• A fee (or a waiver from paying the fee) is required for certain types of actions.
• Twenty-five percent of the fee is non-refundable once an application is submitted, even if it is rejected.
• All registrations are subject to an annual maintenance fee.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) keeps a fee schedule current on its Pesticide Registration Improvement Extension Act of 2018 (PRIA 4) webpage. This is the first stop for determining the application fee amount.

A fee (or a waiver from paying the fee) is required for the following types of actions:

• New active ingredients;
• New uses;
• New products;
• Certain tolerances;
• Certain amendments;
• Certain inert ingredients;
• Certain combination products;
• Cancer reassessments and certain ecological/endangered species assessments;
• Manufacturing use products (MUPS);
• Experimental use permits (EUPS);
• Human study protocols and completed studies that require review by the human studies review board;
• Certain covered actions that require external review by the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) science advisory panel;
• Gold Seal letters; and
• Data extension requests.

FIFRA 33(b)(2)(F) directs the agency to reject any application submitted without the required registration service fee. Twenty-five percent of the fee is non-refundable once an application is submitted, even if it is rejected.

A certification of payment should be the first page of the submission or application and precede a cover letter or fee waiver or reduction request to enable the agency to match a payment with an application.

To help applicants identify the appropriate fee and pay it in advance of submitting an application (pre-payment) or upon submission to EPA, the “Fee Determination Decision Tree” is available on the agency website. Through a series of questions and answers, pesticide registration applicants are led to the appropriate fee category and fee.

Also, chapter 5 of the Pesticide Registration Manual offers in-depth information about registration fees.

Annual pesticide registration maintenance fees

All registrations are subject to an annual maintenance fee. Affected applicants will be contacted by mail in November with instructions for submitting the fee, which is due by the fifteenth of January. No extensions of this due date are possible. The amount of the per product fee will vary from year to year as the fee is dependent upon the projected number of products for which registrants will pay this fee.

Although there are procedures for requesting a fee waiver for individual products, maintenance fees will be reduced by 25 percent for the first registration only, if the applicant can show that:

• The applicant has 500 or fewer employees globally,
• During the three-year period prior to the most recent maintenance fee billing cycle the applicant has average annual gross revenue from all sources that do not exceed $10,000,000, and
• The applicant holds a total of five or fewer registrations subject to the maintenance fee.

There also are maintenance fee waivers for products that meet certain narrow criteria in two categories: minor agricultural use products and public health pesticides.