That's probably an average figure as of 5 or more years ago. The number varies depending on the patent classification and pay grade. (Higher pay grade means you

That's probably an average figure as of 5 or more years ago. The number varies depending on the patent classification and pay grade. (Higher pay grade means you get less time.) I don't know what the average across the entire USPTO was, but as a new examiner I frequently had an "expectancy" (the name for the number you quoted) of around 20-25 hours. And as I said, getting a ton of extra claims only got me 1 more hour. (Typical US patent applications have 20 claims. I once had an application with 45 claims that other examiners kept transferring around because they didn't want to work on it... I had to work on that one and it was a huge waste of my time. The attorney basically used the shotgun approach to claims drafting, hoping that one claim would get through, but none did.) And keep in mind that's for only a certain amount of examination. The first "office action" (response to the application) gets 62.5% of that time, and subsequent actions get a different (smaller) fraction of that time.