Salary · Fieldfisher · 2026
Fieldfisher salary 2026: NQ, associate and partner pay.
The first number a general counsel asks is what 2026 Fieldfisher newly qualified pay actually costs to match. The firm's own table answers with four NQ cells, not a lockstep. Dated figures first, then who pays them.
The first number is a cell, not a scale.
A general counsel asked to match 2026 Fieldfisher pay is being asked to pick among four published NQ cells. Sartori maps some 30,000 lawyers in London; that file records employer and year of qualification. It does not record which Fieldfisher cell a lawyer sits in, because the firm does not publish a PQE ladder.
London commercial newly qualified base on Fieldfisher’s Early Careers table, accessed 11 September 2026 — the cell a general counsel is usually quoting. Fieldfisher Early Careers ↗
Four published NQ cells, one firm. The PQE ladder is not on the table. The full Early Careers grid is below.
- £398m
- Firm-wide revenue, year to 31 March 2026Up 4 percent from £385 million
- Global Legal Post, 14 July 2026
- £975,000
- Equity PEP, year to 31 March 2026Down 3 percent from £1 million; profit share, not PAYE
- Global Legal Post, 14 July 2026
- 23
- Training contracts on the 2026–27 Firms Most ListLegal Cheek Fieldfisher profile, 26 October 2026
- Legal Cheek, 26 October 2026
- 65.8%
- Share of women who received a bonusWhole-payroll filing; pounds unpublished
- GOV.UK gender pay gap, snapshot 5 April 2025
Four NQ products, two trainee rungs, no PQE ladder.
Fieldfisher's Early Careers salary table, accessed 11 September 2026, is the primary document. Legal Cheek's Fieldfisher profile dated 26 October 2026 restates the same bands. Everything else on this page hangs off those cells.
Fieldfisher LLP pays newly qualified solicitors on a published grid that splits by city and by desk, not by class year. The London commercial NQ is £102,000. The London personal-injury and medical-negligence NQ is £73,000. Birmingham and Manchester commercial NQs are £67,000. Regional PI/med-neg NQs are £46,500. London trainees start at £51,000 and rise to £55,000 in the second year; the regional trainee rungs are £34,000 and £37,000. Belfast columns on the same table list apprentice and graduate rates and carry no NQ solicitor cell. Matching Fieldfisher is matching a cell, not a lockstep.
The path into that 2026 London commercial cell is dated, and it is not a single jump. The Law Gazette, on 20 January 2022, recorded a London NQ move from £77,000 to £85,000 and a regional move from £45,000 to £50,000. Legal Cheek, on 26 August 2022, recorded the next London step to £92,000 and regional NQ pay to £60,000. Legal Cheek’s 29 September 2025 “Money talks” table still listed Fieldfisher at £95,000. Law360, on 20 November 2025, reported a London NQ lift to £100,000. The careers table accessed eleven months later prints £102,000. Each of those figures belongs to its year. Collapsing them into one “Fieldfisher salary” is how a head of legal overpays a PI NQ or underquotes a commercial one.
| Seat, 2026 | Published base | Employer NI | Base + NI | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| London commercial NQ | £102,000 | £14,550 | £116,550 | The cell a general counsel usually means |
| London PI / medical negligence NQ | £73,000 | £10,200 | £83,200 | Claimant desk; separate product |
| Birmingham / Manchester commercial NQ | £67,000 | £9,300 | £76,300 | Same firm, regional cell |
| Birmingham / Manchester PI / med-neg NQ | £46,500 | £6,225 | £52,725 | Cheapest published NQ cell |
| London trainee, year 1 | £51,000 | £6,900 | £57,900 | Early Careers table |
| London trainee, year 2 | £55,000 | £7,500 | £62,500 | Early Careers table |
GDL and SQE maintenance grants are £8,000 each, and course fees are covered at The University of Law, on the same Early Careers page. Those are trainee economics, not an NQ match. Equity PEP is omitted from this table because it is profit share, not Class 1 salary.
