Salary benchmarks
Addleshaw Goddard Salary 2026: Associate Scale, Bonus and Partner Pay
On 28 August 2025, Addleshaw Goddard froze London newly qualified base at £100,000. That is still the 2026 number. This page prices it for the lawyer who earns it and for the general counsel who must match it: dated table first, then who pays it.
The first number a general counsel asks is the match cost.
Sartori maps about 30,000 practicing lawyers in London. The first number a general counsel asks about Addleshaw Goddard nq salary is what the 2026 London NQ actually costs to match, not what the firm wishes it paid, and not a 3PQE lockstep that is not on any public page.
Legal Cheek reported on 28 August 2025 that Addleshaw Goddard held newly qualified pay at £100,000 for the year, after careful consideration, to unwind compression between NQ pay and more experienced lawyers. The Legal Cheek firm card still listed that pound on 11 September 2026. The 2026 table is last August's freeze.
Four reads of one firm. The dated NQ is public. The on-cost is statutory. The mid-level lockstep is not printed. The partner ceiling is equity, not a salary to match. The match-cost arithmetic sits in section 03.
- £22m
- Firm-wide staff bonus pool for the year to 30 April 2026, up from £19 million. Not a disclosed NQ percentage.
- Addleshaw Goddard results, 30 June 2026; Law Gazette, 30 June 2026
- 12 days
- Median working days from offer to acceptance on Sartori's London associate mandate telemetry.
- Sartori & Partners, London associate mandate telemetry
- 35%
- Counter-offer incidence on that same London associate desk over the trailing three years.
- Sartori & Partners, London associate mandate telemetry
- 60
- Training contracts a year on Legal Cheek's Addleshaw Goddard card; the apply FAQ prints about 70 across the UK and Ireland.
- Legal Cheek firm card, accessed 11 September 2026; AG apply FAQ, accessed 11 September 2026
What Addleshaw Goddard has actually printed
Start with the seats and the dates. London NQ is a 2025 freeze. Regional NQ pounds were last restated in September 2024. Trainee cash is on the employer's own early-careers page.
Legal Cheek reported on 28 August 2025 that Addleshaw Goddard held newly qualified lawyer salaries at £100,000 for the year. The same piece recorded that £1 million originally earmarked for a junior pay rise was redirected into an expanded £19 million bonus pool. RollOnFriday, on 5 September 2025, quoted a firm spokesperson: only the NQ rate is frozen; the firm has held its NQ salary rate across all its UK offices; and it declined to provide salary figures for other associate bands. That is the 2026 London NQ. It is base salary, not total compensation.
The step that set the pound was the year before. Legal Cheek, on 26 September 2024, reported a 5 percent London NQ uplift from £95,000 to £100,000, English-regions NQ to £65,000 (3 percent), and Scotland NQ from £58,000 to £61,000. No later public restatement of those regional pounds was found. The 2025 freeze applied to NQ rates in all UK offices; the 2024 regional table is the last published regional cash, not a confirmed 2026 reprint.
Trainee cash is the one ladder the employer still advertises. The firm's early-careers page, current when accessed on 11 September 2026, lists London £52,000 / £56,000, Leeds and Manchester £33,000 / £36,000, Scotland £29,000 / £33,000, and Ireland €46,000 / €47,000, with SQE or PPC fees covered and maintenance grants of £15,000 in London, £8,000 in Leeds and Manchester, and £7,000 in Scotland, plus Diploma fees up to £14,000. That page does not state NQ pounds. Legal Cheek's firm card, accessed the same day and aligned to the 2026–27 Trainee and Junior Lawyer Survey, matches the London trainee and NQ cells and adds a London SQE grant of £15,000 and a PGDL grant of £10,000 in London / £7,000 outside London.
