Salary · New Hampshire 2026
The 2026 New Hampshire figure Boston does not explain.
The dated state table contradicts the story that Concord tracks Boston. The lawyer who earns that figure and the company that pays it are reading the same page.
The first number is a midpoint. Concord is not a satellite.
Sartori maps 67,000 lawyers in New York. A general counsel who asks what lawyer salary New Hampshire looks like in 2026 is asking why the capital does not print the Boston lockstep the rest of New England talks about. Pick the lens that matches the seat you are pricing, or the one you already occupy.
WageDex and O*NET both print the Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics cell for New Hampshire lawyers (SOC 23-1011) at a $120,810 median on 2,250 covered jobs. That cell mixes Concord public desks, Manchester regional firms and a thin in-house layer, and it omits the usual large-firm year-end. Budget the midpoint. Hire against the stack.
The dated table is in the next section. The three instruments, the three buyer desks and the 2026 docket that reallocates hours follow it. Open the statewide table.
- 2,250
- Wage-and-salary lawyers employed in New HampshireSOC 23-1011; excludes most self-employed owners
- BLS OEWS May 2025, via WageDex and O*NET
- 5,825
- Active New Hampshire Bar membersUnified bar; about half practice out of state
- NHBA Bar News, public-sector article, 2026
- 3,451
- Resident active attorneys, ABA 2025 surveyData as of 31 December 2024; not an employed-lawyer count
- ABA National Lawyer Population Survey 2025
- 946
- Public-sector or public-interest self-identifiersOne in six active members; 543 in government
- NHBA Bar News, Championing Public Sector Attorneys
The dated lawyer salary New Hampshire table, cell by cell.
May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for lawyers (SOC 23-1011). Statewide first, then every New Hampshire area that published a 2025 table. Concord is the Central New Hampshire nonmetro row, not a hidden Boston satellite.
The first number a company can put on a 2026 New Hampshire legal budget is $120,810. WageDex and O*NET both print the Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics cell for New Hampshire lawyers: 2,250 employed, a median annual wage of $120,810 ($58.08 an hour), and a mean of $172,990. The 10th percentile sits at $65,670; the 25th at $97,080; the 75th at $194,690; the 90th at $358,300. The national median on the same release, in the Occupational Outlook Handbook last modified 27 August 2026, is $159,670, so New Hampshire prints 24 percent below the country and ranks 36th of 53 states and territories on the median. Massachusetts, the neighboring-geo contrast, prints a $176,680 median on the same file — $55,870 above this state. Concord does not track Boston.
OEWS covers wage-and-salary workers in nonfarm establishments. It includes production bonuses. It excludes overtime premiums, nonproduction bonuses — the usual large-firm year-end — equity and benefits. It is not a licensed-bar census. The New Hampshire Bar Association counts 5,825 active members; the American Bar Association’s 2025 National Lawyer Population Survey counts 3,451 resident active attorneys as of 31 December 2024. The Board of Governors minutes of 26 September 2025 record the Controller reporting that about half of active attorneys are out of state. Those two series do not reconcile into one “New Hampshire lawyer” headcount: many active members practice elsewhere, are unincorporated owners, or are not in the occupation as OEWS defines it. Resident, active-licensed and employed-wage are three different populations. Price the one that matches the seat.
The May 2023 OEWS HTML state dump, last modified 3 April 2024, put New Hampshire lawyers at a mean of $146,840 and a median hourly wage of $57.67, which implies an annual median of about $119,950 at 2,080 hours. The May 2025 median is statistically close to that 2023 implied median; the mean moved from $146,840 to $172,990. Do not treat that mean jump as a same-worker raise. It is a fatter upper tail on a different year’s sample.
| Area | Employment | 10th | Median | 75th | 90th |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Hampshire (statewide) | 2,250 | $65,670 | $120,810 | $194,690 | $358,300 |
| Manchester-Nashua, NH | 740 | $74,650 | $125,190 | $185,560 | $287,520 |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 20,080 | $84,280 | $183,350 | $309,920 | $379,350 |
| Central NH nonmetropolitan (Concord) | — | $71,890 | $106,880 | $153,960 | $288,650 |
| Northern NH nonmetropolitan | — | — | $110,880 | — | — |
| Southwestern NH nonmetropolitan | — | $41,040 | $97,400 | — | $170,200 |
Central New Hampshire is the Concord wage signature: government, a government-relations strip of regional firms, and a public-defender headquarters, not a Boston first-year. Manchester-Nashua is Hillsborough County only. Boston-Cambridge-Newton is a bi-state MSA. Area counts are not added to the statewide 2,250.
