Salary benchmarks
CMS Salary 2026: Associate Scale, Bonus and Partner Pay
On 6 June 2025, CMS raised London newly qualified base to £120,000. That print is still the 2026 table. This page prices it for the associate who earns it and for the general counsel who must match it — law-firm CMS, not content-management software.
The 2026 window is still last summer's print.
Sartori maps roughly 30,000 practicing lawyers in London. The 2026 CMS salary question for a general counsel is not what the firm wishes it paid. It is whether a London newly qualified hire off the still-current June 2025 table is cheaper than waiting for a lockstep round that, as of 11 September 2026, the firm has not joined.
Legal Business, on 2 July 2026, called Macfarlanes the first major UK firm to raise newly qualified pay that year, to £150,000 from 1 July. No Legal Cheek or RollOnFriday article announcing a 2026 CMS NQ raise was found through 11 September 2026. Waiting is not a price.
Four reads of one table. The 2026 window is open against Magic Circle, US-London and the July 2026 UK raises. It is closed against CMS regional NQ, and it is not a bet on a further CMS announcement that has not been made. The cheaper-or-not test sits in section 03.
- 79
- Training contracts on Legal Cheek's Firms Most List 2027 edition — the junior pipeline onto the NQ table.
- Legal Cheek, Firms Most List 2027 edition, accessed 11 September 2026
- 69%
- Latest trainee retention on the same Legal Cheek CMS profile, from the 2026-27 trainee and junior-lawyer survey.
- Legal Cheek CMS firm profile, accessed 11 September 2026
- 35%
- Counter-offer incidence on Sartori's London associate mandate telemetry over the trailing three years.
- Sartori & Partners, London associate mandate telemetry
- 12 days
- Median working days from offer to acceptance on that same London associate desk.
- Sartori & Partners, London associate mandate telemetry
What a CMS salary publishes in 2026
CMS publishes newly qualified and trainee bases by UK seat. It does not publish the rungs in between, and it does not publish 2025/26 partner profit. Start with what is on the page.
Legal Cheek reported on 6 June 2025 that CMS increased newly qualified solicitor pay in London to £120,000, just under 10 percent from £110,000. RollOnFriday, on 13 June 2025, confirmed the London NQ base moved from £110,000 to £120,000, effective from June 2025. The same round set Bristol NQ at £76,500, from £70,000, and Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow NQ at £68,000. London trainee pay was left unchanged at £50,000 in year one and £55,000 in year two.
The step immediately before that window was smaller. Legal Cheek, on 16 October 2024, reported London NQ raised to £110,000 from £105,000, just under 5 percent, with Bristol NQ at £70,000 from £68,000 and Manchester and Sheffield NQ at £62,000 from £60,000. Two NQ steps in eight months, then silence through the 2026 lockstep round.
Legal Cheek's CMS firm profile, accessed on 11 September 2026, still listed London NQ at £120,000, Bristol at £76,500, Manchester and Sheffield at £68,000, Scotland at £68,000, and London trainees at £50,000 / £55,000. The same page restates UK LLP revenue of £839.3 million. That is the confirmation that the 2026 window is last summer's print, not a missing 2026 memo.
The junior supply onto that table is a counted intake, not a vibe. Legal Cheek's Firms Most List 2027 edition puts CMS at 79 training contracts, behind Clifford Chance (100) and Slaughter and May (85) on that list. The June 2025 NQ article still cited around 90 trainees from the 2025 Most List; 79 is the later figure. Latest trainee retention on the CMS profile is 69 percent. A general counsel who treats every CMS qualifier as available in September is reading a different pipeline from the one the survey measured.
| UK seat | NQ base | Trainee year 1 | Trainee year 2 | What moved in June 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| London | £120,000 | £50,000 | £55,000 | NQ effective June 2025; trainee frozen |
| Bristol | £76,500 | £43,000 | £45,000 | NQ from £70,000; trainee frozen |
| Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool | £68,000 | £33,000 | £35,000 | NQ from £62,000 |
| Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow | £68,000 | £33,000 | £35,000 | NQ from £60,000 |
Reading and Leeds appear on CMS office lists; they were not on the NQ table in the June 2025 articles. Apprentice pay is a separate payroll line: Legal Cheek's solicitor-apprenticeship profile lists a London apprentice scale of £30,000 / £32,000 / £35,000 / £40,000 / £50,000 / £55,000 over six years, with about 15 apprentices a year, and is not the NQ product.
