Nonprovisional applications are also called regular patent applications. These may be filed for utility, plant or design related inventions. Nonprovisional applications must ultimately include a specification, claims, drawings (where necessary), and an oath/declaration and a filing fee. The components are not all due initially to receive a filing date, but once a completed nonprovisional application is received, the PTO will begin reviewing it.  

The three different types of patents available as nonprovisional applications include utility, design and plant patents.

Utility Patent
Utility patents are those relating to mechanical inventions with function.

Design Patent
A “utility patent” protects the way an article is used and works while a "design patent" protects the way an article looks. Design is inseparable from the article to which it is applied and cannot exist alone merely as a scheme of surface ornamentation. It must be a definite, preconceived thing, capable of reproduction and not merely the chance result of a method.

In other words, in order to qualify for a design patent, the claimed subject matter is the design embodied in or applied to an article or manufacture and not the article itself.

Design patents must be ornamental, novel, nonobvious, and meet the criteria for patentability.

Plant Patent
A plant patent may be granted for a new and distinct variety of plant that is asexually reproduced.

Cultivated sports, mutants, hybrids and newly found seedlings (other than a tuber propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state) may obtain a plant patent.

All plants are patentable except; bacteria, those that are tuber propagated, plants that are not invented or discovered in a cultivated state, sexually reproduced plants, and plants that are obvious. Tuber propagated plants are not patentable even though they reproduce asexually because they are propagated by the same part of the plant that is sold as food. Plants capable of sexual reproduction are not excluded from consideration if they have also been asexually reproduced in the past. Asexually propagated plants are those that are reproduced by means other than from seeds, such as by the rooting of cuttings, by layering, budding, or grafting.