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Data · Lawyer wages

Lawyer and paralegal pay: dataset, download and API

How many lawyers, paralegals and legal assistants work in each place, and what they are paid, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' wage survey. Employees only, with every figure tied to its series id.

Checked October 28, 2026 · CC BY 4.0 · Not legal advice

What is in this dataset?

How many lawyers, paralegals and legal assistants work in the US, in each state and DC, and in the larger metro areas, and what they are paid: the mean annual wage, the median and the 10th, 25th, 75th and 90th percentile wages, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey, May 2025. Every figure carries its BLS series id; figures BLS does not release are marked suppressed and never filled in. OEWS counts employees only: it leaves out owners, partners and the self-employed, so it is not what a firm's owners earn.

Use it to price a hire or an in-house team against the local market, or to see where legal staff are paid most. Look up your state or metro: each record gives the employment and the mean annual wage for lawyers and for paralegals and legal assistants (and, for the US and states, legal secretaries and judicial law clerks), so you can compare staff cost with lawyer pay in the same place. When opening a second office, set the two metros side by side: the paralegal wage shows what intake and case-support staff will cost there, and the lawyer wage shows what a lateral hire expects, so the staffing line of the budget comes from the local market rather than from your home city.

Records
1,264
Look up by
439
area (US, state or metro)
Primary source
1,264

The letters are explained in what P, S, D and U mean.

Where does the data come from?

Each figure is read from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Public Data API (version 1) by series id, from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey (OEWS) for May 2025: employment, mean annual wage, median and percentile annual wages, location quotient and relative standard errors by area and occupation. Figures BLS does not release are recorded as suppressed with no value. OEWS covers wage and salary employees only.

Period covered
May 2025
Places
The whole US, states and metro areas
How often we refresh it
Once a year
The source's next release
April 2027
Records read
October 28, 2026

Official sources

The sources the records cite most

What does a record look like?

The full records add the dates, the quoted source text and every field in the CSV and JSON files below.

What each of the 15 main columns means
area
US, a two-letter state code (DC included) or the 5-digit metro (CBSA) code
areaType
us, state or metro
soc
Standard Occupational Classification code
year
The OEWS reference year (May)
status
P published by BLS; U suppressed (BLS did not release the estimate)
employment
Employees in the occupation (BLS rounds these)
meanAnnual
Mean annual wage in US dollars; empty when suppressed
medianAnnual
Median annual wage in US dollars; empty when suppressed
p10
10th percentile annual wage
p25
25th percentile annual wage
p75
75th percentile annual wage
p90
90th percentile annual wage
locationQuotient
Share of the area's jobs in the occupation relative to the US (1.0 = the US share); not published for the US
employmentRsePct
BLS relative standard error of the employment estimate, percent
wageRsePct
BLS relative standard error of the mean wage estimate, percent

How do I use it in my own tools?

wages_lookup
For one area (US, a two-letter state code or a metro's 5-digit CBSA code such as 31080 for Los Angeles): lawyers and paralegals (and, for states, legal secretaries and judicial law clerks), each with employment and mean annual wage, and where read the median.
wages_compare
Employment and wages for lawyers and paralegals side by side for up to 10 areas (US, state codes or metro CBSA codes).
wages_search
Areas whose name matches the words given, such as "Texas", "Chicago" or "Washington", each with all of its legal-occupation records.

How to cite this dataset

You can reuse, adapt and republish this data, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). The only condition is that you credit Probative and link to the source.

Version
1.0.0, released October 28, 2026
Every version
10.5281/zenodo.23734839 (always points to the newest)
License
CC BY 4.0

Download the data

Free, no email or login. The files are hosted on this site and Zenodo, a public research archive.

Suggested citation

Probative. (2026). Lawyer, paralegal and legal-staff pay by state and metro (BLS OEWS) (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23734840

Credit line for a chart, table or article

Source: Probative, Lawyer, paralegal and legal-staff pay by state and metro (BLS OEWS), version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23734840, licensed CC BY 4.0.

Add to a reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote)

Not legal advice. These are wage and employment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, kept for marketing planning. They cover employees only, not owners or partners.

What changed recently?

  • 2026-10-28 · Now 1,264 records across 439 areas for May 2025. (source)
  • 2026-10-28 · Now 1,264 records across 439 areas for May 2025. (source)
  • 2026-10-28 · Now 97 records across 26 areas for May 2025. (source)
  • 2026-10-28 · Now 237 records across 119 areas for May 2025. (source)
  • 2026-10-28 · Now 237 records across 119 areas for May 2025. (source)
  • 2026-10-28 · First release: 238 records for May 2025 across 119 areas. (source)

The full log is in changes.json.

What are the limits?

  • The survey counts wage and salary employees only. It leaves out owners, partners and the self-employed, so it is not what a firm's owners earn.
  • A mean wage is pulled up by the best-paid few, so compare it with the median, which is given for every area read.
  • Figures BLS does not release (usually small metros) are marked suppressed and left empty, never estimated.
  • Metro areas are added as the pull works through the daily quota, largest first; a metro missing here is not yet read, not necessarily suppressed.
  • Pay is for one reference month of May and does not include benefits, bonuses paid outside that month or equity.
  • Records older than 400 days since their last check are marked stale in the files until we re-check them. Every confirmed error we fix is listed in the data corrections log.

Found a wrong value? Report an error with the record id and the source that shows the right value.

Running a firm? You don’t need the raw data: we handle your state’s ad rules for you. See where your firm stands first.

The study built on this data: What lawyers and paralegals earn, by state and metro.

Published by Probative Growth, a marketing agency for law firms. See our services and pricing.

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