Concord is not a Boston satellite. It is a capital wage table.
The OEWS midpoint, the statute, and the Boston sticker are not the same product.
The lawyer who earns the figure and the company that pays it are usually arguing past each other because they are holding different instruments. Put them on one axis before you open a requisition or resign a seat.
Employed-lawyer midpointBoston lockstep sticker
- The OEWS seat A wage-and-salary lawyer somewhere in New Hampshire — government, regional firm, in-house, legal aid, mixed. The survey’s midpoint is a labor-market fact, not an offer.
- The statutory desk A Concord public seat paid on RSA 94:1-a or on a nonprofit step scale. The market anchor is a statute. A signing bonus does not rewrite it.
- The lockstep sticker A law-firm associate product, paid by class year, published in Boston and matched by New England companies that compete for the same graduates. Concord does not print it.
NHPD starting pay
Program director testimony in NHBA Bar News, 22 December 2025. Not a published schedule.
NHBA Bar News, 22 December 2025 ↗NALP’s 2025 U.S. Associate Salary Survey, with data as of 1 January 2025, is the large-firm instrument and it does not break out Concord or Manchester. The overall median first-year base was $200,000; the median in firms of 701 or more lawyers was $215,000; the median in firms of 250 or fewer was $150,000. NALP’s June 2025 Bulletin treated Boston as scale-dense: 66.7 percent of nine reporting Boston offices paid the then-standard $225,000 first-year figure as of 1 January 2025, and Boston accounted for 5.2 percent of all national offices reporting that amount. Milbank then reset the vanguard on 2 June 2026. A New England company that matches Boston lockstep is paying a first-year more than twice New Hampshire’s statewide median and more than the 90th percentile of Southwestern New Hampshire OEWS lawyers, $170,200 on the same May 2025 file.
The Occupational Outlook Handbook, last modified 27 August 2026, puts the national state-government industry median for lawyers at $115,330 and the legal-services median at $157,870. New Hampshire’s statewide median of $120,810 sits just above that state-government cell and well below legal services. That is the shape of a market whose typical paycheck is a public or regional-firm seat, not a lockstep associate product. National lawyer employment was 863,700 in 2025, projected up 5 percent to 904,300 in 2035. Those national cuts describe the occupation. They do not price a Concord Assistant Attorney General.
Concord is not a Boston satellite. It is a capital wage table. A general counsel who copies a Boston first-year into a Concord requisition is pricing a product the local payer stack does not sell, and a lawyer who quotes that first-year as “the New Hampshire number” is describing a neighboring labor market. Put the instruments on the table before anyone resigns or authorizes.
| The question | The instrument | The 2026 print | What it is not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Statewide employed-lawyer midpoint | BLS OEWS, May 2025, SOC 23-1011 | $120,810 | A Boston first-year base, a year-end bonus, or self-employed income |
| Concord / Central NH employed-lawyer midpoint | OEWS Central New Hampshire nonmetropolitan | $106,880 | Its own MSA; Concord is not a BLS metro |
| Manchester-Nashua employed-lawyer midpoint | OEWS Manchester-Nashua, NH (Hillsborough) | $125,190 | A national-firm lockstep office scale |
| Boston MSA employed-lawyer midpoint | OEWS Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | $183,350 | A Concord wage; the MSA includes the NH seacoast |
| Concord Assistant Attorney General market anchor | RSA 94:1-a, commencing 14 July 2023 | $99,796 | An OEWS cell or a lockstep class year |
| Public Defender starting pay | NHPD Executive Director, Bar News 22 December 2025 | ~$65,000 | A published step schedule |
| Boston first-year lockstep base | Milbank memorandum, 2 June 2026, effective 1 July 2026 | $235,000 | A New Hampshire wage |
Three buyer desks write three different checks.
