Salary benchmarks
Linklaters Salary 2026: Associate Scale, Bonus and Partner Pay
A general counsel matching 2026 Linklaters cash starts with one dated cell: London newly qualified base is £150,000, the 1 May 2024 lockstep still printed on the 2026 list. Associate PQE steps and UK bonus pounds are not public. Profit per equity partner was £2.48 million for the year ended 30 April 2026, a global average, not the NQ match.
The 2026 match is a 2024 cell.
The first number a general counsel asks is which 2026 Linklaters nq salary they are matching. It is £150,000 London base, the 1 May 2024 lockstep, still on Legal Cheek's 2026 list. Pick the figure you think belongs on the offer.
Legal Cheek, on 17 May 2024, reported Linklaters raised newly qualified pay to £150,000 from £125,000, effective 1 May 2024. City AM the same day dated the lift. The 29 September 2025 table still prints that cell. £150,000 base. Not a 2026 raise.
Sartori maps roughly 30,000 lawyers in London. That is coverage of the market a general counsel is hiring from, not a second interview count. Firm pages, tables and statutes sit below.
The 2026 number is a 2024 lockstep.
The 2026 Linklaters nq salary table.
Open the published cells before you write a requisition. London prints three junior sterling bases and an apprentice start. Everything above newly qualified on the associate lockstep is a blank. PEP is an average on a different ledger.
- 18
- US London offices paying newly qualified solicitors more than £170,000 on Legal Cheek's 29 September 2025 table, above the Magic Circle cell a general counsel matches here.
- Legal Cheek, 29 September 2025
- 32 of 43
- Spring 2026 London newly qualified retention, all on permanent contracts, as recorded by The Lawyer on 15 April 2026.
- The Lawyer, 15 April 2026
- £2.47bn
- Firm revenue for the year ended 30 April 2026, up 6.8 percent, on Linklaters' 21 July 2026 results.
- Linklaters FY26 results, 21 July 2026
- 37
- New partner elections effective 1 May 2026, including 14 in the UK, on the firm's March 2026 announcement.
- Linklaters, March 2026
Linklaters LLP, Companies House OC326345, employs the London trainee, newly qualified solicitor, associate and managing associate. The registered office is 20 Ropemaker Street, London EC2Y 9AR. The About us page, accessed 11 September 2026, states 30 offices, 20 countries, 550 partners, 2,100 lawyers excluding partners and 6,000 total headcount. The Careers at-a-glance line on the same check states 5,314 total headcount. Band total staff as about 5,300 to 6,000. Do not treat those two marketing lines as two censuses.
The earner reads the table as a paycheck. The general counsel, chief legal officer or head of legal reads it as a matching problem. Using only the firm’s FY26 pair — newly qualified base of £150,000 against profit per equity partner of £2.48 million — the published NQ cell is about 6 percent of FY26 PEP. It is not a published in-house band, and it is not a reason to copy PEP onto an NQ offer.
| Seat | Where | What is public | Figure | As of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| London newly qualified solicitor | London | Base only | £150,000 | Effective 1 May 2024; still the 2026 list cell |
| London trainee, year one | London | Base only | £56,000 | May 2024 lift; 2026 Money block |
| London trainee, year two | London | Base only | £61,000 | May 2024 lift; 2026 Money block |
| London solicitor apprentice (start) | London | Base + sign-on | £32,000 + £3,000 | Firm school-opportunities page, 2026 |
| London associate and managing associate PQE steps | London | Not public | — | May 2024 email: +£25,000 step, not a grid |
| London associate bonus grid | London | Not public | — | Structure shift reported; pounds omitted |
| US-office associate bonus, class of 2018+ | US offices | Matched Cravath | $115,000 + $25,000 | Legal Business, 27 Nov 2025; UK excluded |
| Profit per equity partner | Global average | Firm results | £2.48m | FY26, year ended 30 April 2026 |
| Profit per all partners | Global average | Firm results | £2.31m | FY26; not a London-office draw |
Click a column header to re-rank. Newly qualified London cash is a single published base. Associate steps above that cell are a May 2024 email, not a lockstep the firm has released class by class. Sources sit at the bottom of this page.
List average NQ on the 2026 Firms Most List
Legal Cheek printed £118,756 as the average newly qualified base across the list, a rise of nearly 5 percent on the prior report.
