Paralegals and Legal Assistants 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 ($39,710) to the 90th ($98,990). 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

BLS counted 367,220 Paralegals and Legal Assistants jobs in May 2024, which is 0.24% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in District of Columbia, where the location quotient is 3.48, meaning the occupation holds 3.48 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 45,740 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 30.5% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $48,190 at the 25th percentile, $61,010 at the middle, $78,280 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $59,280, a ratio of 2.5 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

District of Columbia posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $99,300, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Paralegals and Legal Assistants stands number 101 by employment and number 392 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 11% less than its group median, and it supplies 28.8% of the group's 1,273,410 jobs. In 19 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $61,010, 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 29,300 jobs, 8.0% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $44,680 a year, against $101,760 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $61,010 a year is $5,084 a month gross, $2,347 every two weeks, $1,173 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($48,190) to the 75th ($78,280) is worth $30,090 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $5,084 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $67,111 would sit between the median ($61,010) and the 75th percentile ($78,280), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $48,190, is $12,820 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: 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. The full directory is on the Careers hub.