The people who pay a 2026 New Hampshire lawyer sit in a Concord public desk, a Manchester–Nashua commercial desk, and a thin in-house layer anchored by two campuses that are not Concord. The OEWS median is a blend. Boston lockstep is almost entirely a firm product from next door.
Capital public deskCampus in-house
- Concord public Department of Justice, Judicial Branch, U.S. Attorney, Public Defender headquarters, county attorney. Paid on a statute or a nonprofit floor, across from the State House.
- Manchester commercial Homegrown regional firms of tens of lawyers, plus two national offices that print a New Hampshire headcount, not a Cravath scale, from Elm Street.
- Campus in-house A Merrimack financial campus and a Nashua defense campus. Small legal desks, heavy outside counsel to Concord and Manchester firms, and a pay ceiling the capital public desk cannot match.
Start with the capital, because that is where the Concord story actually sits. A signing bonus does not rewrite RSA 94:1-a. The statute titles the Department of Justice attorney stack: Attorney, Assistant Attorney General, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Associate Attorney General, plus the deputy and the Attorney General. Market anchors commencing 14 July 2023 are $73,264, $99,796, $123,208 and $135,695. The Attorney General’s 2025 salary is $159,630, per Ballotpedia citing the state pay-transparency figure; the department’s fiscal 2026 budget is $56,217,557. A Supreme Court associate justice prints $201,903 on the National Center for State Courts 2025 salary table, and the Judicial System’s fiscal 2026 budget is $128,145,255. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Hampshire sits in Concord with approximately 24 Assistant United States Attorneys; the Department of Justice legal-careers board, accessed 11 September 2026, listed two District of New Hampshire vacancies posted 4 September 2026. None of those seats is a Boston first-year.
The New Hampshire Public Defender is a private nonprofit performing the indigent-defense function, independent since 1985, with offices in every county and central administration in Concord. Staff-attorney postings ask for New Hampshire Bar admission or eligibility for immediate admission by waiver and do not print a number on the careers page. The number that is on the record is the program director’s: starting salaries hover around $65,000, the step scale did not get raises last year, and people at the top of the scale will not get a raise for two years, as reported in the Bar News of 22 December 2025. Massachusetts is expanding its public-defender corps and hiring those lawyers. Name Massachusetts as the destination. Do not treat Concord as a Boston lockstep feeder.
NH Business Review’s 2025 Book of Lists, dated 17 January 2025, ranks New Hampshire firms by in-state attorneys. McLane Middleton prints 110, with offices in Manchester, Concord and Newington. Sheehan Phinney Bass & Green prints 70, including Two Eagle Square across from the State House. Devine Millimet prints 50 or more. Orr & Reno prints 40 and is Concord-only, at 45 South Main Street since 1946, with a practice list that actually includes Government Relations and Administrative Law alongside Corporate, Litigation, Real Estate and Trusts and Estates. Rath, Young and Pignatelli prints 35. Hinckley Allen and Nixon Peabody each print 17 New Hampshire lawyers from Manchester. Those two are Boston and national platforms with a New Hampshire office. They do not publish a Cravath or Milbank associate scale for the Manchester seat. Concord’s private market is a government-relations and administrative-law strip across from the State House, not a Big Law satellite.
The in-house buyers that can clear the statewide median are not in Concord. NH Business Review, on 29 April 2026, put Fidelity Investments at more than 7,900 workers in New Hampshire, against 6,200 at the Boston headquarters, with the Merrimack campus on full-time onsite from September 2026 except customer-facing phone roles. Indexed titles on that campus include Vice President, Associate General Counsel, and Privacy and Cybersecurity Counsel. BAE Systems Electronic Systems, headquartered in Nashua, reports over 6,500 employees across Nashua, Hudson, Manchester and Merrimack on its New Hampshire careers page. The Nashua seat is sector, contracts and intellectual property, not the corporate general counsel chair of the U.S. subsidiary. NH Business Review’s 2025 largest service-sector list puts Dartmouth Health at 16,000 employees across 28 locations and Eversource Energy at 1,348 New Hampshire employees from Manchester. In-house legal headcount at those employers is not published. Band it as a small in-house layer with heavy outside counsel to Concord and Manchester firms. Do not invent a Concord in-house midpoint.