| Seat | Trainee year 1 | Trainee year 2 | NQ base | Grants (as advertised) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| London | £52,000 | £56,000 | £100,000 (frozen 2025) | SQE £15,000; PGDL £10,000 |
| Leeds and Manchester | £33,000 | £36,000 | Last published £65,000 (Sep 2024) | SQE £8,000 |
| Scotland (Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow) | £29,000 | £33,000 | Last published £61,000 (Sep 2024) | SQE £7,000; Diploma up to £14,000 |
| Ireland (Dublin) | €46,000 | €47,000 | Not published | PPC fees covered |
Legal Cheek's card lists 60 training contracts a year; the apply FAQ, accessed 11 September 2026, prints about 70 trainees a year across the UK and Ireland. Those are two printed counts, not a blended intake. Placement-scheme weekly pay for 2025 was £485 in London and £430 in Leeds, Manchester and Scotland. The training-contract page still states a 2:1 degree as the minimum, with a 2:2 considered where there are mitigating circumstances, and no minimum A-level or Higher since 2020. England intakes sit in March and September, Scotland in September, Ireland in January and May. That is a counted junior pipeline a general counsel can date, not an open NQ market.
What Addleshaw Goddard nq salary costs a company to match
Matching is a payroll number, not a league-table row. The published base is £100,000. The first on-cost is statutory. The peer prints around it tell you whether that cash is cheap this year.
Statutory National Insurance alone adds £14,250 to the London NQ base. From 6 April 2025, GOV.UK's Autumn Budget 2024 measure — the National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Act 2025 — set the secondary Class 1 rate at 15 percent above a £5,000 annual Secondary Threshold. On £100,000 that is 15 percent of £95,000. Cash payroll floor before pension, bonus, benefits, apprenticeship levy or salary sacrifice: £114,250. Same arithmetic on the last published regional NQ bases: £9,000 of employer NI on £65,000, and £8,400 on Scotland's £61,000. Those regional on-costs use the 2024 pounds. They are not a 2026 regional reprint.
The Office for National Statistics, in Employee earnings in the UK: 2025 (23 October 2025), put median gross annual earnings for full-time employees in post at least a year at £39,039 in April 2025. That is all employee jobs, not solicitors. It is the national earnings backdrop a remuneration committee already knows. The London NQ print sits well above it. It is still below the City cluster that moved in 2025.
Legal Cheek's 29 September 2025 Money talks snapshot put average NQ salary across 100-plus Firms Most List outfits at £118,756, nearly 5 percent on the prior report, and listed Addleshaw Goddard at £100,000, level with Mishcon de Reya, below Bird & Bird at £102,000, HFW at £103,500, Dentons at £104,000, and a cluster at £105,000. Magic Circle sat at £150,000. Eighteen US London offices paid NQs more than £170,000 on that table. This page does not restate those firms' ladders. It locates this firm's NQ: below the compiled average, £50,000 below Magic Circle, and frozen in a summer when some peers were still moving.
ONS Consumer price inflation, UK: August 2025, released 17 September 2025, put CPI at 3.8 percent in the 12 months to August 2025, unchanged from July and jointly the highest since January 2024. A freeze against that print is a real-terms cut on the NQ rung. Legal Cheek's same September 2025 piece noted some City uplifts were as little as 1.1 percent against that CPI. Addleshaw Goddard's choice was not a small uplift. It was zero on the NQ, with cash redirected into the bonus pool and, on the firm's account, into other PQE levels it would not print.
In the same London interview cohort, 52 of 118 in-house counsel, general counsel and chief legal officer respondents over a 24-month window named the published NQ as the only Addleshaw Goddard number they could take to a remuneration committee. A head of legal at a UK building society described the constraint in one line: the NQ print is the only number they can take to the remuneration committee. Partner profit-per-equity chatter is noise on a first in-house counsel hire.
Scotland NQ, last published
September 2024 restatement. The 2025 freeze applied to all UK NQ rates; this pound was not reprinted.
Legal Cheek, 26 September 2024 ↗| Against | As of | Matching AG London NQ is |
|---|---|---|
| Magic Circle London NQ | 29 September 2025 table | Cheaper cash this year |
| Legal Cheek list average | 29 September 2025 | Below the compiled average |
| Shoosmiths London NQ | 31 July 2025 | The freeze left AG below a peer that moved |
| AG regional NQ, last published | September 2024 | Not cheaper; different seat, last restated pounds |
| A 3PQE Addleshaw Goddard lockstep | Not published | Cannot be matched from this page |
| Average PEP of £1.1 million | Year to 30 April 2026 | Different product; not an NQ salary |
The NQ print is the only number they can take to the remuneration committee.
Associate scale, bonus and hours — the published absences
The rungs a 3PQE actually occupies are not on any public page. Bonus cash is a firm-wide pool. Target hours are undisclosed. Those three blanks are the matching problem.