Legal Cheek, 29 September 2025 ↗The lockstep stopped. The US bonus machine did not.
A general counsel matching 2026 cash is standing on a calendar that stopped on 1 May 2024 for London juniors, and on a different machine for US-office associates. UK bonus pounds were never printed.
London freezeUS bonus reset
- London NQ lockstep The published junior bases last moved in May 2024. The 2026 list still prints that freeze. PQE cells above newly qualified stay off the page.
- UK bonus, unpublished Press reported a shift away from chargeable-hours weighting. The firm declined to comment. Amounts in pounds are omitted here, not guessed.
- US-only bonus match A November 2025 report matched Cravath year-end and special bonuses for US-office associates. UK seats were carved out of that machine in the same article.
Legal Cheek, on 3 May 2024, reported Freshfields moved newly qualified pay to £150,000 effective 1 May 2024. Linklaters matched, as Legal Cheek and City AM both dated 17 May 2024: a £25,000, 20 percent lift from £125,000, with trainee pay to £56,000 and £61,000. Solicitor-apprentice pay moved then from £25,000 to £28,000; the firm’s current school-opportunities page, accessed for 2026, prints a £32,000 starting salary and a £3,000 sign-on bonus. Use the 2026 page for the apprentice cell. Do not mix the 2024 £28,000 as if it were still current.
Clifford Chance closed the Magic Circle band at the same £150,000 cell later that month. The Global Legal Post, on 4 June 2026, still treated Magic Circle starting salaries as £150,000 and named Linklaters’ May 2024 scale as the origin. The 2026 number is a 2024 lockstep.
Legal Cheek’s 29 September 2025 table put UK consumer-price inflation at 3.8 percent for the 12 months to August 2025 as context for firms that froze or made thin uplifts. Against a nominal freeze dating to May 2024, that is real-pay erosion unless bonus makes it up. Bonus pounds for London associates are not in a firm table, so the erosion cannot be closed with a published all-in number.
RollOnFriday, on 9 May 2025, reported the firm is changing its associate bonus system to shift the focus away from billable hours from the next financial year, with greater weight on high performance and contribution. The firm declined to comment. Unnamed-source percentages in that article are not a 2026 scale and are not printed here. Legal Cheek, on 12 May 2025, attributed the same structure shift to that report without independent amounts.
Legal Business, on 27 November 2025, wrote that Clifford Chance and Linklaters will match Cravath scale year-end and special bonuses for associates across their US offices, but not for those working in the UK and elsewhere around the world. Most senior associates, class of 2018, were to receive December bonuses of $140,000 on top of salary, split $115,000 year-end and $25,000 special. A US associate and a London solicitor now have different bonus machines inside the same brand.
Who earns the figure, and who has to match it.
The associate earns the table. The general counsel, chief legal officer or head of legal is usually buying the same product skill on the other side of the deal, and that is where a frozen 2024 cell becomes a 2026 in-house offer.
The paycheckThe company match
- The earner A London newly qualified solicitor, an associate or managing associate on the unpublished step, or a partner reading PEP as an average rather than a drawing.
- The firm payroll Linklaters LLP in London funds the sterling lockstep from client work. US-office associates sit on a Cravath-bonus machine that the UK does not share.
- The company matcher A chief legal officer, general counsel or head of legal at a corporate, bank, sponsor or public body pricing the same product skill in-house.
Across 750 structured interviews with London partners and counsel, 61 of 108 general counsel, chief legal officers and heads of legal at banks, FTSE corporates and sponsors, over a 24-month window, named the Magic Circle newly qualified cell as the cash they match when a Linklaters NQ is on an in-house shortlist. They did not point to a published in-house NQ table. No public in-house NQ table prints a 2026 figure that equals £150,000.
A general counsel at a UK clearing bank told us, in that same cohort, that the Linklaters newly qualified cell is the number they put in the offer model when a Magic Circle NQ is on the shortlist. The Linklaters newly qualified cell is the number they put in the offer model. It is not a published in-house band.
The solicitor and the partner are paid by the firm, on a frozen London cell and a US bonus machine, not by the company that later tries to hire them.
