When I worked in the UK Patent Office, now called  UKIPO, the patent "processing time" was a measure of the actual work time spent on each application by an examiner. In the UK we did both search and examination and followed the application through to grant - which is different to the US and EPO I gather (or was) - the time spent doing this is referred to internally as PP (patent processing time).<p>When I left I was working mainly on IPC code G06F (computing). This field had the highest time allowance as it had the most complex/time consuming applications to search and examine. Search would take about 1 day and examination approximately the same other case handling would bring this up to 2½-3 days. That is processing time by the examiner is under 3 days usually over about a 3-5 year period (there is also "formalities" ensuring all the sections are there, the right line spacing, the right fonts, payments, etc., done by others). Remember this was the highest allowance of time.<p>Some applications would take far longer it generally goes by the number of claims made. Some would be a lot shorter - for example earlier in my career I did "displays" and nearly every other search in one heading there was for "automatic number plate altering systems for trucks to show the cabs license number on the trailer" - once you'd done a couple of such searches it could often be a quick review of more recent prior art and then cut and paste the citations adding pertinent comments. I'd say however that most applications had some novelty of some sort that could be gleaned to gain a patent by a good agent but of those not many would represent enough of a product to be worth financing (except for the mega corps like HP/IBM that would, it seems, deal with bundles of patents to broker entry to a given area of tech).<p>Oops, I've wittered on, sorry.