Lawyer Salary 2026: How Much Lawyers Make by Seniority, Firm Type and State

NALP published the 2025 Associate Salary Survey on 28 May 2025 from 437 responding offices. Eighty-seven percent sat in firms of more than 250 lawyers, so the overall median leans large. NALP also flags that the respondent pool changes year to year. Treat the cells as a dated office survey, not as a census of every U.S. associate. First-year size-band markers sit on the scale below; years 1–8 sit in the sortable table.

The modal first-year nationally was still $225,000 as of that 1 January 2025 snapshot — 32.0 percent of offices, 44.7 percent of 701-plus offices. It had not yet become the median even at the largest band. That is the number a fifth-year later leaving a lockstep office will remember as “the scale.” It is not the number a general counsel outside those large-firm offices should paste into an offer letter.

Outside the 19 major-market cities NALP tracks, regional first-year medians as of 1 January 2025 sat at $181,900 in the West, $170,000 in the Northeast, and $160,000 in the South and the Midwest. A head of legal in those regions who copies a New York lockstep cell is not matching a local office survey. They are importing a different market.

Entry-level shape is bimodal, and that is a different finding from the OEWS stock median. NALP’s Class of 2025 Selected Findings, as of 16 March 2026, recorded 50.0 percent of 22,715 reported full-time salaries between $60,000 and $100,000, while $225,000 was 21.5 percent of all reported salaries and 34.4 percent of law-firm salaries. Private-practice median for that class was $155,000 (a mix shift, NALP says, not a lockstep cut). Government $81,000; public interest $75,000; judicial clerkships $72,533; business $100,000. The business cell is not an experienced general-counsel band: only 34.4 percent of Class of 2025 business jobs were bar-required, and in-house lawyer roles were 23.7 percent of that sector.

NALP’s Class of 2025, as of 16 March 2026, is the measured hiring consequence of the 20 January 2025 Presidential Memorandum on a federal civilian hiring freeze. Federal government jobs excluding clerkships: 692 versus 1,099 (−37.0 percent). Honors: 50 versus 317. Public interest: 2,945 (−13.9 percent). Clerkships were not frozen; they still fell 8.3 percent to 3,253. The class numbered 36,206 graduates. The Department of Justice’s own legal-careers page still describes the Attorney General’s Honors Program as the only way to join DOJ directly out of law school. The 2026 cycle, eligibility updated 27 August 2026, ran 28 August to 8 September 2026 — a narrow, citizenship-gated window, not a restored pipeline. Executive Order 14210 (11 February 2025) then capped non-exempt replacement at one hire for every four departures and directed large-scale reductions in force. The GS-0905 cell in the 2026 table is a retention problem, not a hiring boom.

On the company side, the Supreme Court held on 20 February 2026 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorize the tariffs at issue. The same day, Executive Order 14389 terminated those additional IEEPA duties while leaving Section 232 and Section 301 duties in place, and a proclamation imposed a 10 percent ad valorem temporary import surcharge under section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 for 150 days, effective 24 February 2026. The ACC survey had already named trade and tariffs as the fastest-growing regulatory priority (30 percent of responding chief legal officers). The desk that pays for that file is mid-level in-house trade and firm international-trade / Court of International Trade counsel through 2026, not a first-year lockstep seat. Headcount, on the same survey, was expected to stay flat. The spike is an invoice.

Merger review swung in the same season. Trump v. Slaughter, decided 29 June 2026, held the FTC Act’s for-cause removal provision contrary to the separation of powers, so commission-side merger review and consumer-protection enforcement can move with the White House. The FTC Premerger Notification Office, updated 23 March 2026, recorded that a district-court vacatur of the 2025 HSR form took effect when the Fifth Circuit denied a stay on 19 March 2026; agencies now accept the form in place before 10 February 2025. FY 2025 HSR, released 2 July 2026: companies notified 2,006 transactions, about 31.8 percent valued above $1 billion; 18 combined merger-enforcement actions. LSEG Deals Intelligence, 12 August 2026: announced U.S.-target M&A of $1.69 trillion for January–July 2026, the strongest opening seven months on that series, inside $3.19 trillion globally (+36 percent) on a deal count down 10 percent. Forty-eight mega-deals above $10 billion accounted for about 40 percent of global value. The seat that is busy is senior M&A and antitrust, not a mass of small-HSR associates.

Court filings named the other 2025 practices a general counsel actually bought. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, for the year ending 31 March 2025, reported bankruptcy petitions of 529,080 (+13 percent), immigration criminal defendants of 29,775 (+40 percent, 89 percent in five southwestern border districts), intellectual-property filings up 9 percent with patents up 24 percent, and antitrust civil filings up 73 percent to 772. District civil filings fell 22 percent on an MDL unwind, not on a collapse of the litigation desk. Thomson Reuters’ 2025 hours (average-firm demand +1.9 percent for the year, peaking at 4.4 percent in July) named M&A, litigation, real estate, corporate and labor and employment as elevated, and IP patent prosecution as negative. Citi’s 9-month 2025 flash survey (185 firms) put demand at +1.9 percent, rates +9.6 percent, revenue +11.3 percent, headcount +2.9 percent, equity-partner headcount −0.5 percent, income-partner headcount +6 percent, leverage +4.3 percent. The 2026 pay table’s growth seats are the upper associate, counsel and income-partner cells. Equity partner is not. Partner-pay dollars belong on a sibling page; the mix belongs here because it tells a chief legal officer which seniority to budget.

Two timing constraints sit on who can occupy the 2026 first-year cell at all. NextGen UBE’s first administration is July 2026, in a first wave that includes Connecticut, Maryland, Missouri, Oregon and Washington; New York and Florida will not accept NextGen transfer scores from administrations before July 2028, NCBE’s table updated 16 July 2026. That is a start-date and bar-admission constraint, not a creator of lawyer demand. USPTO registration under 37 C.F.R. § 11.7 remains the patent-prosecution gate; the patent-pay table is a sibling. AI policy in 2025–2026 created regulatory work without a federal licensing regime: Executive Order 14365 (11 December 2025) directed an AI Litigation Task Force at the Department of Justice, and Executive Order 14409 (2 June 2026) kept frontier-model access voluntary. Combined with a stable-headcount CLO read, that is another invoice, not a wave of junior in-house associates.