- London juniors sit on a two-year training contract with four six-month seats, London-based, with optional international or client secondment, as the firm’s training-contract page describes it.
- Associates and managing associates last received a public lockstep instruction in the May 2024 email: a £25,000 lift. PQE-by-PQE cells remain unpublished.
- Partners read PEP. FY26 profit per equity partner was £2.48 million, up 11.4 percent; profit per all partners was £2.31 million, up 10.7 percent, on the 21 July 2026 results. Average and personal drawing are different sentences.
The company-side matcher is buying a product skill, and often hosting the same lawyers on secondment or through Re:link, before ever opening a permanent requisition.
- Corporate legal departments sit opposite the M&A workstream. The firm’s Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions page states it advised 40 of the FTSE 100 and 8 of the top 10 private-equity firms on corporate transactions in 2024.
- Banks, funds and sponsors buy banking, funds and structured lending. The Investment Funds page restates 2025 fundraising in excess of US$175 billion and investment of over US$25 billion into more than 200 funds.
- Public bodies buy energy and infrastructure. The FY26 results name advice to the UK government on financing of the £38 billion Sizewell C project. That is a mandate, not a civil-service hiring table.
Legal Cheek’s Trainee and Junior Lawyer Survey 2026-27, covering over 2,000 trainees and junior associates, puts the chance of a client secondment at 22 percent and an international secondment at 24 percent on the Linklaters profile. Those are survey probabilities, not a census of this firm. The company legal team is a host, then later a hirer of alumni. It is not the employer that posts the £150,000.
Re:link, on the firm’s own pages, connects clients to flexible lawyers on a fixed-term basis, UK and Middle East, wholly aligned with the firm, sitting with client in-house teams. A general counsel who cannot yet fund a permanent NQ match already has a Linklaters-branded overflow valve. Permanent recruitment, the find-a-lawyer page notes, can be difficult. That sentence is the company-side problem this table prices.
The Linklaters newly qualified cell is the number they put in the offer model.
How many £150,000 seats the firm actually staffs.
The published cell is a rate. Retention is the headcount that rate actually hits. A general counsel hiring a Linklaters NQ is hiring from a counted qualifying class, not from an infinite Magic Circle pool.
Legal Cheek, on 6 February 2025, reported the March 2025 qualifying intake: 57 trainees worldwide, 43 accepting NQ roles, or 75 percent; London 48 and 38, or 79 percent. Of the London cohort, 35 NQ offers were to stay in the City and three to Dubai, Singapore and Tokyo; seven trainees from Hong Kong, Singapore, the Middle East and Australia were offered London NQ seats. All were on permanent contracts at the then £150,000 NQ rate. The firm described annual trainee intake as around 100, split across two intakes.
The Lawyer, in an entry dated 15 April 2026, recorded that Linklaters retained 32 of 43 spring-qualifying trainees, all on permanent contracts, or 74 percent of its cohort. That is the NQ headcount the £150,000 rate applied to for that spring round. It is not a salary change.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority SQE route page, as of August 2025, requires a degree or equivalent, SQE1 and SQE2, two years’ qualifying work experience, and character and suitability. The LPC transitional route remains open until 31 December 2032. Linklaters’ two-year training contract is the qualifying-work-experience vehicle for its NQs. Legal Cheek’s Money block lists a PGDL grant of £12,500 (outside London £11,500) and an SQE grant of £20,000. The Law Society’s qualifying-work-experience guide, page dated 18 August 2026, explicitly includes in-house teams as QWE providers — which is why a company legal department can sit on both sides of this table, as host and later as hirer.
Early-careers pages state a 2:1 in every module, any discipline. Legal Cheek’s profile lists minimum A-level AAA and minimum degree 2:1. Vacation schemes pay £520 per week; the firm states 90 percent of the trainee cohort came through the Vacation Scheme. The school-leaver solicitor apprenticeship is a six-year London program with a £32,000 starting salary, not a substitute £150,000 class.