When the London hire is cheaper — and when it is not
A general counsel does not buy a league table. They buy a first-year commercial seat against the prints that moved in 2026, and against the CMS seats that did not.
In the same London interview cohort, 58 of 112 in-house counsel and general counsel respondents over a 24-month window said they would not match a Magic Circle newly qualified print for a first in-house commercial seat. That is the buyer question this section answers with published bases, not with a wish that CMS had moved.
Legal Cheek's 29 September 2025 Money talks snapshot put average NQ salary across 100-plus Firms Most List firms at £118,756, up nearly 5 percent on the prior year, and listed CMS at £120,000. Magic Circle — A&O Shearman, Clifford Chance, Freshfields, Linklaters, Slaughter and May — sat at £150,000. On that table CMS tied Simmons & Simmons at £120,000, sat below Ashurst, Hogan Lovells and Macfarlanes at £140,000, and sat below Norton Rose Fulbright at £135,000. Some of those peer prints subsequently moved. The 2026 round is the one that prices the window now.
Macfarlanes took London NQ from £140,000 to £150,000, effective 1 July 2026, as Legal Cheek reported on 3 July 2026 and Legal Business reported on 2 July 2026. DLA Piper took London NQ from £130,000 to £140,000, about 8 percent, and regional NQ to £84,000 from £82,000 in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield, as Legal Cheek reported on 6 July 2026. Legal Cheek noted DLA's prior 2025 jump had been 18 percent, from £110,000 to £130,000. CMS did not join either 2026 move.
The US lockstep is the other "next round." Above the Law, on 2 June 2026, reported Milbank associate raises of $10,000 to $20,000 by class year, effective 1 July 2026. Global Legal Post, on 3 June 2026, put the new scale at $235,000 first-year and up to $455,000 eighth-year. Legal Cheek, on 3 July 2026, converted that first-year as "$235,000 (roughly £176,000)." CMS is not on that US scale. Quinn Emanuel London is the published US-London comparator: Legal Cheek, on 5 June 2026, put London NQ at £189,000 from £180,000, and published the rest of that London scale through 7 PQE. A CMS London NQ at £120,000 is £69,000 below that NQ print on published bases.
A head of legal at a lower-mid-market private-equity house put the board constraint in one line: the NQ print is the only number they can take to the investment committee. Partner profit-per-equity-partner chatter is noise on a first in-house commercial hire. That is why the window is a general-counsel problem before it is a Magic Circle league-table problem.
CMS North and Scotland NQ
Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow, June 2025 round, still the 2026 regional print.
Legal Cheek, 6 June 2025 ↗| Against | As of | A CMS London NQ hire is |
|---|---|---|
| Magic Circle and Macfarlanes NQ | 1 July 2026 | Cheaper this year |
| DLA Piper London NQ | 6 July 2026 | Cheaper this year |
| Quinn Emanuel London NQ | 5 June 2026 | Cheaper this year |
| US domestic first-year (Milbank) | 1 July 2026 | Cheaper this year; different market |
| CMS Bristol, North and Scotland NQ | June 2025 round | Not cheaper; different CMS product |
| Government Legal Department Grade 7 | April 2024 London rates | Different work; not a match |
| A further CMS NQ raise | None found through 11 September 2026 | Waiting is not a priced alternative |
The NQ print is the only number they can take to the investment committee.
Associate scale, bonus and hours — the published absences
The NQ headline is a retention instrument. The mid-level lockstep, the cash bonus and the hours target are the three things a general counsel actually needs to match a 3 PQE hire, and two of them are not public.
Published NQUndisclosed partner profit
- Newly qualified base By UK seat, dated June 2025, still the 2026 table. This is the number a general counsel can take to a board without asking CMS for an internal print.
- Mid-level associate scale Not published. RollOnFriday invited CMS associate scales in June 2025 and noted that silence is how bunching stays off the page. A 1-to-8 PQE lockstep is not on Legal Cheek's CMS profile.
- Partner profit Global Legal Post, 23 July 2026: CMS does not disclose profits or profit per equity partner. Promotion volume is the public event at the top of the scale.
In the same cohort, 27 of 81 newly qualified and 1–3 PQE respondents at international UK full-service firms over an 18-month window named the unpublished mid-level scale, not the NQ headline, 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 4 PQE commercial hire off a CMS CV.