For the lawyer who earns the figure, Legal Cheek’s Fieldfisher profile dated 26 October 2026 records 25 days of annual leave and no hours targets, with a surveyed average day of 09:02 to 18:19 from its 2026–27 Trainee and Junior Lawyer Survey. That is a description of the day, not a bonus formula. RollOnFriday’s Fieldfisher salary grid, accessed 11 September 2026, still prints a London NQ of £92,000 and leaves the 1 PQE, 2 PQE and 3 PQE cells blank. Those NQ and trainee figures are stale against the 2026 careers table; the blank PQE cells are the evidence that a 2026 associate scale is not public.
Matching Fieldfisher is matching a cell, not a lockstep.
The 2026 match already includes 15 percent employer NI.
HMRC's 2026–27 employer table did not wait for a Fieldfisher announcement. Category A secondary Class 1 remains 15 percent above a £5,000 threshold from 6 April 2026 to 5 April 2027.
A general counsel who matches the London commercial NQ is not writing a £102,000 check. HMRC’s “Rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027”, published 30 January 2026 and updated 1 September 2026, keeps the Category A employer rate at 15 percent on earnings above a £5,000 secondary threshold for 6 April 2026 to 5 April 2027. Applied to the published £102,000 base, that is £14,550 of Class 1 National Insurance before pension, levy, bonus or benefits. The same method puts £10,200 on the London PI NQ, £9,300 on the regional commercial NQ, and £6,225 on the regional PI NQ. Employer National Insurance is already inside the 2026 match.
The rate itself is not new in 2026. The Autumn Budget 2024 policy paper, published 13 November 2024, moved secondary Class 1 from 13.8 percent to 15 percent and cut the secondary threshold from £9,100 to £5,000, in force from 6 April 2025 to 5 April 2028. A head of legal who last costed a City NQ against the old 13.8 percent / £9,100 pair is costing the wrong year. The apprenticeship levy remains 0.5 percent of pay bills above £3 million, with a £15,000 allowance; Employment Allowance is £10,500 and is not material to a large LLP or a large-company pay bill. Neither levy pounds per head nor pension pounds are converted here: Fieldfisher publishes a default 4 percent contribution, matched up to 7 percent, without stating the contribution base.
Fieldfisher London NQ, 29 September 2025 table
Legal Cheek Money talks. Superseded by the November 2025 lift and the 2026 careers table.
Legal Cheek, 29 September 2025 ↗The spread a general counsel is actually matching is European mid-tier, stepping toward £100,000-plus, still well below the Magic Circle cell on the same September 2025 table and further below the US London ceiling. That is the competitive pressure that moved Fieldfisher from £95,000 to £102,000. It is not a reason to import a US lockstep onto this firm’s payroll, and it is not a reason to pay a Birmingham NQ as if they sat in London.
The firm pays the salary. Four kinds of company match it.
The 2026 Fieldfisher NQ is earned on a law-firm practice seat. The general counsel who must match it sits in the client set the firm names on its own vacancy pages: major technology companies, pharmaceutical and life-sciences companies, energy and infrastructure suppliers, and global banks.
Firm payrollSomeone else’s budget
- The law-firm seat Fieldfisher LLP writes the PAYE. The NQ, the senior associate and the claimant PI solicitor all sit here. This is who earns the published cell.
- The in-house match A general counsel at a technology, life-sciences, energy or financial-services company funds the same cell to hire the lawyer onto the company payroll.
- The substitute line Condor ALS and a public-body defendant budget buy the work without matching the NQ at all. Different instrument, different check.
In the same London interview cohort, 91 of 118 in-house hiring managers at technology, life-sciences, energy and financial-services companies, over a 24-month window, named the London commercial NQ — not the regional cell, not the PI cell — as the figure they budget when they hire from Fieldfisher-tier firms. That is a segment inside the London program, not a second survey. A general counsel at a UK-listed pharmaceutical company told us, in that same window, that her HR director had approved the London commercial number for a lawyer whose published Fieldfisher cell was the PI band: “We had costed the brand, not the desk.”
