Lawyer Salary in North Dakota 2026

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey for May 2025, released 15 May 2026, puts North Dakota lawyers (SOC 23-1011) at a median of $106,880 and a mean of $128,680. The 10th percentile is $70,500; the 25th is $92,510; the 75th is $137,380; the 90th is $194,840. Estimated employment is about 1,050 wage-and-salary jobs. The state ranks 42 of 53 states and territories on that median, 33 percent below the national lawyer median of $159,670 published in the same release.

That national cell moved from $151,160 in the May 2024 estimate to $159,670 in May 2025, a 5.6 percent step between two survey vintages, not a same-worker raise. BLS Employment Projections for 2024–2034 put national lawyer employment on a 4.1 percent path, about 31,500 openings a year. None of that national path is a North Dakota hiring plan. It is the yardstick the dated table is scored against.

The Job Service North Dakota reprint of the prior May 2024 vintage counted 1,070 lawyer jobs and a $104,940 median. Compared with May 2025, statewide employment sits in a 1,050–1,070 band and the median moved $1,940. Treat the two vintages as adjacent survey prints, not as a raise awarded to the same people.

OEWS measures wage-and-salary lawyers in covered establishments. It does not isolate equity partners, origination credit, or most nonproduction bonuses and stock. A company that reads $106,880 as “what we should pay a general counsel in Fargo” is reading a blended public-plus-small-firm cell as if it were a commercial offer.

Fargo is the largest employed-lawyer seat and the commercial one. Bismarck is the government-and-energy-regulator seat. Grand Forks is the University of North Dakota School of Law and border-MSA seat. Minot and the west are the Bakken operations seat. A general counsel sitting in Cass County is not hiring the same person as a chief legal officer sitting across from the Public Service Commission.

Vogel Law Firm, on its own site as accessed in September 2026, describes more than 40 attorneys, with offices in Fargo, Bismarck and Moorhead, Minnesota, and a Fargo office of more than 50 team members. Practice labels on the firm site include business and corporate, commercial litigation, construction, cooperative law, employment, mergers and secured financing, real estate, environmental and land use, and oil, gas, wind and energy, including representation before the North Dakota Industrial Commission. That is the regional tier that actually hires associates in-state.

Fredrikson & Byron, a Minneapolis platform, publishes an energy regulation and permitting group covering wind, solar, oil, gas, pipeline, transmission and carbon capture, with representative experience on CapX 2020 and the Dakota Access Pipeline. The firm scheduled 2026 employment-and-labor seminars in Fargo on 29 September and Bismarck on 28 September — a live North Dakota client base, not a fly-in-only file. Crowley Fleck PLLP names Bismarck and Williston offices on its home page: the western-county energy seat, not the Fargo commercial seat.

Basin Electric Power Cooperative sits in Bismarck as a generation-and-transmission cooperative: 138 member systems across nine states, about 3 million consumers, FERC standards of conduct, Southwest Power Pool Upper Missouri Zone, and a large-load commercial program. Legal work sits as in-house counsel plus outside energy and regulatory counsel. The North Dakota Public Service Commission’s 2026 docket list is the buyer signal for utility rate, siting and transmission counsel — in-house at MDU, Xcel and Basin Electric, and outside at regional and Minneapolis-platform firms.

Western operators are a different payroll. The Department of Mineral Resources year-to-date through May 2026 named Chord Energy, Continental Resources, ConocoPhillips (Burlington, Marathon), Devon Energy Williston and Chevron (Hess Bakken) as 65.9 percent of state oil. The employed lawyer may sit in Williston, Bismarck, Denver or Houston; the work is North Dakota. No public in-house salary series was found for those operators, and none is invented here.

The Office of Attorney General in Bismarck is the largest public legal buyer on the state payroll: 270.00 FTE and a 2025–27 biennium budget of $119,172,230, with five new FTE in the 2025–27 bill (mixed legal and investigative). The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of North Dakota keeps offices in Fargo and Bismarck. Cass County District Court is the Fargo trial seat. None of these public desks is a Fargo general counsel, and pricing them off the Fargo 75th is how public employers lose assistants.

Over the trailing three years we closed 33 associate searches on that desk, at a 94 percent completion rate, on a typical 6 to 12 week timeline, with a 37 percent counter-offer incidence and a median 11 working days from offer to acceptance. Of those 33 closed files, 9 were in-house seats whose operating risk sat in a thinner metro than the employer’s headquarters cell. Four of those nine required a second compensation conversation because the first band opened on a state OEWS median the candidate would not accept. All four still closed — the company moved. Five of the nine drew a counter-offer, inside the desk-wide 37 percent.

What that file does not show is the processes that never became searches: companies that printed the state median, failed to attract a shortlist, and never called. That is the miss the dated table creates, and it sits outside our telemetry. We under-briefed the Minneapolis overlap on the first pass of those four files. The second band was the Fargo 75th equivalent, not a revised story about the role. A page that only reports the 94 percent would hide that.

Two anonymized composites, tier and type only. A Cass County manufacturer hiring its first in-house counsel opened near the Fargo median and dual-bar required. Two shortlisted lawyers were already in Twin Cities conversations. The file closed in 8 weeks, inside the 6 to 12 week band, after the company moved to a number that sat on the Fargo 75th rather than on the state cell. The incumbent regional firm tabled a counter-offer; the candidate still moved. A Bismarck generation-and-transmission cooperative hiring regulatory counsel for a live PSC rate and transmission year opened on a public-adjacent band. The file ran 11 weeks. The constraint was not a missing lawyer. It was a first offer that a mid-level energy associate could beat by walking east.

Quarterly surveys running since 2019, and a global mapping of nearly 1.5 million lawyer profiles, are the frame this desk sits in. The New York interview cohort is the one named above; it is not a second count. Two of the 33 closed files ran past the 6 to 12 week band when dual-bar admission, not compensation, became the constraint: the candidate held a North Dakota license and was waiting on Minnesota, or the reverse. We now brief that clock in the first conversation rather than discovering it at offer. That is slower than the headline timeline, and it is the honest one for a Fargo-Moorhead desk.

If you are the lawyer earning this figure, the practical test is dual licensure plus the Fargo 75th against whatever Minneapolis conversation you already have. If you are the company paying it — a general counsel, chief legal officer, or head of HR putting a lawyer on the payroll — the practical test is whether the seat is Fargo commercial, Bismarck regulatory, or Bakken maintenance, and whether you are willing to open on the overlap rather than on the dated table. A search that starts on $106,880 will collect the public-desk and small-firm stock. A search that starts on the Fargo 75th will collect the dual-licensed commercial lawyer the company actually needs. We have worked this pattern for more than 10 years on the desk that underwrites the page. The close is a company conversation, not a candidate inbox.