Published NQEquity drawings
- Newly qualified base London £100,000, frozen August 2025, still the 2026 table. This is the number a general counsel can take to a board without asking the firm for an internal print.
- Associate, managing associate, legal director Named as employee grades in the 2024 pay-gap PDF. Not published as pounds. RollOnFriday recorded the decline to provide other associate bands in September 2025.
- Partner equity Average PEP £1.1 million; top of the ladder near £3 million. Profit share, not salary. Nonequity partner cash is not public.
In that same cohort, 31 of 84 newly qualified and 1–3 PQE respondents at UK national full-service firms over an 18-month window named the unpublished mid-level scale, not the £100,000 freeze, as the reason they were testing the market. That is the associate-side read of the same gap a general counsel hits when they try to price a 4PQE finance hire off an Addleshaw Goddard CV. A 1PQE-to-legal-director lockstep for Addleshaw Goddard is not public.
The firm's own careers site, accessed 11 September 2026, advertised a London Real Estate Finance associate at 1PQE+ with the salary field “Competitive.” The spec asked for a qualified lawyer with at least one year PQE from a major law firm, and named lender-side banks, debt funds and insurers alongside borrower-side investors, developers and listed property companies. That is a live gate. It is not a published cash scale. Do not treat a “Competitive” field as a missing cell you can fill.
Bonus existence is measured at pool level; per-head awards are not. The firm's 30 June 2026 results release stated the annual staff bonus pot increased from £19 million to £22 million (16 percent). The Law Gazette, the same day, repeated the £3 million pool increase. That appropriation covers lawyers and business-services staff. GOV.UK's gender-pay filing for AG Service Company Limited, snapshot 5 April 2025, shows 47.7 percent of women and 51.0 percent of men received bonus pay in the 2025–26 reporting year. A naive £22 million divided by 3,216 headcount is not a typical lawyer bonus, and it is not used here.
The same filing puts women's median hourly pay 14.9 percent lower than men's (mean 14.0 percent lower), women at 57.7 percent of the upper pay quarter and 70.6 percent of the lower pay quarter, and women at 65.8 percent of employees, with a median bonus gap of 20.0 percent and a mean bonus gap of 27.5 percent. The prior-year snapshot (5 April 2024) recorded a 16.1 percent median hourly gap. The firm's own PAY GAP REPORT (UK): 2024, pay date 5 April 2024, names the employee grades Associate, Managing Associate and Legal Director, states that partners receive profit share not salary, and puts UK partners 32.1 percent female. Those are distribution facts. They do not disclose pounds by PQE.
Hours are a published absence that is actually a published fact. Legal Cheek's Addleshaw Goddard profile, from the 2026–27 survey of over 2,000 UK trainees and junior associates, lists average start 08:58, average finish 18:32, and annual target hours undisclosed. That is the measured hours figure for this page. Do not import a billable-hours rumor from a comment thread.
Who earns the figure, and who writes the check
Two payers sit on the same cash figure: the UK LLP that employs the scale, and the general counsel who seconds the junior, hires them in-house, or buys the same City PQE on a panel.
Of 33 closed London associate searches over the trailing three years, Sartori's mandate telemetry records 21 as company-side seats in which a general counsel, chief legal officer or head of legal was matching a City NQ or 1–3 PQE hire. The remaining 12 were firm-side associate seats. That split is why this page is not a Magic Circle lateral memo. The company is the majority buyer on the London associate desk that priced this table.
We have worked the London associate market for more than 10 years, for companies in financial services, energy and utilities, real estate and industrials, and for UK national full-service firms. Over the trailing three years we closed 33 associate searches at a 93 percent completion rate, on a typical timeline of 6 to 12 weeks, with a median 12 working days between offer and acceptance and counter-offer incidence at 35 percent.
The firm writes the paycheckA company matches the print
- UK LLP payroll Trainee, newly qualified, associate, managing associate, legal director, then equity — the people on the published NQ table and the unpublished rungs above it.
- Secondment host A general counsel who samples the junior for a seat, then either returns them or tries to hire them. Legal Cheek's 2026–27 survey put client-secondment chance at 5 percent.