| Gate | London NQ solicitor | Company in-house match |
|---|---|---|
| Title on day one | Newly qualified associate / NQ solicitor | Whatever the requisition says — often “corporate counsel” covering a Magic Circle competing bid |
| Professional exam | SQE1 and SQE2; two years’ QWE via the training contract | England and Wales solicitor admission, unless the seat is a different jurisdiction |
| Published cash | £150,000 base; bonus unpublished | No public in-house NQ table equals this cell; the company matches the competing offer |
| Hours evidence | Survey mean arrive 09:19, leave 21:04 among responding trainees and juniors (Legal Cheek Survey 2026-27) | Shorter hours do not, by themselves, close a £150,000 competing bid |
| Who cannot walk in | A candidate without an SRA path | A company that will not match the Magic Circle cell in cash, title, or both |
Legal Cheek’s Survey 2026-27 clock times are a survey mean of more than 2,000 UK trainees and junior associates, not a published Linklaters billable-hour target. The profile’s “35 per week” field is Legal Cheek’s label, not a firm memo, and is not used as a target here.
Mega-deals, statutes, and a US profit spike paid for a frozen lockstep.
The cash is expensive because the work is expensive. H1 2026 mega-deal M&A, private-capital fundraising, and a cluster of UK statutes that went live in 2025-26 keep the desks busy. They price mid-to-senior seats first, not a second NQ raise.
Reuters, on 1 July 2026, citing LSEG, put global announced M&A at $2.8 trillion in the first half of 2026, up 48 percent year on year, the highest year-to-date since LSEG records began in 1980. Deal count fell 9 percent to about 24,000. Forty-seven deals above $10 billion totaled more than $1.3 trillion. LSEG Deals Intelligence, on 12 August 2026, put January–July 2026 announced value at US$3.19 trillion, with the UK at 35 percent of European activity. Concentrated mega-deals price senior deal teams and mid-level execution. They do not, by themselves, enlarge a newly qualified class.
Linklaters, on 10 July 2026, said it advised on US$193.4 billion of announced transactions worldwide in H1 2026 against US$56.7 billion in H1 2025. The FY26 results put 2025 deal value at US$167 billion. Press restatements that use different league-table datasets are not averaged into those two firm figures.
DESNZ, on 22 July 2025, announced the Sizewell C final investment decision: construction cost around £38 billion at 2024 prices, government initial equity 44.9 percent, nuclear site license to be modified under the Nuclear Energy (Financing) Act 2022 so the project can receive nuclear regulated-asset-base levies. Ofgem regulates the RAB. The FY26 results name advice to the UK government on that financing. Energy and infrastructure partners and project-finance associates sit on that clock. One Energy and Infrastructure partner on the 1 May 2026 election slate is a thin count against that mandate, not a large NQ class.
The Online Safety Act 2023 passed on 26 October 2023. GOV.UK’s explainer, updated 24 April 2025, dates illegal-content duties as enforceable from 17 March 2025, with fines up to £18 million or 10 percent of qualifying worldwide revenue. Ofcom published the Category 1 and Category 2A register on 10 July 2026. Linklaters’ FY26 results said new online safety legislation led to a significant increase in regulatory and public-law mandates across the tech sector. Those files sit in Litigation, Arbitration and Investigations, TMT/IP and public law — mid-to-senior associates and partners through 2026–27, not a trainee-seat explosion.
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 received Royal Assent in May 2024. The CMA put the digital-markets competition regime in force on 1 January 2025. Google’s general-search SMS designation was final on 10 October 2025, with conduct requirements imposed in June 2026. FY26 results name Competition Appeal Tribunal group and opt-out work. Four Antitrust and Foreign Investment partners and seven LAI partners were elected effective 1 May 2026.
The Cabinet Office National Security and Investment Act annual report published 14 July 2026, covering 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026, recorded 1,324 notifications against 1,143 the prior year, with 95.6 percent of reviewed cases cleared and no further action, 60 call-ins, and nine final orders. That is a process tax on the M&A boom, not a separate NQ class. The FCA’s UK Listing Rules applied from 29 July 2024. Capital Markets elected five partners on the 1 May 2026 slate.
FY26 revenue was £2.47 billion, up 6.8 percent; pre-tax profit £1.2 billion, up 11.6 percent, the third consecutive year of double-digit profit growth. Profit per equity partner ran FY24 £1.9 million, FY25 £2.2 million, FY26 £2.48 million on the firm’s own releases. US profit grew 39 percent in FY26; the US partnership has grown by more than 75 percent since 2021, to around 55 partners as City AM and The Global Legal Post both restated on 21 July 2026. Twelve lateral partner hires and 37 elections refreshed the pool. PEP is not the newly qualified figure a general counsel matches.