Of 33 closed London associate searches over three years, 14 were in-house matches of a City NQ or mid-level associate at technology, financial-services, life-sciences or energy companies; 11 were law-firm associate seats; 8 were regional in-house, claimant-desk or mixed files. The in-house majority is the buyer this page is written for. London associate mandate telemetry on that same 33-file set records a 35 percent counter-offer incidence and a median of 12 working days from offer to acceptance. We have worked this market for more than 10 years; the typical seat still closes in 6 to 12 weeks when the brief names the cell.
Fieldfisher Condor ALS is the other check. The firm’s 11 August 2025 results put Condor revenue at £12 million for 2024/25. Condor’s own site, accessed 11 September 2026, sells workflow, managed document review, DSARs, KYC, eDisclosure and contract-lifecycle management as a single-contract alternative to instructing a law firm on time-and-materials. A head of legal who uses Condor is paying a budget line. They are not matching £102,000.
The 2026 figure is earned on a Fieldfisher practice seat, in London, Birmingham or Manchester, on PAYE.
- Commercial NQ, London. The £102,000 cell. Dispute resolution, financial markets and products, employment and pensions, real estate, corporate, regulatory and technology all took at least one of the September 2026 NQs.
- Claimant PI NQ, London. The £73,000 cell. Chambers UK Guide 2026 ranks the clinical-negligence team Band 1, mainly claimant. The opposing purse is NHS Resolution, not a corporate general counsel.
- Regional NQ. The £67,000 commercial cell and the £46,500 PI cell. Same firm, different city, different in-house comparator.
- Live 2026 senior seats. Senior Associate, Derivatives, 4+ PQE, trained at a City or international firm. Associate, Structured Finance, 0–5 PQE, England and Wales or another common-law qualification. Senior Associate, Structured Finance, 5+ PQE. Those gates are on the firm’s own current-vacancies pages, accessed 11 September 2026.
The company that matches the cell is one of the counterparties the firm already names as clients.
- Technology and life sciences. Vacancy boilerplate lists major technology firms and pharmaceutical and life-sciences companies. Chambers UK Guide 2026 puts the London IT and outsourcing desk in Band 1, acting for vendors and for large public and private customers, with a substantial Silicon Valley presence.
- Financial institutions. Global banks sit in the same boilerplate. The live derivatives and structured-finance seats are the product a markets general counsel is matching at 4+ PQE, not at NQ.
- Energy and infrastructure. Energy suppliers and infrastructure companies are named on the same ads. A PE-backed operator matching a commercial NQ is matching £102,000 plus NI, not the regional cell.
- Secondment hosts, not payroll. Legal Cheek, 26 October 2026, cites client secondments to a listed UK fashion retailer’s in-house legal team, a public-service broadcaster, and a US-headquartered media group, with a 21 percent client-secondment probability and a 21 percent international-secondment probability on its 2026–27 survey. The host sees the NQ. The host is not thereby matching the NQ as salary.
We had costed the brand, not the desk.
Seventeen NQs, eight desks, one corporate seat.
The Lawyer, on 9 July 2026, recorded Fieldfisher keeping 17 of 20 final-seat trainees as NQs in September 2026. The mix is the hiring map a general counsel should read before matching the commercial cell as if it were a corporate pyramid.
London took 13 of those 17 NQs; Birmingham took 2; Manchester took 2. Destination practices: dispute resolution 5; financial markets and products 3; employment, pensions, immigration and compliance 3; real estate 2; corporate 1; regulatory 1; PI/clinical negligence 1; technology 1. Legal Cheek’s Fieldfisher profile dated 26 October 2026 restates the 85 percent retention and the 23 training contracts. A single corporate NQ is a fact. It is not a corporate factory.