A signing bonus does not rewrite RSA 94:1-a.
The 2026 docket reallocates hours. It does not reset the median.
Education-finance appeals, a data-center session in which every statewide bill died, a public-defender floor that cannot retain juniors, and a utility capital cycle still running through Concord firms. Those are hiring consequences on a New Hampshire wage table, not a Boston first-year.
On 1 July 2025 the New Hampshire Supreme Court, in Contoocook Valley School District v. State, affirmed that RSA 198:40-a, II(a) is facially unconstitutional and that base adequacy must exceed $7,356.01 per pupil, then reversed the Superior Court’s order to pay. NH Journal priced the increase the Superior Court had described at more than $550 million and noted the legislature is not forced to write the check. Valley News, on 4 January 2026, put the Attorney General’s spend at least $1.5 million defending two school-funding suits that reached the Supreme Court in 2025, excluding about 4,250 hours of in-house counsel and staff, plus a $2 million attorneys’-fee payout, combined about $4 million. In February 2026 the Attorney General and the Solicitor General filed a notice of mandatory appeal asking the Court to overrule Claremont I and progeny. That is a multi-year Concord constitutional-litigation book for the Department of Justice and for plaintiff firms. It is a mid-to-senior public and firm-side seat. It is not a first-year lockstep hire.
Data-center bills in the 2026 session all died. HB 1265, a one-year statewide moratorium, was killed in the House on 11 March 2026. HB 1739, the incentive package, was inexpedient to legislate on 19 February 2026. HB 1722, the large-load tariff, was killed on 12 March 2026. SB 439, the municipal zoning bill, was tabled 304 to 11 on 14 May 2026 and died at sine die. The remaining tools are local: RSA 674:23 temporary moratoriums, ordinary zoning, and large-groundwater review. Canterbury banned data centers in all zones at Town Meeting on 10 March 2026, 322 to 63. A Nottingham warehouse conversion was withdrawn on 27 May 2026. Granite Shore Power requested an Eversource interconnection study filed at FERC in April 2026 for a roughly 200 to 350 megawatt load at the former Merrimack Station in Bow; the governor, on 2 September 2026, backed a multiyear moratorium as a budget promise, not as enacted law. Hiring consequence: land-use, energy and environmental counsel at Concord firms and municipal desks. Not a hyperscale general-counsel wave.
The one enacted energy statute in that debate is HB 672, effective 1 August 2025, creating a category of off-grid electricity providers. Eversource’s 13 February 2026 earnings call put the group-wide 2026 to 2030 plan at about $26.5 billion of regulated electric and gas capital, with a New Hampshire distribution performance-based rate mechanism in place and storm-cost recovery listed as a 2026 regulatory outcome. PSNH’s X-178 115-kilovolt rebuild, Campton to Whitefield, carries an estimated cost of about $385 million in the Site Evaluation Committee filing. HB 707, signed around 30 July 2026, creates a Solid Waste Site Evaluation Committee and pauses new major-facility capacity until rules are adopted or 1 July 2027. Those dockets keep Concord energy and environmental desks busy on a New Hampshire wage. They do not move the OEWS median.
Circuit Court District Division logged 97,209 new filings in calendar 2025, including 56,760 criminal, on a CourTools report run 4 February 2026. Manchester printed 10,863; Nashua 8,875; Concord 7,872. That is the public-docket demand county attorneys, the Public Defender and small-firm litigators actually work. The U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire, headquartered at the Warren B. Rudman U.S. Courthouse in Concord, saw 2024 filings fall to 577 as the Atrium Mesh multidistrict litigation unwound; federal civil volume is not the growth engine. The 2026 demand story is Concord public and administrative-law seats on a New Hampshire table.