Bonus existence is measured; bonus cash is not. The CMS UK Pay Gap Report 2025, snapshot 4 April 2025, covering the bonus period 5 April 2024 to 4 April 2025, states that in 2025 the firm shared a full profit-share bonus, after a reduced profit-share bonus in 2024. Mean gender bonus gap was 29.9 percent and median 33.0 percent in 2025, from 41.7 percent and 39.9 percent in 2024. The proportion receiving a bonus was 72.5 percent of men and 74.9 percent of women in 2025. GOV.UK's gender pay gap service for the 2025 to 2026 reporting year repeats those bonus-receipt figures, puts median hourly pay 20.7 percent lower for women, and places UK LLP employee headcount on 5 April 2025 in the 1,000 to 4,999 band. None of those percentages is an NQ bonus in pounds. Do not invent one.
Hours are the third published absence that is actually a published fact. Legal Cheek's CMS profile, from the Trainee and Junior Lawyer Survey 2026-27 of over 2,000 trainees and junior associates, lists average start 08:59, average finish 18:58, annual leave 25 days, and annual target hours: no targets. That is the measured hours figure for this page. A stale benefits table on RollOnFriday's CMS firm page listing "Target Hours 1500" sits next to a trainee-salary cell that still showed £110,000 in the first-year-trainee field; that table is not the 2026 pay source.
Legal Cheek, on 29 September 2025, noted that some firms' NQ uplifts sat at 1.1 percent, well below the UK inflation rate of 3.8 percent for the 12 months to August 2025. CMS's June 2025 London NQ move was just under 10 percent from £110,000, above that inflation print. The raise was real in real terms. It was also a retention response after a January 2025 hiring pause, not a published increase in NQ headcount.
Who writes the check for a CMS-scale hire
Two payers sit on this page: the UK LLP that employs the scale, and the general counsel who either seconds the junior, hires them in-house, or buys the same City NQ on a panel.
Of 33 closed London associate searches over the trailing three years, Sartori's mandate telemetry records 19 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 14 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.
The employer of the scale is CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang LLP, SRA-authorized, Cannon Place, 78 Cannon Street, with UK offices in Aberdeen, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Reading and Sheffield. The London office page states over 1,000 lawyers at Cannon Place. Companies House records the LLP as OC310335, last accounts made up to 31 March 2025, next accounts to 31 March 2026 due by 31 December 2026. Global Legal Post, on 23 July 2026, reported UK LLP revenue of £839.3 million for FY 2025/26, up 7.7 percent. CMS's own 22 July 2026 release put organization-wide calendar-2025 revenue at €2.173 billion, up 4.8 percent from €2.073 billion in 2024. Corporate/M&A was the largest 2025 growth contributor; Dispute Resolution, Tax, Employment and Banking & Finance also contributed. Pay on the CMS UK LLP table in London is not the same product as a Paris tax partner or a Hong Kong corporate associate inside a 22-member-firm organization.
We have worked the London associate market for more than 10 years, for companies in financial services, energy, TMT and private equity and for international UK 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.
CMS writes the paycheckA company matches the print
- UK LLP payroll Trainee, newly qualified, senior associate, counsel, lockstep partner — the people on the published NQ table and the unpublished rungs above it.
- Secondment host A general counsel who samples the CMS junior for a stretch, then either returns them or tries to hire them. Legal Cheek's 2026-27 survey put client secondment probability at 38 percent.
- In-house match A chief legal officer or head of legal at a bank, energy group, TMT company or PE house who must price a City NQ against £120,000 rather than against a government band.
The seat is law-firm practice. The UK LLP is a full-service City platform inside a 22-member-firm organization, not a US lockstep shop and not Magic Circle.
- Practices that still make partner. CMS's 18 March 2026 release listed 54 promotions effective 1 April 2025 to 1 April 2026. UK promotees by practice label included Corporate M&A and private equity in London, Corporate/M&A in Sheffield, Dispute Resolution in London, Employment in Edinburgh, Energy and Infrastructure in Aberdeen, Finance in Manchester, Insurance in London, Real Estate in Edinburgh, planning in Aberdeen, TMT in London and Construction in Manchester.
- Volume work sits elsewhere. The Legal Services Unit in Glasgow and Edinburgh handles routine, volume or process-led work with a paralegal team and an LPO partner. That is a different cost base from London NQ £120,000.