The label that is really hiring moves by round. Legal Cheek, on 10 March 2023, recorded an earlier spring mix that kept 19 of 20 on permanent contracts plus one fixed-term, weighted then to IP and technology (eight, including Silicon Valley) and to litigation and employment (seven). A general counsel hiring a 2023 Fieldfisher technology NQ and a 2026 Fieldfisher disputes NQ is not hiring the same product at a different date. They are hiring two desks.
| Practice label | NQs kept | City weight | Who matches or funds the other side |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dispute resolution | 5 | London-weighted | Corporate GC as client, not payroll |
| Financial markets and products | 3 | London | Bank / buy-side / treasury GC matches |
| Employment, pensions, immigration, compliance | 3 | London | In-house employment counsel at the same corporates |
| Real estate | 2 | London | Occupier and investor GC |
| Corporate | 1 | London | M&A counterparty GC |
| Regulatory | 1 | London | Tech / FS GC on the other side of the file |
| Personal injury / clinical negligence | 1 | London | NHS Resolution / private hospitals, not a corporate match |
| Technology | 1 | London | Vendor and customer GC; Silicon Valley overlay |
The live 2026 associate book is not an NQ pyramid either. On the firm’s own current-vacancies system, accessed 11 September 2026, London Financial Markets and Products was hiring a Senior Associate in Derivatives at 4+ PQE, an Associate in Structured Finance at 0–5 PQE, and a Senior Associate in Structured Finance at 5+ PQE. The structured-finance ads accept qualification in England and Wales or another common-law jurisdiction. A general counsel hiring a Fieldfisher structured-finance associate may be matching a New York or Australian qualifier, not only an SRA NQ. The derivatives seat prefers a City or international training contract: that is a firm-tier gate, not a regulator’s rule. A head of legal at a global bank’s London markets team told us the 4+ PQE derivatives gate was the constraint on the seat, not the NQ sticker: “The newly qualified number is not the hire I cannot fill.”
Technology is the dual-buyer desk. Chambers UK Guide 2026 ranks Fieldfisher Band 1 in London Information Technology and Outsourcing, four years ranked, alongside a peer set that includes Baker McKenzie, Bird & Bird, Bristows, CMS, DLA Piper and Osborne Clarke. The Chambers review describes work for vendors, large public and private sector customers, and emerging technology, fintech, digital media and e-commerce companies, with a substantial Silicon Valley presence, and notes advice to S&P Global on a global AI governance project. Legal 500 London IT and telecoms, accessed 11 September 2026, lists strengths in telecoms and digital infrastructure, digital regulation, AI and emerging tech, and highlights Getty Images v Stability AI. One NQ went into technology in the September 2026 class. The senior work is already there.
One brandThree products
- Commercial London Disputes, financial markets, employment, real estate, corporate, regulatory, technology. This is the cell most in-house briefs mean, and the only one that should be costed at the London commercial NQ.
- Claimant PI / med-neg A Band 1 claimant clinical-negligence practice. The NQ is a different published number. The defendant on the other side is a public body or a private hospital, not a corporate legal department hiring in.
- UK regional Birmingham and Manchester commercial and PI cells. Same letterhead. A regional general counsel who matches London commercial pay for a Manchester NQ has not read the table.
Three clocks run on the 2026 figure at once.
Employer NI is already in the match. The High Court and the EU AI Act keep Technology and Data busy. The Employment Rights Act and a positive personal-injury discount rate pull EPIC and claimant PI in opposite directions.
The first clock is statutory on-cost, and it has been running since 6 April 2025. Every UK PAYE lawyer seat on this page — London commercial, London PI, regional, trainee — carries the 15 percent / £5,000 pair through 5 April 2027. A chief legal officer who approved a 2024 business case on the old National Insurance pair is not looking at 2026 cash.
