of-title defects, or amending contracts. That remediation is legal practice and belongs with your counsel. ipCapital Group is a consultancy, not a law firm; we run the business side of the audit, the inventory, coverage, and value analysis, and we work alongside your counsel on anything that needs papering.
The two layers are complementary. Counsel confirms the legal facts; we tell you whether the portfolio those facts describe is actually doing its job for the business.
Related questions
How long does an IP audit take?
Small portfolios with organized records typically take a few weeks. Enterprise audits across multiple business units commonly run one to three months, with the pace usually set by how quickly records arrive rather than by analysis time.
How is an audit different from due diligence?
Same toolkit, different driver. An audit is self-initiated and runs on your calendar; due diligence is transaction-driven and runs on the buyer's. Companies that audit before a deal walk into diligence with answers instead of surprises, which shortens the process and protects the price.
When should we run one?
Commonly before a fundraise or sale process, after an acquisition, ahead of a major product launch, or as part of a periodic budget review. If none of those apply but no one in the company can produce a current list of what you own, that is also a signal.
Will an audit reduce our IP spend?
Frequently. Audits surface patents whose maintenance fees map to no current product or strategy, and stopping those payments is immediate savings. The decision to lapse anything stays with you and your counsel; the audit supplies the business case.
Find out what you actually own
Bring us the reason for the audit: a raise, a sale, a budget review, or plain uncertainty. We will scope the audit to that event. Discovery calls are free and proposals are fixed-price.
Talk with Our TeamRelated
ipCapital Group is a consultancy, not a law firm, and nothing on this page is legal advice. Dollar figures on this page are typical market ranges for professional IP services, drawn from published sources and industry experience across a variety of providers. They are not an ipCG quote or rate card; every ipCG engagement is individually scoped and priced. See how our pricing works.