- In-house match A chief legal officer or head of legal at a bank, mutual, utility, infrastructure lender or PE house who must price a City NQ against £100,000 rather than against an unpublished 3PQE band.
The employment contract for the published NQ sits at Addleshaw Goddard LLP, then at AG Service Company Limited for the UK employee population that files gender pay.
- Four groups structure the NQ. The official training-contract page runs two years across Disputes, Finance & Projects, Corporate & Commercial and Real Estate. The Lawyer's 19 August 2026 tracker put autumn 2026 destinations at 15 finance and projects, 13 corporate and commercial, 10 disputes and 5 real estate, with seats in London 16, Leeds 10, Manchester 8 and Scotland 9, on 43 of 50 qualifiers kept.
- Finance is the volume desk. The firm's Finance page describes 400-plus finance specialists and, on the Financial Services sector page, 30 of the UK's 42 building societies among the buyer set. Those are the files that pay the NQ the freeze protected against bunching.
- Qualification is jurisdiction-split. England and Wales NQs from the 2024 intake sit SQE plus two years' qualifying work experience, as the SRA Q&A updated 28 January 2026 still requires. Scotland still runs PEAT 1 (the Diploma) and PEAT 2, then a Court of Session petition. Ireland requires FE1 before start, with PPC fees covered.
- Equity is a different paycheck. FY26 PEP of £1.1 million is average profit per equity partner, not a salary, and not pay for all 479 partners. The March 2026 vote stretched the top toward £3 million. That is who earns the top of the scale. It is not the NQ product.
The general counsel matching this table sits in the client sectors that generate the work — financial institutions, real estate capital, energy and utilities, and a government-owned infrastructure lender — not inside the firm's lockstep.
- Mutuals already staff Legal and Secretariat. A UK building society appointed a Group General Counsel leading Legal and Secretariat in December 2024, with a prior seat as general counsel at a listed UK bank the society had acquired. That is the in-house desk that feels associate inflation when it hires from the same PQE pool.
- The promotional bank has a General Counsel seat. National Wealth Fund Limited, created on 14 October 2024 from the UK Infrastructure Bank with a Leeds headquarters and capital of £27.8 billion, lists a General Counsel and Company Secretary overseeing finance-transaction advice, compliance and public law. Do not infer that seat is paid on the firm's NQ scale.
- Utilities buy the work on a panel as well as in-house. A Find a Tender notice dated 1 August 2022 put United Utilities Water Limited out to three legal-framework agreements with an estimated value of £20 million excluding VAT, review body the High Court of England and Wales. That is external legal spend, not an NQ salary, and it is the other way a head of legal pays for the same desks.
- FTSE buyers instruct the firm. The FY24 results, 14 August 2024, stated clients include 51 of the FTSE 100, with Financial Services circa 30 percent of income. Those are the companies whose in-house teams hire from the same PQE pool the freeze was designed to unbunch.
A composite from that company-side majority: a PE-backed industrials platform asked us to fill a first in-house finance-counsel seat with a 3PQE who had sat funds or real-estate finance at a UK national full-service firm. The general counsel would fund the published NQ-adjacent print and would not fund a Magic Circle number until the seat had a named facility load. We closed the search in 9 weeks, inside the 6-to-12-week envelope. The candidate who wanted an Addleshaw Goddard 3PQE band we could not verify from a public table was not the candidate this board was buying.
A general counsel at a government-owned infrastructure lender put the other constraint: they price project-finance counsel against the same City PQE pool, not against Addleshaw Goddard's unpublished lockstep. The published NQ is a floor they can defend. A made-up 4PQE band is not.
A 3PQE lockstep the firm has not printed is not a number we can invent.
The desks that still absorb these NQs
The freeze is a cyclical response to compression, not a demand collapse. FY26 still printed growth, and the files that justify a City NQ are being written by statute and by construction-phase mandates.
Addleshaw Goddard's own results page, 30 June 2026, put total revenues at £644 million for the 12 months to 30 April 2026, from £551 million (up 17 percent), distributable profits at £262 million from £224 million, PEP at £1.1 million, partners at 479 (up 8 percent) and global headcount at 3,216 (up 9 percent). It was the ninth consecutive year of revenue and profit growth. The Global Legal Post, the same day, matched those headlines. Legal Business added that PEP rose 10 percent from £1 million and that the firm is working toward a £1 billion-by-2030 target. Scottish Legal News, on 9 July 2026, called the firm the UK's eleventh highest-grossing on those results. The Law Gazette's live Top-50 table, updated 20 August 2026, listed the firm immediately below Simmons & Simmons at £690 million and above Macfarlanes at £389.5 million in the rows then published.
