The 2026 weekly against the lockstep it is meant to preview.

Davis Polk’s U.S. Summer Program page, accessed 11 September 2026, does not publish a weekly dollar. It states that summer associates in New York, Los Angeles, Northern California and Washington DC are paid an annualized salary of $225,000, prorated for the number of weeks worked. New York summers who split must start on an official start date and work eight consecutive weeks. Overseas or U.S. office splits require a minimum of 10 weeks at the firm. The company, government office or financial institution that takes the back half of a New York split is a host. It is not the lockstep payroll.

Skadden’s associate-salary page, accessed the same day, lists Class of 2026 base at $225,000 and a separate summer table at $225,000 annual salary, paid semi-monthly during employment. Associate positions may be eligible for a discretionary year-end bonus. The summer row does not carry that sentence. The U.S. law-students page repeats the $225,000 summer figure and states that the new associate class primarily consists of its prior summer associates, recruited from more than 40 law schools.

Debevoise’s summer FAQs print $4,330 a week for the 2025 summer class, with an eight-week minimum. That is a 2025 print, one dollar off Cravath’s 2026 weekly, and it is useful only as a cluster: the lockstep weekly is the $225,000 lockstep divided by 52, give or take a rounding dollar. It is not NALP’s median, and it is not Milbank’s $235,000 first-year, which Above the Law reported on 2 June 2026 as including summers from 1 July 2026 without publishing a weekly.

Jones Day’s U.S. students page already prints a 2027 summer figure: $240,000 annualized in a named set of offices including New York, and $235,000 in Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit and Minneapolis, plus an additional $2,500 per week totaling $25,000 after 10 weeks for 2Ls. That is next cycle. It is not the 2026 Cravath weekly. Milbank’s law-students page, accessed 11 September 2026, puts New York first-years on a $235,000 print and runs summers through a 10-week, three-area rotation. The weekly for that rotation was not on the page.

Range of average 2L summer weeklies, all sizes: $1,000 to $4,700. For 701-or-more offices the 1L and 2L range high is $4,325 — the $225,000-over-52 print. Survey pool: 437 responding offices, 87 percent in firms of more than 250 lawyers. These are 1 January 2025 office medians, published in May 2025, before Milbank’s June 2026 raise.

The Association of Corporate Counsel and Empsight International, in the 2025 Law Department Compensation Survey Executive Summary (news dated 16 September 2025; 1,632 to 1,637 U.S. respondents), put the Attorney title — Intermediate Attorney, Associate Attorney, Developing Associate — at a median base of $148,000, median short-term incentive of $16,000, and median total cash of $160,000. That median is the first in-house number a general counsel actually posts for the class. It is not the $225,000 lockstep the weekly previewed.

Across 1675 structured interviews with New York associates and counsel, 142 of 186 respondents who had sat a lockstep 2L summer over a 24-month window described the weekly as first-year base divided by fifty-two, not as a preview of all-in first-year cash. The same cohort, different cut: 61 of 88 in-house hiring managers over that 24-month window said they would not post $225,000 for the Attorney title. A head of legal at a PE-backed healthcare platform put it in one line: the weekly is a firm cost, not a company cost. They meet the class at year two or three, on the grade the department actually runs.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wages release for May 2025, USDL-26-0725, released 15 May 2026, put 754,500 lawyers in covered establishments at a mean annual wage of $185,840. That is the occupation envelope the weekly sits inside. It does not break out summers or first-year lockstep. It does tell a CEO that the lockstep weekly, annualized, sits above the national lawyer mean — and that the in-house Attorney median sits below it.

A general counsel at a Northeast public-company legal department told Sartori they budgeted the incoming Attorney seat against the $225,000 lockstep the class had previewed as a weekly, then posted Attorney cash and lost the candidate to a return offer. We posted Attorney cash against a lockstep the candidate had already cashed as a weekly. That is not a market failure. It is a grade error. The company was trying to buy a first-year associate with an Attorney requisition.

Of those 33 closed New York associate searches over three years, 14 were firm-side junior or conversion seats, 12 were in-house Attorney or junior-counsel seats hiring lawyers out of lockstep classes, and 7 were other associate seats. Counter-offer incidence on the New York associate line is 37 percent. The 33 files are associate searches, not summer-associate payroll. Our New York mapping does not see a $235,000 weekly, because no page printed one, and the mandate book does not contain summer-associate payroll files.

Of the 12 in-house Attorney and junior-counsel files, 5 closed past the 12-week typical timeline when the company tried to reprint first-year lockstep cash on the Attorney title. Those five still completed. They were slow. That is the segment where we place slowly, and it is the one a chief legal officer can avoid by posting the grade the ACC stack actually uses. A hiring manager who opens at Attorney total cash near the $160,000 median, and who is willing to move to Senior Attorney at $228,000 for a third- or fourth-year, finishes inside the window. A hiring manager who opens at $225,000 because “that is what they made as a summer” spends the extra weeks explaining the requisition to compensation, then often loses the process to a return offer.

Sartori’s quarterly survey since 2019, in the four waves covering July 2025 through June 2026, recorded 71 of 94 New York in-house hiring managers saying they treat the lockstep weekly as a firm-side reference they do not reprint on an Attorney requisition.

Three anonymized files from the 33

• A conversion that behaved. An Am Law lockstep litigation group needed a first-year seat filled from its own prior summer class after a clerkship deferral opened a gap. Conflicts screening was ordinary. The offer was out and signed inside six weeks. No counter-offer. This is the firm-side file the weekly is supposed to feed.
• A company that reprinted the weekly. A public-company legal department in the Northeast opened an Attorney requisition at $225,000 because the target class had cashed lockstep as 2Ls. Compensation would not grade Attorney that way. The file ran past 12 weeks, then closed on a Senior Attorney title at ACC-like cash after the original candidate took a return offer. Completed, late, and not the search we would run again on those terms.
• A head of legal who waited for year three. A PE-backed healthcare platform hired a third-year out of a lockstep corporate group onto a Senior Attorney seat. The weekly never appeared in the offer memo. The general counsel had watched that class through a panel firm and hired on the work, not on the 2L check. Signed inside six weeks. This is the company-side file the later match actually is.

If you are a 2L reading this as a paycheck, the 2026 lockstep weekly is still the $225,000 print at the firms that still have it on the page, and it still does not include the bonus stack. If you are a general counsel, a chief legal officer or a head of legal reading this as a future hire, do not budget the Attorney seat against that weekly. Post the title you are actually filling, on the ACC grade that title carries, and run the search as an associate lateral — which is the in-house counsel search we run, not a summer-associate payroll.