The pipeline is Concord. The housing arithmetic is not Boston.
Four paths onto the New Hampshire bar, a Concord law school that already admits without the two-day exam, and a rent line that the public desk cannot clear. The lawyer who earns the figure is reading a different affordability problem than a Boston first-year.
New Hampshire Supreme Court Rule 42 offers four paths: the Uniform Bar Examination, motion without examination, a transferred Uniform Bar Examination score of 270 or better, and the Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law. Application fees effective 1 October 2025 are $995 for the exam, the scholar program and score transfer, and $2,500 for motion without examination, the first increase since 2014. NextGen Uniform Bar Examination is adopted beginning July 2028; the legacy exam continues until then. The Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination is still required, with a Board scaled passing score of 79. The bar is unified: active dues for 2025 to 2026 total $665. Admission is a gate for court and most firm seats. It is not a Boston-scale starting salary.
The scholar program is the Concord-only diploma privilege. Students complete a two-year practical-skills curriculum, pass a variant of the New Hampshire bar during the second and third years, and are sworn in the day before graduation without the two-day exam, under Rule 42(XII). The Standard 509 Information Report generated 16 December 2024 puts the first-year class at 242, of whom 142 are full-time and 100 part-time. Atlas Legis compilation of the American Bar Association employment questionnaire for the class of 2025 puts 35.4 percent in law firms, 25.5 percent in business and industry, 12.5 percent in government and 6.2 percent in public interest. That mix matches a market whose plurality is firms, whose in-house slice is real, and whose public slice matches the one-in-six Bar self-identifier share. The Assistant Dean for Career Services, in the same December 2025 Bar News account, put entry-level salaries anywhere from the $60,000s to the $100,000s, all over the map in both public and private sectors. That is testimony, not a survey cell. Treat it as a band, not as a median.
New Hampshire Housing’s 2025 report, as cited in that Bar News piece, puts median rent for a two-bedroom at $2,024 statewide — a person would need roughly $90,000 a year to keep housing at 30 percent of income. Median single-family home price is $565,000, up 79 percent since 2019. Public Defender starting pay around $65,000 sits below that rent-affordability line. The Central New Hampshire lawyer median of $106,880 clears it. A Boston first-year base of $235,000 more than doubles it. Combined with an American Bar Association 2024 density of 2.47 attorneys per 1,000 residents, the lowest in New England, the public Concord desk cannot clear a Boston first-year and is losing the housing arithmetic to Massachusetts. Junior public seats stay hard to fill. Firms quoting the career-services band compete with rent, not with Milbank.
BAE’s Nashua Microelectronics Center still carries the December 2023 Commerce Department announcement of about $35 million of initial CHIPS funding to modernize a Department of Defense-accredited gallium arsenide and gallium nitride foundry. That is the in-house desk that can clear the statewide median: patent-bar eligible, United States person, export-control fluent. It is not Concord lockstep, and it is not a data-center book. A general counsel staffing a Nashua intellectual- property seat and a Concord Assistant Attorney General seat from the same budget line is mixing two labor markets.
Authorize the range against the competing offer, not against the midpoint.
Sartori has worked the New York associate market for more than 10 years. The pattern that stalls a New England-corridor search is not a thin shortlist. It is an authorized range written to a state OEWS median while the candidate is reading a Boston lockstep base.
We have worked in the New York market for more than 10 years, for companies filling in-house seats and for firms filling associate classes in corporate, litigation, intellectual property and commercial practices. Over the last three years we closed 33 associate searches with a 94 percent completion rate and a typical timeline of 6 to 12 weeks. Median offer-to-acceptance on those files is 11 working days. Counter-offer incidence is 37 percent. Those are the New York associate-desk figures behind every New England-corridor search we run against a Boston competing offer.
