Legal services price index: what lawyers cost, month by month

What are these three measures?

• Consumer prices. What households pay for legal services, from the Consumer Price Index. It is one item in a basket (wills, divorces, real estate closings and similar work), so it is a guide to the public’s experience, not a law firm’s billing rate.
• Prices law offices receive. The Producer Price Index for offices of lawyers follows what offices are paid for their services, overall and for some types of work. Offices tend to change their rates about once a year, so it moves in steps.
• Jobs and pay in legal services. The Current Employment Statistics survey counts employees on payrolls in the legal services industry, with their average hourly and weekly earnings. It leaves out owners and the self-employed.

What did we find?

• Consumers see legal prices rising with everything else. The consumer index for legal services is up 3.7% over 12 months to September 2026, and all items up 3.7%. All services together up 3.2%.
• What law offices receive is rising about twice as fast. The producer price index for offices of lawyers up 7.5% over the same 12 months (preliminary), against 3.7% for the consumer index. The two measure different things: the producer index follows what offices receive for all their work, mostly from businesses.
• Over the long run, legal services have outpaced prices in general. Since December 1997 the consumer index for legal services is up 130%, against 109% for all items.
• By type of work, the producer index ranges from up 4.2% to up 10.0%. Of the matter types BLS publishes for September 2026, business and commercial up 10.0% and wills, estates, probate up 4.2%.
• Legal services employ 1,249,000 people, the most in our series, which starts in January 2017. That is 1.9% more than a year earlier (preliminary). The low in our series was 1,095,900 in April 2020.
• Pay for employees in legal services. Average hourly earnings were $62.22 in August 2026, down 0.1% over 12 months (preliminary). This covers employees only, not what owners or partners take home.

How have prices moved since 2017?

How did we build it?

We read every value from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ public data interface by series id, and keep each month once read. Each month we ask for the last two years of every series, add the new months and record any value BLS has revised. Year-over-year and month-over-month changes are computed from the published index values and rounded to one decimal.

• The consumer index is a basket item. It tracks what households pay for wills, divorces and similar work. It is not an hourly rate or a contingency fee.
• Preliminary means it can change. BLS revises producer price values for four months and jobs figures for two. We mark them and update them when BLS does.
• Seasonal adjustment is never mixed. Prices are not seasonally adjusted. Jobs are shown seasonally adjusted and, in the data files, not adjusted too, each labelled.
• Matter-type indexes are sparse. BLS publishes a producer price index for a type of work only where it has enough reports. The titles come from BLS’s own table.
• Employees only. Jobs and earnings cover employees on payrolls, not owners, partners or the self-employed.
• Not legal advice, and not a fee schedule or a recommendation of what to charge.

The full monthly series, with the series id and the source on every row, is in the data files.

Where can I read more?

• Adjust a fee for inflation: the legal inflation calculator.
• What legal staff are paid: lawyer and paralegal pay by state and metro.
• The official pages: Consumer Price Index, Producer Price Index, Current Employment Statistics.
• Report an error: the data corrections log.