Patent Filings Per Capita by Country: Where the World Invents Most

Which countries invent the most, relative to their size? A good proxy is resident patent applications per capita — how many patents people file at their own national office, per million population. It measures innovation intensity rather than raw scale, and in 2023 the leaderboard was dominated by a familiar cluster of East Asian and European economies.

Patent filings per capita, mapped

The top 20 countries (2023)

South Korea is in a league of its own, filing roughly 3,696 resident patents per million people — about twice Japan‘s rate (1,839) and far ahead of Switzerland (1,212), China (1,079) and the United States (824). Below the leaders, the ranking is full of small, research-intensive economies: Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria.

What changed since 2013

The decade tells two stories. China more than doubled its per-capita filing rate (517 → 1,079), and the small high-tech economies — Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Singapore, Belgium — pushed higher. Meanwhile several established leaders drifted down on a per-capita basis, including Japan (2,132 → 1,839), the United States (911 → 824), Germany (917 → 751), the UK and Russia. South Korea, already #1 in 2013, climbed even higher.

Per capita vs. total: China’s split picture

It’s worth separating volume from intensity. China files more patents than any other country — over 1.5 million resident applications in 2023, more than the next several countries combined. But spread across its enormous population, that works out to a per-capita rate just behind South Korea, Japan and Switzerland. The reverse is true for places like Switzerland and Finland: modest totals, but very high rates per person.

Total patents granted, by country

Applications are only half the story — what actually gets granted is the other half. Here the picture tilts even more sharply toward China, whose patent office granted nearly 1.05 million patents in 2024, more than three times the United States (319,815) and far ahead of Japan (200,284) and South Korea (127,806). India has surged into the top five. Note this counts grants issued by each office (to resident and foreign applicants alike), so it reflects the scale and throughput of national patent systems.

About the data

Figures are resident patent applications (patents filed by a country’s own residents at its national IP office) per million population, for 2023, from WIPO’s World Intellectual Property Indicators 2024 (figure A38). WIPO lists the top 20 origins meeting its thresholds (population over 5 million and more than 100 resident applications). The world map shades those leaders with 2023 values and fills remaining countries with the latest available figures; grey countries file very few or no resident patents. The colour scale is logarithmic because South Korea, Japan and China are such outliers. The patent-grants table and chart use total grants by office (direct plus PCT national-phase entries) from the WIPO Statistics Database (updated May 2026), latest year 2024.

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