Trademark Class 36: Insurance and financial services
Insurance, banking, financial affairs, monetary affairs and real estate.
What class 36 covers
Class 36 is one of the 45 international classes used by the USPTO and most trademark offices worldwide, under the Nice Classification. Classes 1 to 34 cover goods — physical products — and classes 35 to 45 cover services. Class 36 is a services class.
You register a mark for particular goods or services, not in the abstract. That is why the same word can be owned by unrelated businesses in different classes, and why picking the right class matters as much as picking the right name.
Typically included in class 36
- Banking and lending
- Insurance underwriting and brokerage
- Investment and asset management
- Payment processing
- Real estate brokerage and management
- Cryptocurrency services
- Credit and debit card services
Business types that usually file here
- Banks and credit unions
- Insurance agencies
- Fintech startups
- Investment advisers
- Real estate brokerages
- Payment processors
- Mortgage lenders
Notable brands operating in class 36
Companies whose goods or services fall wholly or partly within this class. This is a list of well-known names in the space, not a ranking — there is no authoritative public measure of trademark "size", and most of these businesses hold registrations across several classes rather than this one alone.
- JPMorgan Chase
- Bank of America
- Wells Fargo
- Citigroup
- Goldman Sachs
- Morgan Stanley
- Visa
- Mastercard
- American Express
- PayPal
- Berkshire Hathaway
- Progressive
- Allstate
- State Farm
- GEICO
- Chubb
- MetLife
- Prudential
- BlackRock
- Charles Schwab
- Fidelity
- Vanguard
- Coinbase
- Block
- Intuit
Choosing the right class
Three mistakes cost applicants the most in this area:
- Filing in too few classes. If you sell a product and also provide a service around it, that is often two classes. Registering only one leaves the other unprotected.
- Filing in too many. Each class costs a separate fee, and the USPTO expects you to be using the mark, or to have a genuine intent to use it, for everything you list.
- Ignoring related classes. Examiners routinely treat certain classes as related — clothing and clothing retail, for instance, or food products and restaurant services. A conflict in a related class can block you just as effectively as one in your own.
Our search checks related classes automatically, so a conflict in an adjacent class shows up rather than being silently ignored.