What smaller firms pay their lawyers in 2026

NALP measured office-level first-year bases as of 1 January 2025 and published the cut in the June 2025 NALP Bulletin+. Firms of 250 or fewer lawyers posted a $150,000 median. Firms of more than 700 posted $215,000. The $225,000 figure that readers still treat as “market” showed up at 44.7 percent of offices in firms of 701 or more, and at 6.3 percent of offices in firms of 250 or fewer. That split is the whole point of a size table.

The July 2026 move sits on top of an older base, not inside this survey. Bloomberg Law’s 17 June 2026 account of Milbank’s 2 June announcement put the new floor at $235,000 and the eighth-year base at $455,000, effective 1 July 2026. Use those two numbers as the prestige ceiling. Do not rebuild the class-year grid here. It already has a page.

The occupational wage is a fourth instrument, and it does not belong in that table. It mixes every employer of lawyers. O*NET republishes the Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2025 percentiles for SOC 23-1011. The median is $159,670. A first-year at $150,000 in a smaller firm and a first-year at $235,000 in a matching firm can both be consistent with a distribution whose middle is $159,670, because the distribution is not a firm grid.

Do not average the cells, and do not treat a later announcement as a raise on an earlier median. The July 2026 matched floor of $235,000 and the 1 January 2025 median of $150,000 at firms of 250 or fewer sit $85,000 apart. Eighteen months and two different populations separate them. One number is what firms that match began paying first-years on 1 July 2026, as Bloomberg Law reported on 17 June 2026. The other is the middle office in NALP’s smaller-firm group on 1 January 2025. Subtracting them produces a gap a committee can see. It does not produce a market raise, and it does not tell you what any one office paid in either year.

The New York City cell is the trap for a company that hires in Manhattan and staffs the rest of the country off that hire. NALP found 56.5 percent of 23 reporting New York City offices at $225,000 as of 1 January 2025. Twenty-three offices is a thin slice, and it is a large-firm slice. A general counsel who exports that percentage to a specialty firm in Houston under 250 lawyers, or to a first-year seat outside the match list, is using a New York reporting cell as a national grid. The national size cut is the one that applies: $150,000 at 250 lawyers or fewer, and only 6.3 percent of those offices at $225,000.

The same discipline applies when the reader is the lawyer. A fourth-year who earned lockstep in New York and moves to a smaller litigation firm does not carry the old class-year base into the new payroll. The receiving office’s grid, the hours that grid assumes, and the rate the firm can bill are the offer. The old scale is evidence of the last job. Partners making the same move should not convert the Second Hundred average in the table above into a draw. That average is a residual. It does not fill in the W-2.

Sartori & Partners was founded in 2017. The New York hub has been open since 2023. The firm maps 1,480,000+ lawyers. On the New York partner book we closed 22 partner searches over the trailing three years, 6 of them boutique-platform files, with a 93 percent completion rate, a 39 percent counter-offer incidence, and a median of 15 working days from offer to acceptance. The typical timeline is 4 to 7 months. 2 of the 6 boutique-platform files ran past that window because the first offer copied the July lockstep.

Those two late files are the uncomfortable part. In both, the committee opened from $235,000-class cash the candidate had earned, or had been promised, at a matching firm. The receiving firm’s associates were not on that grid. The guarantee then had to be rewritten, the candidate’s counter-offer window stayed open, and the file slipped past the 4-to-7-month band. A clean completion rate would hide that. The two files are why the first compensation paper gets stripped before it goes out.

One file that stayed inside the band was a 35-lawyer litigation boutique in Houston hiring a trial partner. The shortlist went out in 21 days. The first guarantee copied the July lockstep the candidate was leaving. Once that draft was rewritten to the firm’s own grid, signature took the desk median of 15 working days, and the file closed in week 18. The managing partner’s note on the first draft was blunt: We had written the guarantee off a scale our associates have never been paid. The general counsel at the manufacturer on that partner’s panel never saw the guarantee. The counsel saw the hourly invoice. Those are not the same document, and a board paper that uses one as a proxy for the other is already wrong.

Sartori & Partners maps about 67,000 lawyers in New York. That coverage figure is not the interview cohort, and it is not a count of smaller firms. It is the city map the desk works from. A company that wants the lawyer on payroll, rather than on a panel, starts from in-house counsel recruiting. A firm hiring the partner onto its own letterhead starts from lateral partner recruiting. The method sits on methodology. The cohort sits on research.