Legora, on 22 September 2025, announced a firmwide rollout of its generative-AI platform across all 30 Linklaters offices. The FY26 results restated that September rollout and an Applied Intelligence practice launched in May, with a growing team of AI Lawyers. No public salary for that title was found. It is omitted, not estimated. Technology changes how associate hours are spent. It does not cut the £150,000 NQ base.
Discovering Linklaters, the 26 January 2026 practice-area fair, structured work into three primary divisions: Corporate; Finance; and Litigation, Arbitration and Investigations. Stalls included TMT/IP, Banking, Capital Markets, Energy and Infrastructure, and Innovation and AI. That is the anatomy a general counsel is buying when they instruct the firm or hire an NQ out of it. A Workday posting dated 4 September 2026 advertised a London Regulatory Compliance Lawyer, qualified solicitor, two or more years’ PQE, supporting the COLP and liaising with the Solicitors Regulation Authority. That is an internal Legal and Risk seat, paid by the firm, not a client general counsel.
PEP is not the newly qualified figure a general counsel matches.
We have closed the London associate searches. Frozen cells still reopen them.
Sartori & Partners has worked the London associate market for more than 10 years. Over the trailing three years we closed 33 associate searches, with a 93 percent completion rate and a typical timeline of 6 to 12 weeks. Files that treated PEP or a US London ceiling as the NQ match ran past that window.
Of those 33 closed London associate searches, 19 were firm-side laterals and 14 were company-side, matching a Magic Circle NQ-to-PQE-3 lawyer onto a bank, listed-corporate or funds payroll. Of the 14 company-side files, 9 were priced against the published £150,000 newly qualified cell. Subsets sit inside the 33.
Six of the 33 were re-specified after the first offer pack because a general counsel had written FY26 PEP, or a US London newly qualified ceiling above £170,000, into an NQ in-house match. Those six ran past the typical 6-to-12-week window. That is the finding that does not flatter us: the miss is often already in the brief we are handed, and we still take too long to force the split back to the published cell. Counter-offer incidence on the same London associate line is 35 percent. On the 14 company-side files, 5 drew a firm-side hold. Median offer-to-acceptance is 12 working days when the cell is clean.
In the same interview cohort, 44 of 82 London NQ-to-managing-associate interviewees over an 18-month window said they would not move in-house below the Magic Circle newly qualified cell even when the company offered shorter hours. A head of legal at a private-equity-backed infrastructure platform said the team lost two shortlisted Magic Circle NQs in a 12-month window to US London offices paying more than £170,000. The team lost two shortlisted Magic Circle NQs in a 12-month window. The competing bid was not this firm’s London lockstep.
Two anonymized composites, presented as Sartori engagements, show the pattern without naming a client.
A listed consumer-goods company asked for a Magic Circle NQ to sit beside a head of M&A. The published competing bid was £150,000. The first specification had copied a US London ceiling into the cash line. We closed a rewritten in-house corporate-counsel search in 9 weeks after the offer was reset to the published cell. The firm-side hold arrived on day four; signature sat inside the 12-working-day median.
A UK clearing bank froze cash at a mid-market City band and tried to close the gap with title. Two Magic Circle NQs declined. We reopened the file as a PQE-3 corporate-counsel seat with bonus language rather than a base match, and filled it on the second specification. Time-to-fill on the second run sat at the outside of the 6-to-12-week band. The first specification had already consumed the opening weeks of the clock.
We cannot price London all-in cash for a general counsel who asks. The UK bonus grid is not public, and our mandate telemetry does not invent one. That blank is a fact about the market, not a gap we fill with a round number. If you need a private read on a specific offer — NQ, mid-PQE, or in-house match — that conversation is the product. The associate recruiting desk and the in-house and general counsel desk are the two doors; pick the payroll the hire will actually sit on.
Quarterly surveys have run since 2019 across the global research program, which maps nearly 1.5 million lawyer profiles. The London findings come from that interview cohort and the 33-file telemetry. For the US class-year ladder a New York hire is priced against, see the 2026 BigLaw associate salary scale. For company-side cash once the lawyer is on the corporate ledger, see the general counsel salary benchmark. Partner economics as a Magic Circle datapoint, not this scale, sit on partner pay at London law firms.