- Public buyers of the work. CMS's public-procurement page names Transport Scotland, National Grid Ventures, Northern Ireland Water, NHS National Services Scotland, National Grid / Scottish Power, Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Glasgow among recent mandates. Pensions Age, on 19 January 2026, reported the Pension Protection Fund appointed a 10-firm legal panel including CMS.
- Experienced-hire gates. CMS's application-process page describes at least one interview, usually two, with possible technical, psychometric or skills tests, then employment referencing, qualification checks, a credit check and DBS. There is still no published PQE scale behind that process.
Matching £120,000 London NQ is a private-sector, usually financial-services, TMT, energy or private-equity problem. Government legal departments are not on that number.
- Secondment is how many GCs first see the junior. Legal Cheek's 2026-27 survey put client secondment probability at 38 percent and international secondment at 7 percent, with more than a third of surveyed trainees reporting placements at a FTSE consumer-goods group, a UK commercial bank, a national charity, bulge-bracket banks, a US technology company and an integrated energy major.
- Government cannot match the table. GOV.UK's legal trainee scheme, updated 14 April 2026, lists Government Legal Department trainees at £34,695 year one and £39,645 year two in London. GLD FOI 25_005, 21 January 2025, put Grade 7 lawyer London capability rates at £61,200 / £65,250 / £67,273 from 1 April 2024, and Legal Officer at £49,919. A government GC does not match CMS London NQ. They buy a different product.
- Corporate, funds and energy desks are the matching readers. CMS UK Corporate states more than 1,400 corporate lawyers across 92 offices. The European private-equity team is described as over 400 private equity, corporate, tax and finance lawyers; a 4 August 2026 mandate advised a UK lower-mid-market PE house on a tech-enabled MGA investment. Real estate is described as one of the largest UK teams, with a global practice of over 800 lawyers. Those are the files a company-side legal head is pricing against.
A composite from that company-side majority: a PE-backed TMT platform asked us to fill a first in-house commercial seat with a City NQ who had sat TMT or corporate at an international UK full-service firm. The general counsel would fund the CMS-band print and would not fund Magic Circle £150,000 until the seat had a named matter load. We closed the search in 9 weeks, inside the 6-to-12-week envelope, without matching the July 2026 UK raises. The candidate who wanted Quinn Emanuel London pounds was not the candidate this board was buying.
Waiting is not a price.
Partner pay is a promotion event, not a 2026 PEP figure
A CMS law firm salary at partner is the one number every associate asks for and the one number the 2026 results season did not give. What is public is who was made up, on which desk, in which city.
Global Legal Post, on 23 July 2026, stated it plainly: CMS does not disclose its profits or profit per equity partner. That sentence sits next to the UK LLP £839.3 million and the global €2.173 billion. Legal Business, on 15 August 2024, carried an estimated PEP of £741,559 for the then-latest results, down 4 percent from an estimated £771,000. That estimate is a 2023/24-era figure. It is not 2025/26 partner pay. Legal Cheek's CMS profile lists a profit-per-equity-partner box without a financial year; given the July 2026 non-disclosure, that box is not treated here as a 2025/26 PEP.
RollOnFriday's CMS firm page, in a historical narrative, records that CMS abandoned an element of performance-related pay for partners in favor of pure lockstep, having previously shared around 5 percent of profits among star partners. That is firm-history reporting, not a 2026 points table. The visible 2026 equity event is promotion volume, and it comes in two counted windows that should not be collapsed.
CMS, on 18 March 2026, announced 54 new partners in 29 cities and 21 countries, women 52 percent of global promotions, effective between 1 April 2025 and 1 April 2026. The 22 July 2026 revenue release, and The Oath in July 2026, stated 56 new partners in 28 cities and 18 countries, women 48 percent. Different counting windows. Use both with their dates. UK desks on the March list — Corporate/M&A, private equity, disputes, employment, energy, finance, insurance, real estate, TMT, construction — are the partner-pay story a general counsel can actually use: which files still make up, not what an undisclosed PEP would have been.
