Employment attorney salary 2026: law firm versus in-house

Bloomberg Law, writing on 17 June 2026, recorded the matching-firm lockstep that Milbank set on 2 June 2026 and that took effect on 1 July 2026, with class-year raises of $10,000 to $20,000. Law360 Pulse on 2 June 2026 and Above the Law on the same day print the same floors and the same effective date. That is the firm-side column of this page. It is a published lockstep at matching firms, not an employment-boutique scale — none of Littler Mendelson, Ogletree Deakins, Jackson Lewis or Fisher Phillips published a 2026 associate grid on the pages opened for this article.

The Association of Corporate Counsel 2025 Law Department Compensation Survey, data effective 1 March 2025 and built on 1,632 self-reported US respondents, is the in-house column. Those medians pool every legal specialty. They are what a company actually pays by title when it puts a lawyer on the payroll. NALP’s 2025 U.S. Associate Salary Survey, data as of 1 January 2025, sits between the two columns as the participating-office median rather than the matching-firm print. The survey’s only published specialty cut in the participant summary is intellectual property, not labor or employment. Treat every NALP row on this page as an all-practice office median.

NALP all-sizes seniority medians, still base only and still as of 1 January 2025, run second year $210,000; third $220,625; fourth $238,125; fifth $255,000; sixth $271,175; seventh $286,700; eighth $330,000. At firms of 701 or more lawyers the same survey prints the middle of the ladder as second $225,000; third $250,000; fourth $291,250; fifth $315,000; sixth $340,000; seventh $360,000. Firms of 250 or fewer report a first-year median of $150,000, a seventh-year median of $200,000 and an eighth-year median of $197,500. That last inversion is the participating-office sample, not a reason to guess an employment-boutique scale.

The July 2026 first-year floor sits $20,000 above NALP’s 701-plus first-year median from 1 January 2025, which is the lag you would expect from an eighteen-month-old office survey set against a June raise. Eighth-year matching lockstep at $455,000 sits $80,000 above the NALP 701-plus eighth-year median of $375,000.

Two further ACC cuts change what a head of legal should expect to pay, and what a candidate should expect to earn, without moving the medians above. Attorney 90th-percentile base is $204,000 — still below the July 2026 first-year lockstep floor. Associate General Counsel 90th-percentile base is $340,000. Chief Legal Officer 90th-percentile base is $506,000 and 90th-percentile total cash is $764,000. Short-term incentive eligibility is 83 percent at Attorney (median STI $16,000), 93 percent at Associate General Counsel (median $65,000), and 96 percent at Chief Legal Officer (median $91,000). Long-term incentive eligibility is 17 percent at Attorney, 43 percent at Senior Attorney, 59 percent at Associate General Counsel, and 63 percent at Chief Legal Officer. The in-house package is a title plus a bonus plus, past a point, equity. The firm-side package is a class year plus a year-end bonus the matching firms have not, as of the November 2025 Cravath memo, reopened.

ABA Journal, on 19 November 2025, reported that Cravath bases “will remain the same” in 2026: Class of 2025 at $225,000 through Class of 2019 at $420,000, with year-end plus special bonuses unchanged since 2021. Combined special and year-end for a Class of 2018 associate was $140,000. That November print is the last full published grid before Milbank moved the bases. The June raise did not create the inversion. It widened it.

Across 1,675 structured interviews with New York lawyers, 196 respondents sitting in labor-and-employment or in-house employment seats over a 24-month window described how their employer grades the role. Of those 196, 112 were in-house (general counsel, associate general counsel, or dedicated employment counsel) and 84 were firm-side. Of the 112 in-house respondents, 68 — 61 percent — said the company still maps the seat to an HR compensation family. A general counsel at a national grocery retailer in that same cohort put it without decoration: the CHRO had already graded the seat as an HR director with a law license. A head of legal at a PE-backed industrial manufacturer said they would not post an in house employment counsel role until someone put the lockstep first-year next to the ACC Attorney median on a single slide.

Of 33 closed New York associate searches over the trailing three years, 8 were labor-and-employment or employment-litigation seats. Five of those 8 were for management-side platforms or Am Law labor-and-employment groups; 3 were in-house laterals from firms, paid by the company. Completion on the New York associate line is 93 percent. Median offer-to-acceptance is 11 working days. Counter-offer incidence is 37 percent: 3 of those 8 employment files drew a counter, which is the line rate on a small base. Typical time-to-fill is 6 to 12 weeks.

The uncomfortable number sits inside those 8. Three of the 8 closed only after the general counsel personally raised the first approved band, which had been set against an HR-adjacent grade. Those three files ran to 12 weeks. Two further employment-associate processes in a 24-month window never reached an offer at all, both because the approved band sat at the Human Resources Manager median; those two are processes, not closed searches, and they are the files that make the 93 percent completion rate look better than this practice feels from the inside. We were slow on the three that did close because we did not challenge the grade on day one.

Two anonymized composites, both Sartori engagements, both inside that envelope. A national grocery platform retained us for an Associate General Counsel, employment, after a first internal band had been set next to the CHRO’s director grade. Four weeks of declined conversations later, the general counsel reset the cash to sit between ACC Senior Attorney and Associate General Counsel median total cash. The file closed in week 11, inside the 6-to-12-week window, on an 11-day offer-to-signature. No candidate and no employer is named here because the composite is the point: the delay was the grade, not the market.

A PE-backed logistics operator wanted its first dedicated in-house employment counsel, hired out of a management-side wage-hour group, to stop paying platform rates on a standing FLSA docket. The brief opened on lawyer-market numbers. Time-to-fill was 10 weeks. A counter-offer arrived on day 6 of the 11-day window; the company matched base and moved the start date rather than reopen cash. The head of legal on that file already knew the ACC Attorney median would not move a fifth-year wage-hour associate. The companies that do not know it are the ones who call us after a silent first posting.

Sartori maps about 67,000 lawyers in New York. The global research frame behind every city page is the same: about 1.5 million lawyer profiles, structured interviews, mandate records, and quarterly market surveys running since 2019. Mandate telemetry is the smaller instrument — tens of files, not thousands of interviews — which is why the 8 employment seats are a subset of 33 closed searches and not a second census.