The second clock is technology and data. Getty Images v Stability AI [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch) was handed down at 10.00am on 4 November 2025 by Mrs Justice Joanna Smith DBE in the Intellectual Property List of the Business and Property Courts, after a trial from 9 to 30 June 2025. The claimants were represented by counsel instructed by Fieldfisher LLP. Osborne Clarke’s 6 November 2025 note records that primary copyright and database claims were dropped at trial for want of UK training and output evidence, that the secondary copyright claim under CDPA 1988 sections 22–23 was dismissed, and that limited historic trade-mark findings survived on watermarks in older-model outputs. That is follow-on and appellate work for Technology and Data and IP litigation associates in London. It is not, by itself, an NQ-volume spike: one of the September 2026 NQs went into technology.
Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the EU AI Act, signed 13 June 2024 and in force from 1 August 2024, puts the majority of rules, including Article 50 transparency and enforcement of GPAI obligations, on 2 August 2026. Fieldfisher’s European network is in scope for client advice from Berlin, Brussels, London, Munich and Paris. The UK overlay is the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, Royal Assent 19 June 2025, with the majority of Part 5 UK GDPR and privacy changes commenced on 5 February 2026, per the GOV.UK commencement plan last updated that day. The Information Commissioner’s Office is the regulator facing the Technology and Data desk. None of that converts into a published PQE raise. It is why a general counsel matching a Fieldfisher technology associate is matching a busy seat, not a quiet one.
The third clock splits. The Employment Rights Act 2025, 2025 c. 36, received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025, with commencement SIs including S.I. 2026/559 and S.I. 2026/954, phased through 2026 and 2027. Fieldfisher put three of the September 2026 NQs into employment, pensions, immigration and compliance — the largest non-disputes bucket in that class. In-house employment counsel at the same corporates who match the £102,000 NQ are on the same clock. The Personal Injury Discount Rate moved from −0.25 percent to +0.5 percent from 11 January 2025, under the Damages (Personal Injury) (England and Wales) Order 2024, with the next review to start by 11 January 2030. A positive rate shrinks lump-sum damages. It does not, on its own, hire NQs.
Two further 2025 commencements sit under the financial-markets seats rather than under NQ volume. The failure-to-prevent-fraud offence in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 came into force on 1 September 2025 for large organizations, per the Home Office. The FCA Consumer Duty has been in force for open products since 31 July 2023 and for closed products since 31 July 2024; the regulator’s firm-information page was last updated 5 August 2026. Those are senior-associate and in-house financial-services files first. They align with the live derivatives and structured-finance hiring. They do not rewrite the NQ table.
Employer National Insurance is already inside the 2026 match.
PEP fell while the NQ cell stepped up. They are not the same instrument.
Global Legal Post, on 14 July 2026, put Fieldfisher PEP at £975,000 for the year to 31 March 2026, down 3 percent from £1 million, on revenue of £398 million, up 4 percent from £385 million. A general counsel does not match PEP.
Legal Business printed the same £398 million / 4 percent and £975,000 / −3 percent pair on 14 July 2026, with prior-year revenue at £385 million. People and Work grew 18 percent, personal injury and medical negligence 17 percent, real estate 15 percent. Four core sectors — energy and natural resources, financial services, life sciences, technology — generated more than £141 million. PEP is the partnership’s residual. It is not a PAYE band, it does not carry Class 1 National Insurance, and it is not the number a chief legal officer puts on an offer letter.
The residual shrank while the NQ cell rose because the partnership spent the difference on Europe. Fieldfisher’s 11 August 2025 results framed 2025–2030 as “One Europe” integration, with PEP then at £1 million. Poland opened on 8 May 2025 with 32 people in Warsaw and Krakow, on the firm’s own announcement. The Law Society of Ireland Gazette, on 5 November 2025, reported a merger with Cork corporate firm Regan Wall LLP from 25 November 2025, taking Ireland to 140 professionals and 18 partners; Global Legal Post’s FY26 wrap put Ireland revenue up 25 percent. The same wrap recorded 40 partner hires in the year. Fieldfisher, on 1 April 2026, promoted 12 lawyers to partnership across Barcelona, Brussels, Dublin, Hamburg, London, Madrid and Manchester, in Corporate, Dispute Resolution, Personal Injury and Medical Negligence, Real Estate, Regulatory, Tax, and Technology and Data. London seats in that round covered dispute resolution, contentious tax, clinical negligence, technology and data, and real estate construction.
