Lawyers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($72,780) to the 90th ($239,200 or more). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 747,750 people in May 2024, 0.48% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 92,580 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 32.5% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in District of Columbia, whose location quotient of 9.73 says this work is 9.73 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $151,160 and the mean of $182,760. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 51 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 92,580 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, California would lead at $197,790. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Lawyers stands number 48 by employment and number 35 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Legal Occupations, the group median wage is $68,760 across 8 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 120% more than its group median, and it supplies 58.7% of the group's 1,273,410 jobs. In 11 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $151,160, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 93,730 jobs, 12.5% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 390 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Missoula, MT posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $105,770 a year, against $314,430 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Lawyers paycheck, gross, is $5,814 every two weeks on an annual $151,160, which is $12,597 a month and $2,907 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($99,760) to the 75th ($215,420) is worth $115,660 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $166,276 would sit between the median ($151,160) and the 75th percentile ($215,420), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $99,760, is $51,400 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Legal Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Title Examiners, Abstractors, and Searchers, Legal Support Workers, All Other, Judges, Magistrate Judges, and Magistrates, Administrative Law Judges, Adjudicators, and Hearing Officers, Judicial Law Clerks, Arbitrators, Mediators, and Conciliators. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.