Using those already-rounded millions, revenue per partner on the FY26 stock is £1.344 million (£644 million / 479). Distributable profit over revenue is 40.7 percent. Neither figure is PEP. PEP is equity-partner profit. The 479 includes the whole partner population. Do not treat revenue per partner as a salary, and do not match it for an in-house counsel seat.
The partner-pay event of 2026 was the ceiling, not the average. Legal Business, on 17 March 2026, reported partners voted overwhelmingly to extend the top of the partner pay ladder so top earners can receive close to £3 million a year. Law.com International, on 16 March 2026, reported in its lede that partners voted to raise the ceiling of the compensation model by a third. Legal Business, on 19 December 2025, had already recorded the managing partner telling the title the firm needed to be prepared to disproportionately recognize and reward outperforming partners. The FY26 release said the firm had stretched the top of its partner equity ladder. Individual drawings, lockstep points and nonequity salaries remain unpublished.
Headcount across the three year-ends ran 2,700 to 2,952 to 3,216. Partner stock ran 444 in FY25 to 479 in FY26; FY24 was not stated as a closing partner total, only 72 additions in-year. Amsterdam opened on 1 July 2026, after the FY26 year-end, adding 17 partners and 60-plus lawyers. Warsaw was announced on 18 February 2025. Those openings hire local-qualified associates and laterals. They are not a London NQ scale.
Statute writes the fileA specialist seat, not an NQ factory
- Regulated-asset-base nuclear The Nuclear Energy (Financing) Act 2022 made a designated nuclear company bankable. Sizewell C's final investment decision is a construction-phase mandate into the 2030s.
- Direct procurement for customers Ofwat's first DPC close on the Haweswater Aqueduct puts utilities project finance into Leeds and Manchester for a decade of construction legal work.
- Conduct and certification FCA SM&CR phase 1 from 24 April 2026 and Consumer Duty outcomes-monitoring in July 2026 keep financial-services regulatory seats busy at 3PQE to legal director, not at NQ volume.
Sizewell C's final investment decision on 22 July 2025 is a construction-phase mandate, not an NQ factory. GOV.UK that day put government initial equity at 44.9 percent, capital cost around £38 billion in 2024 prices, and the National Wealth Fund providing the majority of construction debt. The firm's own 22 July 2025 announcement said it advised the National Wealth Fund as lender on debt financing of up to £36.55 billion. The NWF factsheet (May 2025) put the term-loan maximum under the Higher Regulatory Threshold at £36.6 billion, alongside a proposed £5 billion Bpifrance guarantee and £8.4 billion of equity, for a 3.2 GW plant. Hiring consequence: Infrastructure, Projects & Energy and energy-regulatory counsel at mid to senior associate, plus in-house legal at the promotional bank and at equity sponsors. Not a 2025 NQ headcount spike.
Ofwat's reasons document for HARP (August 2025) records that United Utilities Water entered a CAP agreement with Cascade Infrastructure Limited on 14 August 2025 for circa £3 billion across six tunnel sections of the 110 km Haweswater Aqueduct. United Utilities' corporate news, 21 August 2025, put construction in 2026, about 1,200 people at peak, and 2.5 million customers. The firm's FY26 release lists the mandate. Hiring consequence for a head of legal at a listed water undertaker, and for IPE associates in Leeds and Manchester: a decade of construction and project-finance work. Complement, not a restatement, of the Sizewell file.
The Competition and Markets Authority cleared Nationwide's acquisition of Virgin Money at phase 1 on 19 July 2024 (case ME/7094/24, Enterprise Act 2002 s.33), purchase price approximately £2.9 billion. The firm's FY25 results name the mandate. FCA policy statement PS26/6 put most SM&CR phase-1 changes on 24 April 2026. The FCA's outcomes-monitoring review under the Consumer Duty, 27 July 2026, told firms that collecting data is not enough. Those two supervisory events keep financial-services regulatory, employment and investigations counsel busy at the building societies and banks already on the firm's client list. They are not an NQ factory.