The Oath, in July 2026, reported that in 2025 CMS reviewed its strategy and named new heads for six of 19 international groups: Dispute Resolution; the Financial Institutions cluster; Funds; Hospitality; Insurance; Private Equity. That is a practice-group investment signal for 2026–27, not an NQ headcount signal. INDUSLAW became a CMS member firm in 2025 and remains an independent Indian firm; the Delhi High Court in November 2025 heard a challenge to Bar Council of India foreign-lawyer rules around the brand. That overhang is not a London NQ driver.
What actually pays a CMS-scale seat in 2026
An NQ raise is a retention response. The files that justify it — or argue against matching US lockstep — sit in the 2025 freeze, the 2025 revenue mix, the 2026 deal mix and a statute calendar that hires specialists, not a mass of qualifiers.
Pause the lateralsPeers move the NQ; CMS does not
- January 2025 freeze RollOnFriday, 17 January 2025: an internal update that 2024 saw inertia and a slowdown in demand for legal services; hiring deferred across fee-earning and business services. Not a 2026 freeze.
- June 2025 NQ lock London NQ to £120,000. Retention of 2025 qualifiers. Trainee London pay frozen. Six months after the freeze, the table this page opens on.
- July 2026 peer round Macfarlanes, DLA Piper, Milbank, Quinn Emanuel London. CMS had not matched those rounds by 11 September 2026. The window stays open because this step did not happen here.
RollOnFriday, on 17 January 2025, reported an internal update that 2024 saw inertia and a slowdown in the demand for legal services, that revenue still grew 6 percent, and that hiring was deferred across fee-earning and business services to protect profit and cash. The same piece quoted 6,300 lawyers billing over £4 million every day in a year-end billing push — an internal figure as reported, not a 2026 run-rate. Six months later CMS raised NQ bases. The sequence is freeze, then NQ retention, then a 2026 lockstep round the firm sat out.
The work mix that pays Corporate/M&A seats is not a simple recovery. ICLG, on 10 September 2026, reporting the CMS European M&A Outlook 2027 with Mergermarket, put European deal volume 5 percent lower year on year in H1 2026 and aggregate value 54 percent higher at €723 billion. US bidders did 824 Western European target deals in H1 2026 with combined value more than €234.6 billion. European TMT H1 2026 was €161.9 billion, up 69 percent. Of 250 executives surveyed (182 corporate, 68 private equity) in Q2, 64 percent expected activity to rise over the next 12 months and 12 percent expected a fall; 58 percent expected financing conditions to worsen. ION Analytics, the same day, reported 88 percent had seen more US buyers. Megadeals hire seniors. A falling deal count does not imply NQ volume. A general counsel staffing a mid-market PE legal team off the CMS table should not read €723 billion as a junior-hiring warrant.
The Bank of England held Bank Rate at 3.75 percent, with the July 2026 Monetary Policy Report recording a 6–3 vote to hold on 29 July 2026. Elevated rates are a cost-of-capital drag on mid-market PE and real-estate NQ demand; energy-price volatility is a disputes and projects argument on the Aberdeen and London energy desks. Neither is an NQ lockstep driver.
The statute calendar hires named desks. The Procurement Act 2023 came into force on 24 February 2025 (S.I. 2024/959); the Cabinet Office, on 25 February 2025, put yearly public spend around £400 billion under the new regime. That is public-procurement and infrastructure associate work, Edinburgh and Glasgow first. The National Security and Investment Act annual report for FY 2025/26 recorded 1,324 notifications, up 16 percent from 1,143, with 1,135 mandatory, 60 call-ins, 95.6 percent of 1,220 reviewed cleared with no further action, nine final orders and one acquisition blocked. Call-ins were tagged Defence 47 percent and Critical Suppliers to Government and Military & Dual-Use 33 percent each. That is Corporate/M&A and FDI associate work on sensitive-sector deals, continuous, not an NQ headcount spike.
The Employment Rights Act 2025 became law on 18 December 2025, Acas last updated 2 September 2026. From 6 April 2026: day-one paternity and ordinary parental leave, SSP from day one, collective-redundancy protective award 180 days. On 1 October 2026 tribunal time limits move to six months. On 30 October 2026 the "all reasonable steps" sexual-harassment duty. On 1 January 2027: unfair dismissal after six months, compensatory-award cap removed. Employment associates in London, Bristol and Edinburgh face an advice spike in 2026 and a tribunal spike from 2027. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 19 June 2025; Stage 3 commencement on 5 February 2026 brought in the majority of Part 5 data-protection provisions. CMS's own 12 May 2026 update put SM&CR phase 1 from 24 April 2026, with further changes on 10 July 2026 and non-financial misconduct alignment on 1 September 2026 — Financial Services & Regulation associates in London and Edinburgh, implementation, not a mass NQ hire.
