Lawyer salary in Wyoming, 2026: the $100,130 table.

Read the industry split first, because it is the cleanest answer to who earns the number. Wyoming DWS, in the March 2025 ECI update of the 2024 OEWS, puts about 570 lawyers in professional, scientific and technical services at a $97,492 median and a $142,842 mean, and about 300 lawyers in public administration at a $103,301 median, a $112,329 mean and a $153,783 90th percentile. The private desk is larger. The public desk pays the higher median. The public 90th sits on the statutory circuit-judge and district-attorney cap.

The public desk has an address. The Attorney General’s Law Office sits in Cheyenne. The 2027–2028 biennium budget request prepared for the February 2026 Legislature funds that unit at $25,581,289 with 85.38 positions, organized as five legal divisions — Human Services, Civil, Criminal, Water and Natural Resources, and Tort Litigation — each headed by a deputy attorney general. All AG attorneys are at-will under W.S. 9-1-608. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Wyoming, updated 27 May 2026, staffs a Cheyenne headquarters and a Casper branch with two to three civil Assistant United States Attorneys and approximately nine criminal AUSAs. The Wyoming Public Service Commission legal staff page lists a chief counsel, an attorney supervisor and two staff attorneys. Only Laramie County and Natrona County elect a district attorney; the remaining 21 counties elect a county and prosecuting attorney, and the Legislative Service Office cites an average of 78 assistant county and prosecuting attorneys in the county attorneys’ budget request.

The private desk is offices of lawyers, not an associate factory. Wyoming QCEW for 2025Q2, prepared 7 January 2026, puts private NAICS 541110 at 1,164 jobs, down 41 year-over-year, at an average weekly wage of $1,560 across all occupations on that payroll. Title abstract and settlement offices (541191) employed 76. Those weekly wages are not lawyer salaries; they mix attorneys, paralegals, title staff and clerical. Annualizing $1,560 times 52 to about $81,120 is an industry average, and treating it as attorney salary Cheyenne is the most common misread of the QCEW print.

License geography is denser than payroll geography, and the two must not be subtracted into a fake unemployment rate. The American Bar Association’s 2025 National Lawyer Population Survey counted 1,656 resident active attorneys in Wyoming as of 31 December 2024, down from 1,768 in the 2024 survey. SE Wyoming News, on 16 April 2026, reprinting the Wyoming State Bar, put 533 active licenses in Laramie County as of the first quarter of 2026 — roughly one-third of the statewide license count sitting in the Cheyenne county, consistent with the AG, the district attorney, the PSC, the federal courthouse and the private Cheyenne firms sharing one capital market. That is a roster fact, not a jobs census.

The in-state corporate legal department that is not a state agency is small enough to count from a roster. The University of Wyoming Office of General Counsel, in Old Main in Laramie, publishes a Vice President and General Counsel, two Deputy General Counsels, a Senior Associate GC / Chief Risk Officer, and four Associate General Counsels — about 7 to 8 attorneys. An Associate General Counsel I posting listed $73,800 commensurate, apply-before 8 August 2026. Legal Aid of Wyoming, the statewide Legal Services Corporation grantee, staffs a thin attorney desk across Cheyenne, Casper, Cody, Lander and Gillette; Cause IQ’s 2024 Form 990 print puts the organization at 27 employees and $1.75 million revenue. That is public-interest pay, not the 2026 state median, and it is included here only as a named in-state employer.

The pipeline from the only in-state law school feeds those two desks, and leaks a Colorado-sized minority next door. The University of Wyoming College of Law Class of 2025 ABA Employment Summary, status date 16 March 2026, records 64 graduates: 17 to law firms of 1–10 lawyers, 17 to government, 8 to public interest, 3 to firms of 101–250, zero to 251 or more; 30 employed in Wyoming, 15 in Colorado, 3 in the District of Columbia. There is no salary cell on that 509 summary. The placement mix is the evidence: small Wyoming firms and government, with Colorado the first out-of-state seat — consistent with a Cheyenne pay table that does not lock to Denver.

Across 1,675 structured interviews with New York lawyers, 79 of the 112 respondents who had evaluated a Mountain-West in-house or local-counsel seat over a 24-month window told Sartori they would not treat a Cheyenne number as a lagging Denver lockstep rung. A general counsel at a Denver-seated independent producer, in that same window, described Cheyenne as “a file, not a hire”: the company buys Casper or Cheyenne local counsel rather than putting a lawyer on a Wyoming payroll. That is the buyer side of the thin in-house stock.

Two anonymized composites, described by category only. A Denver-seated independent producer, PE-backed, needed Casper title and conservation-commission work on a permit-by-permit clock after the Converse County EIS fell. The general counsel’s first brief was an in-house Cheyenne hire on a Denver-adjacent band. The search was redesigned in week two as a local-counsel panel plus a six-month secondment. It closed in 9 weeks. The company did not put a lawyer on a Wyoming payroll. A Cheyenne data-center developer, mid-market, needed municipal, water and utility counsel during the 2026 annexation wave. The hire was a seven-year government-side energy and natural-resources lawyer into a company-counsel seat, banded inside the live Senior AAG range, on a 10-week clock. No firm, company or candidate is named because none of those composites is a named file.

The service view of putting a lawyer on a company payroll sits on our in-house counsel recruiting page. Associate-line search, the desk whose 33 closed files sit behind the telemetry above, sits on our associate recruiting page. Companies building a legal function from nothing should start with the first general counsel guide before they price a Cheyenne number.