Autumn 2026 still absorbed juniors. The Lawyer, 19 August 2026, recorded 43 of 50 qualifiers kept. Spring 2026 kept 8 of 10. Legal Cheek, 3 March 2025, recorded a spring 2025 clean sweep of 11 of 11. The August 2025 freeze piece recorded 50 of 58 offers that autumn. Retention as a UK-wide NQ market is not this page's thesis. The point for a general counsel is narrower: the freeze did not shut the NQ door at this firm, and the desks that took the 2026 cut were finance and projects and corporate and commercial first.
FY26 also printed more than 20,000 client matters on a technology platform and 1.6 million prompts to a proprietary GenAI tool (6,000 a day). More than one third of people moved office. Neither fact is a published headcount cut, and neither is a reason to invent an hours target the firm has not disclosed.
How a general counsel should run an Addleshaw Goddard-scale hire
Run the hire against the table that exists: a frozen London NQ, a statutory NI floor, an unpublished mid-level, and a partner ceiling that is not a salary to match.
Five of 21 company-side files in that telemetry stalled past twelve weeks because the buyer asked for a 3–5 PQE Addleshaw Goddard band we do not have. Those searches sat open while the general counsel waited for a number that is not public. That is the finding that does not flatter the desk. We can price a published NQ. We cannot manufacture a lockstep the firm has declined to print. A 3PQE lockstep the firm has not printed is not a number we can invent.
Of the 12 firm-side files in the same 33, 4 needed a second shortlist after the first-choice NQ used the 12-working-day offer window to shop a Magic Circle or US-London print. Sartori's London associate counter-offer incidence is 35 percent; that rate is a defense cost, not a compliment. The 12-day window is short enough that a candidate who wants to shop the £150,000 print can do it inside the process. Budget that.
A second composite, from the slower end of the envelope: a listed utility asked us to fill a project-finance counsel seat against the same City PQE pool that staffs the Haweswater and Sizewell files. The first-choice candidate had already seen a London NQ freeze and wanted a mid-level print we could not verify. The file took 11 weeks, needed a second shortlist, and closed on a candidate from a UK national full-service firm who would disclose current cash. The unpublished middle is not only an associate grievance. It is a company-side delay.
- 01 · Which product? Write City NQ, regional NQ, secondment-to-hire, or 3PQE finance as separate briefs. If you cannot say which, you are not ready to open a search.
- 02 · Which print? Price against the August 2025 freeze and statutory NI, not against a hoped-for 2026 raise. If the board will not fund £100,000 plus NI, you are not matching this table.
- 03 · Which desk? Name the file: finance and projects, corporate, disputes, real estate, energy, utilities. A generic “Addleshaw Goddard-scale commercial lawyer” produces a shortlist for a job you do not have.
- → All three answered? Then run the search on the 6-to-12-week clock, budget a 35 percent counter-offer, and put the unpublished mid-level question in the first screening call rather than the fourth.
- Write the NQ specification first. City or regional, practice label, whether a secondment host is acceptable, whether you will match only this print or will stretch to the £105,000 cluster.
- Pull the published table, not a rumor. Legal Cheek's 28 August 2025 freeze piece and the September 2026 card are the London pounds. The early-careers page is trainee cash. Do not mix them.
- Budget National Insurance as a board line. £14,250 on the London NQ is statutory from 6 April 2025. It is not optional color on a spreadsheet.
- Ask what the mid-level print is. The firm does not publish it. A candidate who will not say what they earn at 4PQE is not ready to be matched in-house.
- Treat PEP as a different product. £1.1 million average and a near-£3 million ceiling are equity economics. They are not an NQ match, and they are not an in-house counsel band.
Google Ads Keyword Planner, measured 11 September 2026 across four countries, put 330 monthly searches on the string this page owns. That is demand for the dated number, not a reason to invent a lockstep. Sartori & Partners maps nearly 1.5 million lawyer profiles globally, with quarterly market surveys running since 2019. The London associate findings here — the 33 closed searches, the 35 percent counter-offer rate, the 12-day window, the 21 company-side files, the five stalled mid-level files — come from that program. The company-side route sits on our in-house counsel recruiting practice; the firm-side NQ and 1–3 PQE work sits on associate recruiting. What a chief legal officer costs on the company side sits on our general counsel salary 2026 benchmark. The US lockstep this table did not join is on our 2026 BigLaw associate salary scale.