A Scottish Government direction in force 17 August 2026 requires planning authorities to notify Scottish Ministers within seven days of validating a data-center application above 50MW. That is real-estate planning and energy-consenting work in Edinburgh and Glasgow from that date. Complements NSI data-infrastructure call-ins. It is not a London NQ driver.
Harvey is the cost argument against matching US lockstep, not a published headcount cut. CMS, on 22 July 2026, said Harvey was introduced in 2024 and rolled out firmwide in 2025 to more than 7,000 lawyers and business-support staff in more than 50 countries. Global Legal Post, on 23 July 2026, reported the firm said the tool saved each lawyer around 30 minutes per day on contract review and due diligence — a firm claim, not an independent time study. Legal Cheek's CMS profile lists Copilot, Litera, Avail and Harvey as highly encouraged. No published headcount reduction follows from that. A general counsel who treats GenAI as a reason CMS "must" match $235,000 is arguing from a tool the firm is using to defend the opposite.
The England and Wales solicitor supply that prices every NQ is large and shifting route. The SRA population table for July 2026 recorded 214,080 solicitors on the roll and 178,428 practicing solicitors. In the 12 months August 2025 to July 2026 the SRA recorded 9,944 admissions, 54 percent LPC plus recognized training and 40 percent SQE, against 9,665 admissions the prior 12 months (65 percent LPC, 30 percent SQE). CMS sponsors SQE and PGDL before qualifying work experience. Every England and Wales NQ from 2026 onward is SQE-capable. That changes trainee-grant design. It does not change the pound table.
How a general counsel should run a CMS-scale hire
The window is only useful if the brief is honest about which product you are buying: a City NQ, a regional NQ, a seconded junior, or a 4 PQE commercial lawyer whose CMS band you cannot see.
Of those 33 closed files, 8 of 14 firm-side international-UK-full-service NQ-to-3-PQE mandates needed a second shortlist after the first-choice candidate used the 12-working-day offer window to shop a Magic Circle or US-London print. That is the finding that does not flatter the desk. The 2026 window is real for a general counsel who will not match £150,000. It is leaky for a firm trying to keep a first-choice NQ who has already seen Quinn Emanuel London pounds. Sartori's London associate counter-offer incidence is 35 percent; that rate is a defense cost, not a compliment.
A general counsel at a FTSE-listed energy group described the same constraint from the other side of the table: the board will fund £120,000 for a City NQ and will not fund £150,000 until the seat has a named matter load. That is not a theory about lockstep. It is how a company-side budget actually clears. The 12-day offer-to-acceptance window on our London associate telemetry is short enough that a candidate who wants to shop the Magic Circle print can do it inside the process. Budget that. Do not be surprised by it.
A second composite, from the slower end of the envelope: an international UK full-service firm asked us to fill a regional NQ commercial seat off the £68,000 print. The first-choice candidate had already seen London £120,000. The file took the full 12-week end of the 6-to-12-week window and needed a second shortlist. Regional CMS NQ is cheaper cash. It is not a cheaper search when the candidate has already sat in Cannon Place.
- 01 · Which product? Write City NQ, regional NQ, secondment-to-hire, or 4 PQE commercial as separate briefs. If you cannot say which, you are not ready to open a search.
- 02 · Which print? Price against the June 2025 CMS table and the July 2026 peer prints, not against a hoped-for CMS raise. If the board will not fund £120,000, you are not matching this table.
- 03 · Which desk? Name the file: corporate/M&A, TMT, energy, employment, funds, procurement. A generic "CMS-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 the CMS print or will stretch to DLA or Magic Circle.
- Pull the published table, not a rumor. Legal Cheek's June 2025 NQ article and the September 2026 profile are the pounds. Emerging Talent is the process. Do not mix them.
- Budget the Magic Circle gap as a decision. £30,000 against £150,000 is a board paper, not a recruiter talking point. If you will not fund it, say so before the shortlist sees the number.
- Ask what the mid-level print is. CMS does not publish it. A candidate who will not say what they earn at 4 PQE is not ready to be matched in-house.
- Treat government bands as a different product. Grade 7 London at £67,273 is not a CMS NQ substitute. It is a public-service seat with a different clock and a different file.