Of those 33 closed New York associate searches over three years, 12 were New England-corridor laterals at years three to six where the candidate’s competing offer sat on a published Boston lockstep rather than on a state OEWS median; 14 were New York or national commercial associate seats; seven were energy, employment or other. Five of those 12 New England-corridor files closed with a candidate from a regional firm or an in-house seat rather than from a lockstep office, because the authorized range never reached lockstep cash. The shortlist was not the problem. The number on the requisition was.
Across the same cohort, the cut that matters for a company reader is the in-house one. Of 88 general counsel and heads of legal at companies with a New Hampshire or northern New England legal seat, over a 24-month window, 53 said their first budget number for a Concord or Manchester hire was a Boston first-year base. Of 72 associates then sitting in New York or Boston lockstep or lockstep-adjacent offices, over the same 24-month window in that cohort, 49 said they would not consider an in-house or regional-firm New Hampshire seat whose posted cash sat at the statewide OEWS median. A chief legal officer at a New England financial employer put it in budget language: they had treated the statewide median as a “New Hampshire lawyer” line and had then watched two consecutive privacy laterals decline once a Boston first-year print landed. A head of legal at a New England industrial employer said the statewide median described a different labor market from a patent-bar, United States-person seat, and that they hire against the campus market, not against Concord public bands. Both are right about their own desks. The mistake is using one of those prints to staff the other.
Seven of the 33 closed files spent more than four idle weeks between shortlist and authorized offer because the compensation committee would not approve a number above a state OEWS median. Those seven still closed, which is why they sit inside the 33, but they ran to the long end of the 6-to-12-week band. That is the finding that does not flatter this desk: we do not place quickly when the budget is the OEWS print and the candidate is sitting on a published $235,000 base. Quarterly surveys running since 2019 keep returning the same split. The New York mapping file records employer and seniority. It does not record which instrument a Concord compensation committee thought it was using.
Your job is to authorize a range that can survive contact with the competing offer, then put that range on the desk you are actually filling — Concord public, Manchester commercial, or campus in-house.
- Read the area first. A Concord public seat is not a Boston lockstep seat. The May 2025 OEWS table is the instrument for that distinction.
- Name the competing offer. If the candidate is sitting in a Boston lockstep office, the competing number is the published class-year base, not the statewide median.
- Do not gold-plate a public requisition. RSA 94:1-a is the band. A signing bonus does not rewrite it, and a Boston first-year will not sit it.
- Price campus seats as campus seats. Merrimack financial and Nashua defense desks can clear the statewide median. Concord government-relations firms cannot be asked to match them.
- Do not wait for a data-center statute to hire. Every statewide bill died. Staff the education-finance, energy and land-use desks you have.
Your job is to know which instrument you are quoting, because a $235,000 Boston first-year and a $120,810 statewide median are both true and do not describe the same job.
- Quote the instrument. OEWS, a published lockstep ladder, a statutory market anchor and program-director testimony are four different numbers. Mixing them in a negotiation is how both sides lose trust.
- Concord is not an MSA. Lawyer salary Concord is the Central New Hampshire nonmetro cell. Treating the Boston MSA median as a capital wage is how a candidate prices themselves out of a real offer.
- Admission is a gate, not a courtesy. Court and most firm seats run through Rule 42. The scholar program is a Concord diploma privilege, not a Boston-scale starting salary.
- Public floors are public floors. Attorney salary Concord on the Department of Justice side is RSA 94:1-a. Public Defender starting pay is a nonprofit floor that Massachusetts is currently bidding against.
- Campus in-house is a different market. In house counsel salary Concord is a thin print; the desks that clear the median sit in Merrimack and Nashua. Price the campus, not the State House.
The national lockstep ladder those Boston offices sit on is set out in our 2026 BigLaw associate salary scale. In-house bands, as a metro cut rather than this statewide table, sit in the 2026 in-house counsel salary note. The research program behind the New York interview cohort, the closed- search telemetry and the quarterly survey series is on our research page. Companies ready to authorize a range against the competing offer, not against the midpoint, should open a confidential hiring conversation.
Common questions about New Hampshire lawyer pay in 2026
What is the lawyer salary New Hampshire figure for 2026?
