How Much Law Firm Partners Make in 2026: Equity, Nonequity and Firm Tier

Above the Law’s 15 April 2026 recap of the 2026 Am Law 100 listed 2025 PEP at Wachtell of $12.152 million (up 34.48 percent), Kirkland & Ellis $11.121 million (up 20.19 percent) and Davis Polk $9.800 million (up 25.60 percent). Quinn Emanuel, Gibson Dunn and Latham & Watkins followed at $9.545 million, $8.890 million and $8.654 million. Seventy of 100 firms posted PEP growth of at least 10 percent; only two reported PEP declines. That is the top of the equity chart. It is not a salary scale, and it is not what a nonequity partner takes home.

A general counsel reading those rows is looking at the platform that will invoice the company, not at a payroll band the company can copy. Original Jurisdiction’s 30 April 2026 recap put Am Law 100 revenue per lawyer at $1.39 million for 2025, up 8.7 percent — a platform productivity read, and still not the hourly invoice. Citi’s nine-month 2025 cut found demand growth at 69.2 percent of Am Law 50 firms against 51.4 percent of Am Law 51–100 firms: the residual concentrated where demand actually arrived, which is the same concentration a head of legal sees when a mega-deal panel and a diligence panel stop being the same firm.

Cole Scott, Cahill and Choate Hall sit in the Second Hundred and still print PEP above several Am Law 100 names. A chief legal officer who treats “Am Law 100” as a price ceiling and “Second Hundred” as a discount will mis-specify both the panel and a hire off those platforms.

NALP counted 20,036 partners at multi-tier firms that reported equity status in its 2025 Directory of Legal Employers, with 11,154 equity and 8,882 nonequity. Equity partners fell from 61.3 percent of all partners in that set in 2011 to 55.7 percent in 2025, a 0.6-point drop from 2024. The sample is a volunteer NDLE subset — 488 offices, about 75,993 lawyers — and 230 fewer offices than 2024, about 31,000 fewer lawyers. It is not a census of every US partner. It is the cleanest public split of the title. In that same 2025 set, women were 29.55 percent of partners and 26.5 percent of equity partners; more than 58 percent of men partners in multi-tier firms were equity, against 49 percent of women partners. A chief legal officer hiring off a firm cannot read those shares as a pay band, but they do show who sits in the PEP denominator.

Citi’s 2026 Client Advisory puts the same split in motion. Large firms added income partners at 6.4 percent a year on average during 2019–24 against 0.7 percent average annual equity-partner growth, with all-partner headcount up 3.0 percent a year. Through nine months of 2025, equity-partner headcount fell 0.5 percent while income partners grew 6 percent; overall headcount rose 2.9 percent, all from salaried lawyers. Leverage rose 4.3 percent. Seventy-two percent of large firms plan to invest in more income partners over the next two years; 67 percent expect to increase lawyer leverage through 2027. Bloomberg Law’s 10 June 2026 self-reported firm survey found equity shareholder counts roughly flat last year while nonequity partners grew 5 percent.

That leverage is why PEP can rise while the titled partner in the room is on a salary. Original Jurisdiction’s 30 April 2026 recap reported Am Law 100 nonequity ranks up almost 7 percent in 2025 against 2 percent equity growth. Citi’s 2024 contribution cut found the average counsel contributed almost twice as much to overall firm profitability as the average income partner, because income partners were less productive and paid considerably more. Promoted income partners: 66 percent above break-even; lateral income partners 56 percent (additions 2020–24). A head of legal at a PE-backed healthcare platform told us they would not match a counter-offer written as a percentage of PEP because the sitting firm had not disclosed whether the lawyer was equity. Nonequity is a paycheck. Equity is a residual after capital.

Capital is the second cash outflow on the equity seat. Above the Law, on 11 July 2025, citing an Am Law survey, put the norm for a new-equity buy-in between 25 and 35 percent of compensation. Citi’s 2026 advisory notes that partner paid-in capital has risen for years as firms de-risked after 2008–10, but growth in paid-in capital has not kept pace with net income. ABA Model Rule 5.4 still bars a lawyer from forming a partnership with a nonlawyer if any of the activities consist of the practice of law, which is why the 2026 partner is still paid by a lawyer-owned partnership funded by client fees, not by a private-equity salary band. Citi expects management-service-organization experiments at smaller, high-volume firms, and calls them less likely at large firms.

We have worked in the New York market for more than 10 years, for companies that buy partner time and for firms that pay it. Over the trailing three years we closed 22 partner searches with a 93 percent completion rate and a typical timeline of 4 to 7 months. Sartori’s New York partner mandate telemetry records a 39 percent counter-offer incidence on that 22-file set, and a median of 15 working days from offer to signature. Of those 22 closed files, 13 were firm-instructed equity or nonequity seats and 9 were company-instructed hires of lawyers then sitting as partners. Of the 13 firm-instructed files, 8 were equity seats and 5 were nonequity.

Of 512 New York equity and nonequity partners inside the same interview cohort who had received a distribution or a salaried draw in the prior 12 months, over a 24-month window, 61 percent said their last-year take-home sat below their firm’s published PEP (if they were equity) or that PEP was not their pay at all (if they were nonequity). In the 2026 second-quarter survey wave, 41 of 55 New York general counsel respondents named the hourly rate as the first number they wanted on a partner seat; 6 named PEP. The uncomfortable read is on our own intake. Of the 22 closed searches, 5 files ran past the typical 4-to-7-month window. On 3 of those 5, the first offer had been written against published PEP rather than the candidate’s actual draw or salary, and Sartori had not stripped that figure at intake. A page that only reports the 93 percent completion rate would be selling the method. The five overdue files are why the method has a briefing step.