Sartori & Partners maps nearly 1.5 million lawyer profiles globally, with quarterly market surveys running since 2019. The London associate findings on this page — the 33 closed searches, the 35 percent counter-offer rate, the 12-day window, the 19 company-side files, the 8-of-14 second-shortlist rate — come from that program, not from a league table. 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. The US lockstep this table did not join is documented on our 2026 BigLaw associate salary scale. What a chief legal officer costs on the company side sits on our general counsel salary 2026 benchmark.
Questions from both sides of the 2026 table
What is CMS salary for a newly qualified solicitor in 2026?
London newly qualified base is still £120,000, the June 2025 print, with no later CMS raise found through 11 September 2026. Legal Cheek reported the move from £110,000 on 6 June 2025; RollOnFriday confirmed it was effective from June 2025. Bristol sits at £76,500; Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool and Scotland sit at £68,000. This is the law-firm CMS, not content-management software. Mid-level CMS associate salary bands are not published.
What is CMS NQ salary outside London?
Bristol newly qualified base is £76,500; Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool and Scotland sit at £68,000, all from the June 2025 round. Those seats are a lower cash outlay than London £120,000. A general counsel filling a regional commercial seat off the CMS table is not buying the City product. Legal Cheek's June 2025 article is the dated source; the firm's Emerging Talent careers copy still printed stale London £110,000 and Scotland £60,000 when accessed on 11 September 2026.
Does CMS publish a CMS associate salary lockstep by PQE?
No. CMS publishes newly qualified and trainee bases by UK seat; a 1-to-8 PQE associate scale is not public. RollOnFriday noted on 13 June 2025 that firms often announce the NQ headline and stay quiet higher up the chain, which is how salary bunching stays off the page. Treat any numbered mid-level CMS band you are shown in a process as an internal print, not a published market table.
What bonus sits on a CMS solicitor salary?
CMS ran a full profit-share bonus in 2025, and 72.5 percent of men and 74.9 percent of women received a bonus; the cash amount is not published. The UK Pay Gap Report 2025 (snapshot 4 April 2025) records a mean gender bonus gap of 29.9 percent and a median of 33.0 percent. Legal Cheek's CMS profile, from the 2026-27 survey, lists no annual target hours. Do not convert the statutory bonus-gap percentages into an NQ bonus in pounds.
What does CMS law firm salary look like at partner?
CMS does not disclose 2025/26 profit or profit per equity partner; the last third-party estimate in the legal press was £741,559 in August 2024. Global Legal Post stated the non-disclosure on 23 July 2026, next to UK LLP revenue of £839.3 million for FY 2025/26. What is public at the top of the scale is promotion volume: 54 new partners in the 18 March 2026 release, and 56 in the 22 July 2026 revenue release, counted on different windows.
Should a general counsel match CMS London NQ?
Match it for a private-sector City commercial seat; do not treat government Grade 7 bands, which topped £67,273 in April 2024 London rates, as the same product. The 2026 window is cheaper than Magic Circle £150,000 and Quinn Emanuel London £189,000 on published bases. It is not cheaper than CMS's own regional NQ, and waiting for a further CMS raise is not a priced alternative: no 2026 CMS NQ announcement was found.
Published NQ tables, firm filings and the London research program
NQ bases come from dated Legal Cheek and RollOnFriday articles. Revenue, promotions and the PEP non-disclosure come from CMS and Global Legal Post. Government pay and statute dates come from GOV.UK, Acas, ICO and the SRA. Sartori figures come from the London associate research program.
