Lawyer Salary in Indiana 2026

Indiana Department of Workforce Development’s 2025 Employment and Wage Report, reprinting the cooperative Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey with the Bureau of Labor Statistics and released May 2026, puts employed lawyers (SOC 23-1011) at a median of $126,860 on 8,970 wage-and-salary jobs, with a mean of $175,850. The same row reads 10th percentile $65,750, 25th $95,120, 75th $193,420, 90th $327,960. What it measures is covered nonfarm establishments: it excludes most self-employed practitioners, owner-partners, equity, overtime, stock and nonproduction bonuses.

WageDex’s Indiana lawyers page, compiled 10 August 2026 from the same May 2025 micro-tables, matches those cells and ranks Indiana 31 of 53 states and territories on the lawyer median, at $60.99 an hour. The national comparator is the same survey: occupation compilations put the U.S. employed-lawyer median at $159,670 ($76.76 an hour), and the Bureau of Labor Statistics news release of 15 May 2026 (USDL-26-0725) counted 754,500 employed lawyers nationally at a mean of $185,840, or $89.35 an hour. Indiana’s median is 21 percent below that U.S. cell. The May 2024 national median on the same compilation was $151,160; the May 2025 cell is a 5.6 percent rise, not a lockstep event.

The rest of the Indiana legal-occupations row is a different job, and it is worth reading so a head of HR does not confuse the lawyer cell with the department. The same DWD reprint puts legal occupations as a group (SOC 23-0000) at 17,660 employed, median $83,430, mean $123,780. Paralegals and legal assistants (23-2011) sit at 5,910 employed, median $57,030. Judges, magistrate judges and magistrates (23-1023) are 790 employed at a median of $183,000, flat from the 75th through the 90th — the shape of a statutory lockstep, not a market percentile. That $183,000 judicial-occupation median is the same number as the circuit-judge cell under IC 33-38-5-8.1; the survey is recovering the statute.

Two years earlier, the Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2023 Indiana OEWS table counted 8,890 employed lawyers, a location quotient of 0.58, a median hourly wage of $58.43 and a mean annual wage of $144,500. The May 2025 DWD reprint at 8,970 is a two-year employment change of about 80 wage-and-salary jobs at the state level. That is a measured headcount, not a hiring forecast, and the 0.58 location quotient means lawyer employment is thinner than the U.S. mix. It does not say desks are empty.

Illinois’s May 2025 OEWS median is $160,800 on 33,590 jobs; New York State’s is $207,860 on 91,870 jobs. The Chicago MSA median is $165,660 on 28,320 jobs; the New York MSA median is $208,880 on 94,610 jobs. Figures: WageDex compilations of the May 2025 OEWS, corroborated by the Indiana DWD reprint and the BLS 15 May 2026 news release. See sources.

Indiana’s median is $33,940 below Illinois’s and $81,000 below New York State’s on those same cells. Against the metros a board actually quotes, it is $38,800 below Chicago and $82,020 below New York — 76.6 percent of the Chicago MSA median and 60.7 percent of the New York MSA median, as arithmetic on the sourced cells. The tails tell the same story. Illinois’s May 2025 OEWS 75th is $224,450 and its 90th is $330,200; New York State’s 75th is $322,120 and its 90th is $391,420; the Chicago MSA 75th is $232,270 and its 90th is $331,140. Indiana’s 90th, $327,960, sits next to Chicago’s 90th and still below the 2026 fifth-year lockstep base of $385,000 on the Biglaw Investor scale. A chief legal officer copying a New York 75th is copying $322,120, not $193,420.

Prices do not close that gap. The Bureau of Economic Analysis’s 2024 all-items regional price parities, carried on FRED and updated 20 February 2026, put Indiana at 93.329 against a U.S. index of 100, Illinois at 99.958 and New York at 107.921. Indiana consumption prices sit about 6.7 percent below the national average; New York State sits about 7.9 percent above. The wage gap is several times the price gap. That is the cost-side of the cheaper in-house bid, labeled as derived from those FRED series, not as a purchasing-power salary.

That suppression is the geographic fact a general counsel keeps hitting. Indianapolis is where the headquarters legal departments sit — pharmaceutical manufacturing, a national health plan, a global agriculture company, a hospital system, utilities — and it is the metro whose wage row the survey will not print. Employment is not the same as a median. Use the statewide table for the bid; use the metro only for headcount.

Published Indiana-primary MSA medians on O*NET’s May 2025 local-wage table for lawyers do exist elsewhere. Terre Haute is $135,290 (employment 210 on the national metro compilation); Fort Wayne $126,520 (510); Evansville $107,050 (370); Bloomington $103,460 (210); South Bend-Mishawaka $103,050 (280); Lafayette-West Lafayette $100,650. The highest published Indiana-primary MSA median is Terre Haute, not Indianapolis. Cincinnati OH-KY-IN at $130,980 and Louisville/Jefferson County KY-IN at $124,530 are mostly other states; they are not Indiana-seat wages.

A shortage story lives in a different geography. Admission and Discipline Rule 1.2, effective 15 October 2024, defines legal deserts; The Indiana Lawyer on 6 November 2025 reported that 49 of 92 counties meet the definition and 42 counties are rural under the rule. Those are rural public-defender, prosecutor and small-firm seats. An Indianapolis headquarters in-house desk is not a desert seat, and 49 deserts are not a statewide vacancy count.