Firm results, the 2026 NQ table, and the statutes that fund the freeze.
London cash is the May 2024 lift, still on Legal Cheek's 2026 list. US bonus is the November 2025 Cravath match for US offices only. PEP, promotions and deal volumes are the firm's own results. UK bonus pounds and PQE steps are not public.
Sources
56 references- Sartori & Partners — London Legal Talent Research Programme (750 structured interviews; ~30,000 lawyers mapped; quarterly surveys since 2019; mandate telemetry) sartoriglobal.com ↗
- City pay war: Linklaters matches Freshfields with £150k NQ lawyer salary - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- Magic Circle Linklaters ups lawyer starting salary to £150,000 - City AM cityam.com ↗
- Linklaters matches Freshfields with £150k for newly-qualified solicitors - RollOnFriday rollonfriday.com ↗
- Money talks: What newly qualified solicitors earn at the UK's top law firms - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- Linklaters - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- Mishcon rolls out extra bonus for top-performing associates - The Global Legal Post globallegalpost.com ↗
- Freshfields sets down Magic Circle salary marker as it ups NQ lawyer pay 20% to £150k - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- EXCLUSIVE Linklaters moves away from chargeable hours for bonuses - RollOnFriday rollonfriday.com ↗
- 'There's definitely competition around rates' - Clifford Chance and Linklaters match Cravath bonuses for US associates - Legal Business legalbusiness.co.uk ↗
- Linklaters reports record FY26 results linklaters.com ↗
- Linklaters reports record revenue and profit in FY25 linklaters.com ↗
- Linklaters delivers record financial performance linklaters.com ↗
- Linklaters partners' average earnings climb to £2.5 million - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- Third successive year of profit growth at Linklaters as PEP hits £2.48m | Law Gazette lawgazette.co.uk ↗
- Magic Circle firm Linklaters sees partner profits soar to £2.5m after record year - City AM cityam.com ↗
- About us - Linklaters linklaters.com ↗
- Linklaters Careers | Home linklaters.com ↗
- Linklaters elects 37 new partners linklaters.com ↗
- Linklaters tops industry M&A league tables as the firm advises on US$193.4bn of deals in H1 linklaters.com ↗
- Training Contracts | University & Graduate Opportunities | Early Careers | Linklaters linklaters.com ↗
- Vacation Schemes | Linklaters linklaters.com ↗
- School Opportunities | Early Careers | Linklaters linklaters.com ↗
- Your Application | Early Careers | Linklaters linklaters.com ↗
- Linklaters | Your Application (experienced lawyers) linklaters.com ↗
- Discovering Linklaters linklaters.com ↗
- Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions | Linklaters linklaters.com ↗
- Investment Funds | Linklaters linklaters.com ↗
- Corporate and Structured Lending | Linklaters linklaters.com ↗
- Re:link | Linklaters linklaters.com ↗
- Find a Re:link lawyer | Linklaters linklaters.com ↗
- Become a Re:link lawyer | Linklaters linklaters.com ↗
- Alternative Legal Services | Linklaters linklaters.com ↗
- Regulatory Compliance Lawyer at Linklaters linklaters.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com ↗
- Linklaters retains 75% of trainees globally - Legal Cheek legalcheek.com ↗
- LIVE: Trainee retention 2026 - The Lawyer thelawyer.com ↗
- LINKLATERS LLP overview - Find and update company information - GOV.UK find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk ↗
- Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) route | SRA sra.org.uk ↗
- Qualifying work experience | SRA sra.org.uk ↗
- Pathways to qualification | SRA sra.org.uk ↗
- Qualifying work experience (QWE) | The Law Society lawsociety.org.uk ↗
- Mega-deals fuel record M&A as boards dream big on takeovers - Reuters reuters.com ↗
- Global M&A update: A record-breaking market that's becoming increasingly concentrated - LSEG lseg.com ↗
- Sizewell C gets green light with final investment decision - GOV.UK gov.uk ↗
- Sizewell C: Regulated Asset Base (RAB) - GOV.UK gov.uk ↗
- Online Safety Act: explainer - GOV.UK gov.uk ↗
- Ofcom's approach to implementing the Online Safety Act ofcom.org.uk ↗
- Online Safety: Register of categorised services - Ofcom ofcom.org.uk ↗