The dated statewide figure is $120,810, the May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics median for employed lawyers. WageDex and O*NET both print that Bureau of Labor Statistics cell; the state ranks 36th of 53 on the median, 24 percent below the national $159,670. That midpoint mixes Concord public desks, Manchester regional firms and a thin in-house layer. It is not a Boston first-year base, and a general counsel who budgets only that median is not pricing the seat that actually has to clear a Boston lockstep offer.
What is lawyer salary Concord against the Boston print?
Concord is not its own wage metro: the capital sits in the Central New Hampshire nonmetropolitan cell at a May 2025 median of $106,880. The Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH median on the same release is $183,350, and that geography includes Rockingham and Strafford Counties, not Concord. A Boston first-year lockstep base of $235,000, effective 1 July 2026 on the Milbank scale, sits above New Hampshire’s statewide 75th percentile of $194,690. Lawyer salary Concord is a capital wage table, not a Boston satellite.
What is attorney salary Concord in the public desk?
The Assistant Attorney General market anchor in RSA 94:1-a is $99,796, inside an overall attorney band of $60,778 to $140,802 that commenced 14 July 2023. The Attorney General’s own 2025 salary is $159,630. New Hampshire Public Defender starting pay hovers around $65,000, per the program director in the Bar News of 22 December 2025. Attorney salary Concord, on the public side, is a statute and a nonprofit floor, not a lockstep class year.
What is in house counsel salary Concord for a company that actually sits a legal desk in-state?
Concord’s private in-house layer is thin: the desks that clear the $120,810 statewide median sit in Merrimack and Nashua, not across from the State House. Fidelity’s Merrimack campus employed more than 7,900 people in New Hampshire as of 29 April 2026, per NH Business Review, with privacy and associate-general-counsel titles indexed to that campus. BAE Systems reports over 6,500 employees across Nashua, Hudson, Manchester and Merrimack. Neither employer publishes a 2026 in-house counsel scale; treat those seats as campus markets, not as Concord lockstep.
How long does a New Hampshire-adjacent associate hire actually take?
Sartori’s New York associate desk typically closes in 6 to 12 weeks, with a median 11 working days from offer to acceptance. That is the envelope on 33 closed associate searches over three years, at a 94 percent completion rate, on a desk that has worked this market for more than 10 years. Counter-offer incidence on the same files is 37 percent. Searches stall when the authorized range is written to the statewide OEWS median while the shortlist is reading a Boston first-year print.
Does Concord track Boston lockstep pay in 2026?
No. A Boston first-year base of $235,000, effective 1 July 2026, is more than twice Concord’s $106,880 median. New Hampshire’s statewide 75th percentile of $194,690 still sits below that first-year. The people who pay a Concord lawyer sit in the Department of Justice, the Judicial Branch, the Public Defender, and a government-relations strip of regional firms. Boston lockstep is the neighboring-geo contrast, not the Concord rule.
The wage table, the statute, and the docket.
Statewide and area wages are May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Lockstep dollars are the Milbank memorandum and NALP city tables. Public-desk figures are RSA 94:1-a and dated Bar News testimony. The 2026 docket is the Supreme Court, the General Court and the utility filings.
