Submetering Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
Submetering and Building Energy Metering Patents
One filer dominates the ranked field. the leading assignee holds 123 records against a fifth-place count of just 2, with a long tail of single-filing entrants behind it. Filings peaked in 2017 at 16 and have since pulled back; the 2021-to-2024 window, the last stretch of years complete enough to compare, shows a 30% drop from 10 to 7 filings. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, 2025 and 2026 figures are still filling in and should not be read as a continued decline.
- 1CAUSAM ENERGY INC123
- 2FORBES JR JOSEPH W9
- 3西门子计量股份有限公司2
- 4康奈尔大学2
- 5ZULUAGA MARC2
See the full submetering and building energy metering analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions about submetering patents
Who holds the most submetering and building energy metering patents?
The ranked assignee list for this dataset contains only nine companies, and one assignee holds 123 of the 142 records in scope, far ahead of the fifth-ranked entity at 2. That concentration suggests a single long-running filing programme rather than a competitive field of similarly sized portfolios. Anyone doing freedom-to-operate work in this space should treat that leading assignee’s portfolio as the first thing to clear.
Is submetering patent filing activity growing or slowing?
Filing peaked in 2017 at 16 records and has trended down since; the last fully comparable window, 2021 to 2024, shows a 30% decline from 10 to 7 filings. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 figures in any dataset are still incomplete and should not be read as evidence of a continuing drop. Overall the field looks past its filing peak rather than accelerating.
What technology areas do submetering patents actually claim?
Most claims sit in power and control classes: H02J (power supply and grid systems) covers 80.3% of the 142 records and G05B (control and regulating systems) covers 69.7%. Business-data class G06Q, which is closest to tenant billing software, appears in only 16.9% of records, and general data processing class G06F in just 3.5%. That split means the hardware and control side of submetering is far more heavily claimed than the billing-software side.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Submetering and Building Energy Metering covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.