License headcount is a third universe. The Indiana Supreme Court’s 2024-2025 Annual Report, unveiled 8 October 2025, recorded 19,213 active attorneys on the Roll of Attorneys and 22,269 attorneys licensed in Indiana who self-reported during annual registration, data current as of 11 February 2025. Of those, 6,835 were exempt from pro bono reporting as judicial officers, government employees or retired or inactive; 8,160 contributed time or money to pro bono; 428 of 652 bar applicants passed; 92 out-of-state lawyers were admitted on motion. The American Bar Association’s 2024 National Lawyer Population Survey put 15,485 resident lawyers in Indiana on a population of 6,862,199, or 2.26 per 1,000 residents, against 4.95 in Illinois, 9.59 in New York and 3.81 for U.S. states as a whole. None of those cells is a job. The OEWS 8,970 is the wage-and-salary employment this salary page prices.

A fourth universe, occupational projections, is larger because it includes self-employed lawyers. O*NET, republishing Projections Central 2024–2034, puts Indiana lawyer employment at 10,660 in 2024 and 11,540 in 2034, an 8 percent rise, with 440 projected annual openings from growth plus replacement. National BLS employment projections for the same window run 864,800 to 900,700, a 4 percent rise, with 31,500 annual openings. The 10,660 base is a different reference concept from the OEWS wage-and-salary count. The Board of Law Examiners still charges $180 for active registration paid 1 August through 1 October, $90 inactive, and a late ladder to $510 after 31 December — a license-maintenance price, not earnings.

Notre Dame Law School remains an Indiana campus that does not feed this wage table. Its 2025 Standard 509 Information Report, generated 16 December 2025, shows a private school with 185 in the first-year class, an LSAT median of 170, JD enrollment of 572 as of 5 October 2025, and 164 J.D. degrees in 2024–25. Combined with the 9 percent in-state stay rate, it is an export school: the Indiana general counsel who pays the figure is not competing with that coastal lockstep cohort as local supply. Purdue Global Law School, after the 15 February 2024 amendment to Admission and Discipline Rule 13 effective 1 July 2024, sent its first graduates through the February 2025 exam; the Supreme Court annual report counted 87 February 2025 passers, including those first Purdue Global admits later in May, and 341 July 2024 passers. The waiver is discretionary. It is a thin additional supply into Indiana licenses, not a 2026 wage shock.

Over the trailing three years we closed 33 associate searches on that line, with a 93 percent completion rate and a typical timeline of 6 to 12 weeks. Median offer-to-acceptance is 11 working days. Counter-offer incidence is 37 percent. Indiana is the geo those figures are used to price. Sartori & Partners runs a continuous research program over nearly 1.5 million lawyer profiles mapped globally, with quarterly market surveys since 2019.

In that New York interview cohort, 51 of 118 general counsel, chief legal officers and heads of legal over a 24-month window who had priced an Indiana or lower-Midwest in-house seat said their first draft offer was a Chicago or New York class-year number. Of those 118, 86 sat inside companies with an Indiana operating footprint; 40 of those 86 named the public lockstep — judge, prosecutor, public defender — as the competing bid for two-to-eight-year litigators.

Of 33 closed associate searches over three years, 12 were company-side counsel seats rather than law-firm associate seats. Five of those 12 involved a Midwest operating company where the first number on the brief was a New York lockstep photocopy. A general counsel at an Indianapolis-headquartered pharmaceutical manufacturer told us the CHRO’s first worksheet was a New York first-year number “that finance would never approve for Lebanon.” A head of legal at an Indianapolis-headquartered health system, speaking in the same research program, said they lose two-to-five-year litigators to regional firms the week a municipal desk posts around $92,000 and a state desk posts $82,000 to $113,000 — the candidate can see those cells, and a coastal photocopy does not make them disappear.

One finding cuts against the easy story. Of 33 closed associate searches over three years, 8 ran past twelve weeks. Five of those eight had opened on a coastal class-year number the compensation committee would not sign. We are slow when the brief starts on the wrong table. Sartori’s quarterly survey since 2019 is consistent with that stall: companies that open an Indiana in-house seat on a New York or Chicago class year spend the first month arguing with finance rather than meeting candidates. The 11-day offer-to-acceptance window holds when the number is one a chief legal officer can defend. It does not hold when the number is a photocopy.

NALP’s Employment for the Class of 2025, dated 5 August 2026, records a national median salary of $100,000 for full-time jobs lasting at least a year, a private-practice median of $155,000, $84,000 in firms of 1–10 lawyers, $225,000 in firms of more than 500, $81,000 in government and $100,000 in business. Those are national entry-level seat bands, not Indiana in-house bands, and they are the right national context once the statewide table has been read. Half of all reported graduate salaries sit between $60,000 and $100,000. The $235,000 cell is 21.5 percent of all reported salaries and 34.4 percent of law-firm salaries. It is not the Indiana in-house market.

If you are the company filling the seat, the brief starts on our in-house and general counsel search. An Indianapolis headquarters brief, including the unpublished metro wage cell and Rule 6, is on in-house legal recruiters in Indianapolis. Where the hire is a years 2–8 lawyer rather than a chief legal officer, see associate and attorney recruiting. How we count interviews, mandates and surveys is on the methodology page. The salary hub sits at US legal salary and compensation benchmarks.