Questions from both sides of the 2026 table
What is Addleshaw Goddard nq salary in London for 2026?
London newly qualified base remains £100,000, frozen on 28 August 2025 for the 2025 qualifying year. Legal Cheek recorded the freeze; the firm's Legal Cheek card still listed that pound on 11 September 2026. It is base salary, not total compensation, and not a 1PQE scale.
Does Addleshaw Goddard publish associate salary by PQE?
No. RollOnFriday reported on 5 September 2025 that the firm declined to provide salary figures for other associate bands. A general counsel matching a 3PQE or managing associate cannot take a public Addleshaw Goddard lockstep. Those pounds are not public and are not estimated here.
What bonus sits on Addleshaw Goddard associate pay?
A firm-wide staff bonus pool of £22 million for FY26 is public; a per-lawyer bonus percentage is not. Legal Cheek, on 28 August 2025, recorded a £19 million pot at the NQ freeze, with £1 million redirected from a junior rise. GOV.UK's 2025–26 gender-pay filing shows 47.7 percent of women and 51.0 percent of men received a bonus, so the pool is not a typical lawyer award.
What does Addleshaw Goddard partner pay look like in 2026?
Average profit per equity partner was £1.1 million for the year to 30 April 2026; the top of the equity ladder sits near £3 million after a March 2026 partner vote. PEP is not a salary and not pay for all 479 partners. Nonequity partner salary is not public.
What does it cost a company to match London NQ cash?
Statutory employer National Insurance alone adds £14,250, so the payroll floor on the published £100,000 base is £114,250 before pension, bonus or levy. That arithmetic uses the 15 percent secondary Class 1 rate and £5,000 threshold in force from 6 April 2025. It is not the firm's actual on-cost.
How long does a London associate search against this table take?
Typically 6 to 12 weeks on Sartori's London associate line, with a median 12 working days from offer to acceptance and a 93 percent completion rate across 33 closed searches over three years. Files that wait for an unpublished 3PQE band run long.
Firm announcements, NQ tables and the London research program
NQ bases come from dated Legal Cheek and RollOnFriday articles. Revenue, PEP, headcount and the bonus pool come from Addleshaw Goddard and the legal press. Employer NI, CPI and earnings come from GOV.UK and the ONS. Sartori figures come from the London associate research program.
Firm announcements, NQ tables and the London research program
52 references- Sartori & Partners — London Legal Talent Research Programme (750 structured interviews; ~30,000 lawyers mapped; quarterly surveys since 2019; mandate telemetry) sartoriglobal.com ↗
- Addleshaws freezes NQ pay at £100k to tackle salary bunching legalcheek.com ↗
- Addleshaw Goddard freezes NQ pay at £100k to beat pay bunching rollonfriday.com ↗
- Addleshaws pushes NQ lawyer pay to £100k legalcheek.com ↗
- Addleshaw Goddard — Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- Money talks: What newly qualified solicitors earn at the UK's top law firms legalcheek.com ↗
- Hogan Lovells and Addleshaw Goddard post spring trainee retention rates legalcheek.com ↗
- AG delivers 17% headline growth to maintain strong momentum addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- Addleshaw Goddard posts strong revenues as it continues to invest in strategic growth addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- Strong Global Growth Drives 12% Revenue Increase for Addleshaw Goddard addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- AG builds bonus pot after big profit increase lawgazette.co.uk ↗
- Top-50 financial results table 2026: updated live lawgazette.co.uk ↗
- Addleshaw Goddard posts double-digit revenue growth as PEP hits £1.1m globallegalpost.com ↗
- Addleshaws posts 17% revenue growth and increases bonus pot to £22m legalbusiness.co.uk ↗
- Addleshaws partners approve plan to extend top of pay ladder to £3m legalbusiness.co.uk ↗
- Addleshaws explores plans to boost rewards for star partners in performance drive legalbusiness.co.uk ↗
- Addleshaw Goddard Stretches Partner Pay Ladder to Reward Top Performers law.com ↗
- City law firms top £1m average partner pay after strong revenue growth scottishlegal.com ↗
- LIVE: Trainee retention 2026: Clifford Chance, Mishcon and Bakers reveal results thelawyer.com ↗
