The US Copyright Office sent Congress a new fee schedule on 14 July 2026. Under section 708(b) of the Copyright Act the Register may institute those fees 120 days after submission unless Congress passes a law disapproving them, which puts the earliest date at 11 November 2026. The Office’s transmittal letter says it intends to implement “in the fall of 2026.”
The figure moving through the trade press is “up to 55%.” For anyone registering recordings, that number is too low.
What actually changes for music
From the Office’s final proposed schedule and analysis, these are the adopted figures:
- Group of sound recordings on an album (up to 20 recordings, including photographs, artwork and liner notes): $65 to $130. A 100% increase.
- Group of musical works on an album (up to 20 works): $65 to $85. A 31% increase.
- Standard Application, filed electronically: $65 to $85.
- Standard Application, filed on paper: $125 to $185.
- Single Application (one work, one author, who is also the sole claimant): $45 to $55.
GRAM means Group Registration for Works on an Album of Music, the option that files a whole album as one claim. Two flavours: GRAM/SR for the sound recordings, GRAM/PA for the underlying compositions. Most independent labels file both.
The 55% belongs to photographers, whose group registration of up to 750 images goes from $55 to $85. Sound recordings do worse. They double.
The math on a real catalogue
Take a label registering both rights layers across twelve albums.
- Today: 12 x ($65 GRAM/SR + $65 GRAM/PA) = $1,560
- After: 12 x ($130 GRAM/SR + $85 GRAM/PA) = $2,580
That is $1,020 more for the same twelve records, a 65% rise. The headline percentage never told you that, because it was measured on a different asset class.
The line item nobody budgets for
Recordation, the separate filing that puts an ownership transfer into the public record, is rising harder than registration:
- Base fee, electronic filing: $95 to $215
- Base fee, paper filing: $125 to $350
- Each additional transfer: $95 to $215
- Notice of termination, paper: $125 to $275
Every producer assignment and catalogue acquisition runs through that base fee. A label tidying twenty chains of title before due diligence pays $1,900 today and $4,300 after.
Why this matters if you are not American
Plenty of rightsholders in Lagos, Bogota and Jakarta treat US registration as a domestic formality. It is not, and the reason is section 412.
Under the Berne Convention, foreign works are exempt from having to register before filing a US infringement suit. Section 412 is separate and applies regardless of where a work originated: statutory damages and attorney’s fees are unavailable unless the work was registered before the infringement began, or within three months of publication.
That is the difference between a claim worth litigating and one worth abandoning. If your streams, sync placements or sample exposure sit in the United States, registration is the only thing that makes the remedy affordable. Same logic we traced in the new royalty geography: the state, not the distributor, sets the ceiling on what you can recover.
What to do before 11 November
Register the catalogue you actually earn from
Not everything. Pull your top-earning releases from the last three years plus any unreleased masters, and file those first. Fees are assessed at submission, so the operative deadline is filing, not examination.
Batch by album, not by track
After November, a twelve-track album filed as one GRAM/SR claim costs $130. Those same tracks filed individually on Standard Applications cost $1,020. Group registration was always efficient. The gap just widened.
Fix chains of title first
Recordation more than doubles. If you have unrecorded producer assignments or a pending catalogue transfer, that is the item with the shortest window and the biggest delta. Messy paperwork is expensive paperwork, which is the metadata debt problem in a different currency.
The reason behind it
This is the first adjustment since 2020, and the Office is candid about the arithmetic. It recovers 41% of its costs today. The new schedule is projected to reach 53% in year one, still short of the roughly 60% it treats as its historical benchmark. The March 2026 proposal noted the median Consumer Price Index rose about 23% since fees were last set.
Registration is voluntary under US law, which the Office repeatedly names as the limit on how far it can push. It dropped its initial plan to scrap the Single Application after pushback from the NMPA, the Copyright Alliance and the Authors Guild, and reduced several proposed group fees. The registration and transfer layer is one of the few places where an independent rightsholder’s admin discipline converts straight into legal leverage. It is about to cost more to be disciplined. Current rates sit on the Office’s fees page.