- The first (proper) year of the UK's Online Safety Act #1 - Linklaters Tech Insights techinsights.linklaters.com ↗
- Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 - legislation.gov.uk legislation.gov.uk ↗
- CMA sets out initial plans as new digital markets competition regime comes into force gov.uk ↗
- Google's general search and search advertising services - CMA gov.uk ↗
- National Security and Investment Act 2021 annual report 2025-26 - GOV.UK gov.uk ↗
- Investment screening powers protect national security and support growth - GOV.UK gov.uk ↗
- FCA overhauls listing rules to boost growth and innovation on UK stock markets fca.org.uk ↗
- Linklaters announces firmwide roll-out of Legora's Generative AI platform legora.com ↗
London junior cash is Legal Cheek (17 May 2024 and 29 September 2025), City AM (17 May 2024), and the firm profile Money block. The associate and managing-associate step is the internal email published by RollOnFriday on 24 May 2024. US bonus is Legal Business, 27 November 2025. PEP, revenue, regional profit growth, elections and deal volumes are Linklaters results dated 21 July 2026, 22 July 2025 and 9 July 2024. Retention counts are Legal Cheek, 6 February 2025, and The Lawyer, 15 April 2026. M&A cycle figures are Reuters citing LSEG, 1 July 2026, and LSEG Deals Intelligence, 12 August 2026. Sizewell C is DESNZ, 22 July 2025. Online Safety Act dates are GOV.UK and Ofcom. DMCC and Google SMS are the CMA. NSI Act volumes are the Cabinet Office annual report 2025-26. UK Listing Rules are the FCA, 29 July 2024. SQE and QWE rules are the SRA and the Law Society.
Compensation figures are general information, not financial, career or legal advice. Actual pay varies by office, PQE, hours, bonus eligibility and the employing entity. London PQE steps, UK associate bonus amounts, a London-office partner draw, and any in-house NQ table equal to £150,000 are not public and are not estimated here.
Linklaters pay: questions from both sides of the table
What is the Linklaters nq salary in 2026?
London newly qualified base is £150,000 — the 1 May 2024 lockstep, still printed on Legal Cheek’s 29 September 2025 table. Trainee bases are £56,000 and £61,000. PQE steps and UK bonus pounds are not public.
Does Linklaters publish a 2026 PQE associate scale?
No. The last firm-origin public statement is a May 2024 internal email: lockstep starts at £150,000 NQ and associates and managing associates rise by £25,000. That is a flat step, not a published grid.
What bonuses do Linklaters associates receive?
UK bonus amounts are not in a firm table. US-office associates matched Cravath year-end and special bonuses in November 2025; class of 2018 combined cash was $140,000. UK seats were excluded.
What is Linklaters PEP for 2026?
Profit per equity partner was £2.48 million for the year ended 30 April 2026, up 11.4 percent, on the firm’s 21 July 2026 results. Profit per all partners was £2.31 million. Neither figure is a London-office draw.
How many Linklaters London NQs stayed in spring 2026?
The Lawyer recorded 32 of 43 spring-qualifying trainees retained on 15 April 2026, all on permanent contracts, or 74 percent. The £150,000 rate applied to those seats.
How long does Sartori take to fill a London associate seat?
Typical timeline is 6 to 12 weeks on the London associate line, with a 93 percent completion rate across 33 closed searches in three years. Median offer-to-acceptance is 12 working days.
Adjacent tables for the same two readers.
BigLaw associate salary scale 2026
The US class-year ladder a New York hire is priced against. It is not this firm's London lockstep.
Read the US scaleGeneral counsel and CLO salary 2026
What the company-side paycheck looks like when a Magic Circle product lawyer moves onto the corporate ledger.
Read the GC benchmarkIn-house and general counsel recruiting
Retained search for the corporate legal seat — including the NQ and mid-PQE matches this table prices.
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Matching a 2024 cell in a 2026 search?
If you are a general counsel, chief legal officer or head of legal writing a requisition against this table, or an associate checking the published figure, we will split the cell from PEP and from US London ceilings before we open a search. Confidential, no obligation.