- Start your legal career at Addleshaw Goddard earlycareers.addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- Legal training contracts at Addleshaw Goddard earlycareers.addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- Apply for a legal career at Addleshaw Goddard earlycareers.addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- Real Estate Finance Lawyer - Associate - 1PQE+, London careers.addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- Finance — Addleshaw Goddard addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- Financial Services — Addleshaw Goddard addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- Energy & Utilities — Addleshaw Goddard addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- Real Estate — Addleshaw Goddard addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- Addleshaw Goddard advises National Wealth Fund on financing of Sizewell C nuclear project addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- AG SERVICE COMPANY LIMITED gender pay gap report for 2025 to 2026 reporting year gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk ↗
- PAY GAP REPORT (UK): 2024 addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- Changes to the Class 1 National Insurance Contributions Secondary Threshold… from 6 April 2025 gov.uk ↗
- Employee earnings in the UK: 2025 ons.gov.uk ↗
- Consumer price inflation, UK: August 2025 ons.gov.uk ↗
- Questions and answers — SQE sra.org.uk ↗
- Qualifying work experience — SRA sra.org.uk ↗
- Pathways to qualification — SRA sra.org.uk ↗
- Diploma in Professional Legal Practice — Law Society of Scotland lawscot.org.uk ↗
- Admission to the roll of solicitors — Law Society of Scotland lawscot.org.uk ↗
- Nuclear Energy (Financing) Act 2022 legislation.gov.uk ↗
- Sizewell C gets green light with final investment decision gov.uk ↗
- Sizewell C: Factsheet — National Wealth Fund nationalwealthfund.org.uk ↗
- Chancellor announces new plans to secure UK investment gov.uk ↗
- Reasons for various regulatory decisions in relation to the Haweswater Aqueduct Resilience Programme (HARP) ofwat.gov.uk ↗
- Landmark £3bn deal to overhaul 70-year-old aqueduct… corporate.unitedutilities.com ↗
- Nationwide Building Society / Virgin Money merger inquiry gov.uk ↗
- PS26/6: Senior Managers and Certification Regime review fca.org.uk ↗
- Outcomes monitoring: good practice and areas for improvement fca.org.uk ↗
- PRO004624 – Services- Framework- Legal Services find-tender.service.gov.uk ↗
- Shoosmiths addresses salary bunching whilst it lifts London NQ salaries to £105k legalcheek.com ↗
- Addleshaw Goddard expands international reach with addition of Linklaters' Warsaw office addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- Addleshaw Goddard opens for business in Amsterdam addleshawgoddard.com ↗
- Clean Power 2030 Action Plan gov.uk ↗
NQ figures are annual base salary before bonus, as published. Addleshaw Goddard does not publish a 1PQE–legal-director associate scale, an NQ or associate bonus in pounds, hours targets, or nonequity partner salary. Regional NQ pounds are the September 2024 restatement; the 2025 freeze applied UK-wide without a new regional table. PEP is average profit per equity partner, not a salary. The £22 million bonus pool covers lawyers and business-services staff. Employer NI of £14,250 is statutory arithmetic on the published London NQ, not the firm's actual on-cost. Sizewell C debt of up to £36.55 billion is the announced mandate, not the firm's fee.
Our own numbers — the interview cohort, the mandate telemetry, the counter-offer incidence and the offer-to-acceptance window — come from the continuous research program described on our research page.
Adjacent benchmarks for the same two readers
In-house counsel salary 2026
What a company-side legal counsel seat costs once you leave the City NQ table — the in-house chair that has to decide whether to match this print.
View in-house rangesGeneral counsel salary 2026
What a chief legal officer and general counsel cost on the company payroll — the buyer who prices Addleshaw Goddard NQ cash against their own bands.
View GC rangesBigLaw associate salary scale 2026
The US lockstep this UK table did not join: $235,000 first-year through $455,000 eighth-year, effective 1 July 2026.
Read the US scaleA quiet conversation
Matching a City NQ, or hiring the in-house seat that has to?
We map London associate and in-house legal talent for companies that have to put a lawyer on the payroll, and we are as willing to tell you this table is the wrong print as to open a search. Confidential, no obligation.