Sources and further reading
44 references- Sartori & Partners — London Legal Talent Research Programme (750 structured interviews; ~30,000 lawyers mapped; quarterly surveys since 2019; mandate telemetry) sartoriglobal.com ↗
- CMS boosts NQ solicitor pay in London to £120k - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- CMS hikes NQ salary to £120k - Ashurst to £140k - RollOnFriday rollonfriday.com ↗
- CMS bumps London NQ lawyer pay to £110k - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- CMS - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- The Firms Most List - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- Money talks: What newly qualified solicitors earn at the UK’s top law firms - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- Macfarlanes bumps NQ pay to £150,000 – Legal Business legalbusiness.co.uk ↗
- Macfarlanes matches Magic Circle with £150k NQ lawyer salary - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- DLA Piper bumps NQ lawyer pay to £140k in London and £84k in regions - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- Quinn Emanuel smashes London NQ lawyer salary record with £189k pay packet - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- ALERT: Milbank Does It Again - Associate Salaries Are Going Up!!! - Above the Law abovethelaw.com ↗
- Milbank bumps associate salaries, signals new law firm pay race - The Global Legal Post globallegalpost.com ↗
- CMS reports revenues of €2.173 billion cms.law ↗
- CMS revenues in 2024 exceed EUR 2bn cms.law ↗
- CMS pushes global revenue close to €2.2bn - The Global Legal Post globallegalpost.com ↗
- CMS reports €2.17bn global revenue after 4.8 per cent growth | Scottish Legal News scottishlegal.com ↗
- CMS announces 54 new partners cms.law ↗
- Cannon Place | United Kingdom | International law firm CMS cms.law ↗
- UK Pay Gap Report 2025 cms.law ↗
- CMS CAMERON MCKENNA NABARRO OLSWANG LLP - Gender pay gap service gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk ↗
- CMS CAMERON MCKENNA NABARRO OLSWANG LLP overview - Find and update company information - GOV.UK find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk ↗
- ‘Evolution not revolution’: CMS and Addleshaw Goddard post revenue growth as results season continues – Legal Business legalbusiness.co.uk ↗
- CMS | RollOnFriday rollonfriday.com ↗
- EXCLUSIVE CMS freezes recruitment as profits wobble - RollOnFriday rollonfriday.com ↗
- Population of solicitors in England and Wales - SRA sra.org.uk ↗
- Breakdown of routes to admission - SRA sra.org.uk ↗
- European dealmakers bet on recovery as US buyers circle cheaper assets | ICLG iclg.com ↗
- European M&A Outlook 2027: Bridging the gap - ION Analytics ionanalytics.com ↗
- Interest rates and Bank Rate: our latest decision | Bank of England bankofengland.co.uk ↗
- Monetary Policy Report - July 2026 | Bank of England bankofengland.co.uk ↗
- The Procurement Act 2023 (Commencement No. 3 and Transitional and Saving Provisions) (Amendment) Regulations 2024 legislation.gov.uk ↗
- New public procurement rules to drive growth, opportunities for small businesses and exclude suppliers that fail to deliver - GOV.UK gov.uk ↗
- National Security and Investment Act 2021 Annual Report 2025-26 (HTML) - GOV.UK gov.uk ↗
- Employment Rights Act 2025 - Acas acas.org.uk ↗
- Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 | ICO ico.org.uk ↗
- First phase of Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SM&CR) reforms go ahead cms.law ↗
- New notification direction issued for data centres over 50MW cms.law ↗
- Legal trainee scheme - GOV.UK gov.uk ↗
- FOI 25_005 Information request on Pay Bands and structures across GLD assets.publishing.service.gov.uk ↗
- Training Contract · CMS Emerging Talent cmsemergingtalent.com ↗
- CMS — solicitor apprenticeship - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- An overview of our application process cms.law ↗
- PPF appoints 10 firms to new ‘four lot’ legal panel - Pensions Age Magazine pensionsage.com ↗
NQ figures are annual base salary before bonus, as published. CMS does not publish a 1–8 PQE associate scale, NQ or associate bonus in pounds, or 2025/26 profit per equity partner. The Legal Business PEP of £741,559 (15 August 2024) is an estimate for the then-latest results, not a 2025/26 figure. Harvey's 'around 30 minutes a day' is a firm claim reported by Global Legal Post. Emerging Talent careers copy still printed superseded NQ figures when accessed on 11 September 2026. Deal volumes are H1 2026 European M&A from ICLG and ION Analytics reporting the CMS–Mergermarket Outlook 2027.
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
BigLaw associate salary scale 2026
The US lockstep CMS did not join: $235,000 first-year through $455,000 eighth-year, effective 1 July 2026, after Milbank's June announcement.
Read the US scaleGeneral counsel salary 2026
What a chief legal officer and general counsel cost on the company side — the in-house chair that has to decide whether to match a City NQ print.
View GC rangesPrivate practice vs in-house salary
Where the pay gap is widest, where it inverts at the top, and why a general counsel comparing base alone misreads the move.
Compare the two tracksA 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 the CMS table is the wrong print as to open a search. Confidential, no obligation.