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Data · Legal prices

Legal services prices and jobs: dataset, download and API

What consumers pay for legal services, what law offices receive for their work, and how many people work in legal services, month by month, straight from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Free to use, with the series id on every value.

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

What is in this dataset?

Month by month since 2017, what consumers pay for legal services (Consumer Price Index), what law offices receive for their work (Producer Price Index for offices of lawyers, overall and by type of work where BLS publishes it), and how many people work in legal services (Current Employment Statistics), each next to the all-items or services index where that helps. Every value is read from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' own database with its series id, base period, and a preliminary flag while BLS may still revise it. The consumer index measures a basket item, not a law firm's billing rate. Counts and index values only.

Use it to put a fee, a billing rate or a hiring plan against the official price record. Look up the consumer legal-services index, the producer price index for offices of lawyers, or legal-services employment; each series comes with its last 24 months and the year-over-year change. To adjust a fee from an earlier year to today's prices, use the legal inflation calculator. To test a fee you set years ago, read the consumer legal-services index for the month you set it and for the latest month: the ratio shows how far legal prices moved in between, and the producer series for law offices shows whether firms' billings moved faster or slower than what clients paid.

Records
1,871
Look up by
17
data series
Primary source
1,871

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

Where does the data come from?

Each value is read from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Public Data API (version 1) by series id: CPI-U legal services and all items, PPI offices of lawyers and its published product indexes, and CES legal-services employment, hours and earnings. Year-over-year and month-over-month changes are computed from the published index values and rounded to one decimal; values BLS marks preliminary are flagged.

Period covered
January 2017 to September 2026
Places
The whole US
How often we refresh it
Every month
The source's next release
November 2026
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 10 main columns means
series
BLS series id (for example CUUR0000SEGC01)
measure
What the series measures
program
cpi (consumer prices), ppi (producer prices) or ces (employment)
month
The reference month, YYYY-MM
value
The published index value, or jobs in thousands, dollars or hours (see unit)
baseNote
The index base period as BLS publishes it
seasonal
SA seasonally adjusted, NSA not adjusted
preliminary
true while BLS may still revise the value
yoyPct
Change from the same month a year earlier, percent, one decimal
momPct
Change from the previous month, percent, one decimal

How do I use it in my own tools?

legalprices_lookup
One BLS series by id (for example CUUR0000SEGC01 for consumer legal-services prices, PCU541110541110 for offices of lawyers, CES6054110001 for legal-services jobs): the latest value, the change from a year earlier and the monthly values, each with its source.
legalprices_compare
The latest values and year-over-year changes for up to 10 series side by side, for example consumer legal-services prices against all items and against the producer price index for offices of lawyers.
legalprices_search
Monthly records whose text matches the words given, such as "legal services", "offices of lawyers", "inflation", "employment" or a month and year.

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.23734853 (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). Legal-services prices and jobs, monthly (BLS CPI, PPI and CES) (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23734854

Credit line for a chart, table or article

Source: Probative, Legal-services prices and jobs, monthly (BLS CPI, PPI and CES), version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23734854, licensed CC BY 4.0.

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

Not legal advice. These are price and employment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, kept for marketing planning. Index values are not a fee schedule, and BLS revises recent months.

What changed recently?

  • 2026-10-28 · First release: 1,679 monthly values for 17 BLS series, 2017 to September 2026. (source)

The full log is in changes.json.

What are the limits?

  • The consumer index tracks a basket item (wills, real estate and similar work). It is not a law firm's billing rate.
  • The producer index for offices of lawyers measures what law offices receive. BLS revises it for four months after first publication, and jobs figures for two, so recent months are marked preliminary.
  • Index values show change over time. They are not dollar prices, and one index cannot be compared in level with another.
  • Matter-type price indexes are published only where BLS has enough reports, and the family-law index has had no published value for several years.
  • Employment and earnings cover employees only, not owners or partners.
  • Records older than 60 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.

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The study built on this data: Legal services price index: what lawyers cost, month by month.

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

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