Sources and further reading
41 references- Sartori & Partners — New York Legal Talent Research Programme (1,675 structured interviews; ~67,000 lawyers mapped; quarterly surveys since 2019; mandate telemetry) sartoriglobal.com ↗
- Lawyers Salary in New Hampshire: $120,810/yr | WageDex wagedex.com ↗
- Lawyers Salary: $159,670/yr (2025) | WageDex wagedex.com ↗
- New Hampshire Wages: 23-1011.00 - Lawyers | O*NET OnLine onetonline.org ↗
- Lawyers : Occupational Outlook Handbook bls.gov ↗
- New Hampshire - May 2023 OEWS State Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates bls.gov ↗
- Occupational Employment and Wages in Boston-Cambridge-Newton — May 2025 bls.gov ↗
- Occupational Employment and Wages in Manchester-Nashua — May 2025 bls.gov ↗
- 2025 National Lawyer Population Survey americanbar.org ↗
- Championing Public Sector and Nonprofit Attorneys nhbar.org ↗
- September 26, 2025 Board of Governors Meeting Minutes nhba.s3.amazonaws.com ↗
- Cost of Living is Pushing New Lawyers Out of New Hampshire nhbar.org ↗
- New Hampshire Bar Association Membership Status Chart nhbar.org ↗
- $225,000 Entry-Level Salaries Not Yet the Standard at Large Firms nalp.org ↗
- 2025 U.S. Associate Salary Survey National Summary Tables nalp.org ↗
- MEMORANDUM TO ASSOCIATES (Milbank, June 2, 2026) abovethelaw.com ↗
- ALERT: Milbank Does It Again - Associate Salaries Are Going Up!!! abovethelaw.com ↗
- Chapter 94 COMPENSATION OF CERTAIN STATE OFFICERS gencourt.state.nh.us ↗
- Attorney General of New Hampshire ballotpedia.org ↗
- New Hampshire court salaries and budgets ballotpedia.org ↗
- The NHBR BIZ LIST (17 January 2025) read.nhbr.com ↗
- NH Fidelity employees returning to Merrimack campus full time nhbr.com ↗
- Life in New Hampshire | BAE Systems jobs.baesystems.com ↗
- Contoocook Valley Sch. Dist. v. State (1 July 2025) law.justia.com ↗
- NH Supreme Court Rules Ed Funding Inadequate, But Won't Order State to Pay nhjournal.com ↗
- $4M state expenditure on school funding lawsuits so far vnews.com ↗
- State Asks Supreme Court to Overturn Claremont in Sweeping School Funding Appeal nhjournal.com ↗
- HB 1265 (2026) | Impose moratorium on new data centers citizenscount.org ↗
- New Hampshire Data Center Policy servercountry.org ↗
- Ayotte backs multiyear moratorium on new data centers unionleader.com ↗
- Eversource (ES) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript fool.com ↗
- District Division - New Case Filings Calendar Year 2025 courts.nh.gov ↗
- United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire ballotpedia.org ↗
- University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law - 2024 Standard 509 Information Report law.unh.edu ↗
- Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program law.unh.edu ↗
- News | Office of Bar Admissions courts.nh.gov ↗
- Attorney Vacancies | United States Department of Justice justice.gov ↗
- Offices - New Hampshire Public Defender nhpd.org ↗
- Law Firm Practice Areas – Orr & Reno orr-reno.com ↗
- Concord Office | Sheehan Phinney sheehan.com ↗
- BAE Systems Inc. and U.S. Department of Commerce announce first CHIPS funding baesystems.com ↗
OEWS medians measure wage-and-salary employment in the occupation, not active bar membership and not all-in large-firm cash. Boston-Cambridge-Newton employment includes Rockingham and Strafford Counties, so area counts are not added to the statewide total. Public Defender starting pay is program-director testimony, not a published schedule. In-house legal headcount at Fidelity, BAE, Dartmouth Health and Eversource is not published. Constructed comparisons of dated public cells are arithmetic on those cells, not a single-publisher table.
Our own numbers — the New York interview cohort, the associate mandate telemetry, the counter-offer incidence and the offer-to- acceptance window — come from the continuous research program described on our research page, which sets out the survey waves and the mapping coverage behind every Sartori figure quoted above.
Adjacent figures for the same two readers.
BigLaw associate salary scale 2026
The national $235,000 to $455,000 lockstep ladder that New England companies match and that Concord does not print.
Read the 2026 scaleIn-house counsel salary 2026
Metro bands for corporate legal pay, as a city cut rather than this statewide, public-desk and campus table.
See in-house bandsHow Sartori builds the numbers
The interview cohort, mandate telemetry and quarterly survey series behind every proprietary figure on this page.
Read the research noteA quiet conversation
Pricing a New Hampshire legal seat for 2026?
We map associate and in-house talent across the New England corridor that actually competes with Concord, Manchester and the Merrimack and Nashua campuses, and we will tell you when the statewide median is the wrong instrument for the seat you are actually filling. Confidential, no obligation.