Ask if your name is taken.

Start with the federal register, the record of every US trademark application and registration. Type the name into the box at the top of this page and you get the matching records we find, each with its live, pending, or dead status taken from USPTO data. Check close variants as well as the exact spelling, and look at which classes the results sit in, because the same name can live in two unrelated classes without conflict. Two things a search like this will not tell you. State registrations and unregistered names already in use sit outside the federal register. And matching works on the name as written, so a different spacing or spelling of the same idea can hide from it.

No, and it is the most common mix-up in branding. Copyright covers creative work like writing, music, photographs, and code. It does not cover names, titles, slogans, or short phrases, however original they are. A business name is protected by trademark law, which governs the use of a name to identify who is selling something. If someone told you to copyright your business name, what you actually want is a trademark.

Filing costs $350 per class for an electronic application, and each extra class adds another $350. Keeping a registration alive costs more later, $325 per class for the proof-of-use filing due between years 5 and 6. Attorney-assisted filings mostly land somewhere between $600 and $2,000 all in. Searching first costs nothing here, which beats paying filing fees on a name that was never available.

Searching is free. Filing is not. Every application costs $350 per class and the fee does not come back if it fails. There is no free filing route and no small-business waiver. What is free is finding out whether the name is already taken before you spend anything, which is what this site is for. Treat a free search as a first pass rather than a clearance opinion: it does not cover state registrations or unregistered names already in use.

The same way you trademark a name, with one extra decision. A word mark protects the name in any font or styling. A design mark protects the logo as drawn, including its shape and layout. Most brands file the word mark first, because it is broader and survives a redesign. If the logo carries the recognition rather than the name, file both. Each is a separate application with its own fee.

Yes, if it works as a brand rather than as a sentence. The USPTO registers slogans that identify a source, and refuses ones that read as ordinary information, decoration, or something anyone in the trade would need to say. A slogan printed across the front of a t-shirt is usually refused as ornamental. The same slogan on a hang tag, used consistently across a product line, has a much better chance.

The application was abandoned or the registration got cancelled or expired. A dead mark is not a federal bar to your filing. But the former owner might still have common-law rights if they never stopped using the name. So dead means proceed with your eyes open, not proceed freely.

Straight from the USPTO's public record, the same source trademark attorneys cite. Federal trademark data is a U.S. Government work in the public domain. We pull each record live from the USPTO's TSDR the first time anyone asks for it, then refresh it on a rolling schedule, and every report carries the date we pulled it.