Chambers UK 2026, on a firm-supplied profile, lists 183 UK partners, 359 solicitors, 29 other fee-earners, 105 paralegals and 57 trainees. That is a UK legal headcount, not the global “more than 2,200 people, 28 offices, 14 countries” in the 14 July 2026 results, and not the 1,800-people boilerplate still running on the 2026 vacancy pages. Non-equity partner salary is not in any of those documents. A Fieldfisher associate salary conversation that slides into PEP as if it were the next rung on the same ladder is a conversation that has left the table.
What Fieldfisher does not publish, and how to cost the cell anyway.
A 2026 PQE-by-year associate scale, a cash bonus percentage, and non-equity partner salary are not public. Those gaps stay empty. The match still has to be run.
- No published PQE ladder. RollOnFriday’s grid leaves 1, 2 and 3 PQE blank, and no Fieldfisher, Legal Cheek, Law360, The Lawyer or Law Gazette page used here prints a 2026 associate year-by-year scale.
- No bonus pounds. GOV.UK records that about two-thirds of men and women received a bonus on the 5 April 2025 snapshot. It does not record how much. An unfetched search-snippet of a 30 percent experienced-lawyer bonus is not used.
- No non-equity partner salary. PEP is public as profit share. Partner salary is not. Converting PEP into a PAYE match is a category error.
- No in-house salary table. Sibling pages own UK in-house and London general counsel pay. This page owns Fieldfisher’s published cells and the cost of matching them.
The uncomfortable number in our own file is not the counter-offer rate. Of the 14 in-house matches inside those 33 closed London associate searches over three years, 6 ran past the 12-week top of the typical 6-to-12-week timeline. In all six, the original brief said “Fieldfisher NQ” without naming commercial London, PI London, or regional. We still closed them. We closed them late, and we closed them after a second costing. A 93 percent completion rate on 33 files does not mean the first brief was right. The misspecification is the finding that makes the rest of the telemetry believable.
Two composites from that book, described by category only. A PE-backed energy platform in London needed an in-house energy counsel and came in quoting “Fieldfisher NQ.” The shortlist was commercial, not PI. The offer was built on the £102,000 cell plus the HMRC on-cost, accepted in 12 working days, closed in 9 weeks, no counter. A life-sciences company budgeted the Birmingham commercial cell against a London commercial NQ sitting in Technology and Data. The firm counter-offered. The candidate stayed. That file is why the 35 percent counter-offer incidence is not an abstraction: it is what happens when the company’s number and the published cell are not the same number.
The credential gate does not let a general counsel skip the NQ price. The Solicitors Regulation Authority’s SQE route still requires a degree or equivalent, SQE1 and SQE2, two years’ qualifying work experience, and character and suitability. SRA news dated 21 April 2026 set 2026/27 assessment fees, from September 2026, at £2,006 for SQE1 and £3,086 for SQE2. Fieldfisher still funds The University of Law PGDL/SQE, still runs a two-year training contract with four seats, and still screens at a 2:1 degree and ABB A-levels, per Legal Cheek on 26 October 2026. SQE changes how the candidate arrives. It does not change which cell they sit in when they qualify.
Cost the cell, not the brand. Name commercial London, PI London, or regional before a shortlist circulates. Put employer National Insurance in the business case at the 2026–27 rate, not the 2024 rate. Do not convert PEP into a salary, and do not fill a blank PQE cell with a guess. The company CTA on this desk is an in-house search, not a CV drop: if the seat is a Fieldfisher-trained associate moving onto a corporate payroll, the brief starts with which of the four published cells you are actually matching.