What is the Nice Classification System?

The Nice Classification (“NCL”) was established in 1957 by the Nice Agreement, a treaty administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”). It is an international classification system used to classify goods and/or services for the registration of trademarks and service marks. It consists of 45 classes, which 34 of them (from class 1 to 34) are used for description of goods, and 11 of them (from class 35 to 45) for description of services. The Nice Classification is continuously updated and revised to keep the content up to date. A new edition will be published every five years and since 2013, a new version of each edition is published annually.

Meanwhile, there are approximately 150 trademark offices in the world uses the Nice Classification system. This number includes members of the Nice Agreement as well as non-member countries.

What is the advantage of using Nice Classification?

The Nice Classification helps to simplifies the trademark application process by ensuring that the goods and/or services of the application are classified in the same manner in all trademark offices that uses the Nice Classification system.

In addition, it is important to choose a correct set of classes for your goods and/or service in order to protect your trademark in the future. Applying for a too narrow and/or wrong set of goods and/or services will be a risk of missing out protection on specific goods and/or services. Meanwhile, apply your mark with wide selection of classes may result in getting your already registered mark being invalidated or cancelled, if you do not have evidence to proof that you have been using the mark in a specific goods and/or services in a continuous period of time (according to the regulations of the specific country that your mark is registered).

The latest edition of the Nice Classification

The latest electronic publication of the Nice Classification NCL (12-2023) which is in English and French is now available on NCLPUB. You may download the latest version of the NCL through the WIPO website.