Lockstep vs. Merit-Based Associate Pay: How Raises Are Decided

Lockstep compensation ties an associate's base salary to class year — the year they graduated law school — instead of to individual performance.

Everyone who started the same year earns the same base, and the whole class advances together, one band per year.

Your pay is set by the calendar and the firm's scale, not by a review.

The purest example is the Big Law market scale.

A memo Milbank sent on June 2, 2026, as reported by Above the Law, set first-year base pay at $235,000 (the Classes of 2026 and 2025) rising to $455,000 for the Class of 2018, effective July 1, 2026.

Above the Law credits Milbank — not Cravath — with leading both of the last two market raises, in 2023 and 2026, which is why the schedule is now often called the Milbank scale.

And lockstep spreads by matching: one firm announces, other firms decide whether to follow.

Firms including McDermott, Quinn Emanuel and Norton Rose Fulbright had matched the 2026 scale by late summer, per the scorecard — but whether every other market firm, Cravath included, had matched was not confirmed in the sources we read, through October 2, 2026.

For the full ladder, rung by rung, see our class-year scale breakdown.

Lockstep is not one salary; it is a ladder of levels.

The 2026 market scale lists eight pay bands for the Classes of 2018 through 2026 — $235,000 at the entry rung (shared by the two newest classes), $455,000 at the top.

Your "level" is your class year, which is what makes law firm salary bands legible: anyone can read what each year of seniority is paid.

Firms reshape the ladder when they match it.

Katten's 2026 schedule topped out at $440,000 for the Class of 2019 and above, and Susman Godfrey set its first-year base at $240,000 — both as reported on Above the Law's scorecard.

The bands are a shared grammar, not a uniform number every market firm reproduces.

Tiers can come from hours as well as years.

Some firm memos tie the scale itself to a billable-hours expectation, and some firms pay bonus multipliers — more than the listed amount at higher hour counts — gates that an associate's own numbers have to clear.

How those targets work is their own subject: see our guide to billable hours.

And the ladder ends.

Past the top of the scale sits the partnership, where class-year bands give way to a different compensation system — our guide to partner lockstep covers how partners are paid.

Merit-based pay removes the published ladder.

Under this model, base salary and raises can reflect the individual — performance, responsibility, client development — and the firm's own finances.

Without a market memo to match, the raise is a decision someone at the firm makes, not a step the calendar takes.

That is the model's description, not a survey finding — this section returns to that gap below.

What the data shows is how wide the range runs.

In NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey, the most common first-year salary at firms of 250 or fewer lawyers was $150,000 or less, reported by 44% of offices.

At firms of more than 700 lawyers, the median first-year base was $215,000, and $225,000 was the most common figure (45% of offices) — same title, same year, one survey.

NALP's Class of 2025 salary curve — all full-time jobs reported for the class, not just law firms — was bimodal: salaries of $60,000–$100,000 made up 50.0% of the 22,715 reported full-time salaries, while $225,000 accounted for 21.5%.

The right-hand peak sits at the market scale's pre-2026 entry number; the left is everything else the class reported.

One chart, but it is a picture of graduate pay as a whole — not a survey of associate pay models.

The economics explain the variance.

Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report — drawn from the firms on its platform, mostly small firms — puts average utilization at 38% — the share of an eight-hour day spent on billable work — with 88% of billable work invoiced and 93% of invoiced work collected.

A firm whose collections trail its timesheets that far has less predictable money for raises — which may be one reason pay varies so much from firm to firm.

One honest gap: our research found no quotable survey of how small firms structure raises and bonuses.

Treat the model as an interview question — how are raises decided here, who decides them, and when?

On a lockstep scale, the annual raise does not wait on a review: each year your class steps to the next band, at that band's number.

The second mechanism is the market reset — when a scale-setting firm moves and others match, every class moves at once.

The June 2026 reset worked exactly that way — per the Milbank memo as reported, it added $10,000 to the first four class years and $20,000 to fifth- through eighth-years, lifting the schedule from $225,000 to $435,000 up to $235,000 to $455,000.

The previous numbers had been in place since the 2023 raise.

Flat markets work the same way in reverse.

In November 2025, as the ABA Journal reported, Cravath told associates its base salaries would stay the same in 2026 — $225,000 for the Class of 2025 up to $420,000 for the Class of 2019.

That memo predates the June 2026 market move, and whether Cravath later matched was not confirmed in the sources we read.

The structural point holds: under lockstep, a strong year does not move your base while the scale itself is standing still.

Bonuses are where individual numbers enter — where merit sneaks into lockstep.

The year-end scale Cravath set for 2025 ran $15,000 for the Class of 2025 (prorated) to $115,000 for the Class of 2018, plus special bonuses of $6,000 to $25,000; per Law360's reporting, that scale had been unchanged since 2021.

Some firms gate the scale: Cadwalader paid 120% of the year-end bonus to associates with at least 2,200 billable hours in 2025.

Hours can gate the base scale too.

In Above the Law's scorecard of the firms that matched the 2026 raise, the scale was commonly tied to a 1,900- or 2,000-hour billable expectation — Norton Rose Fulbright at 1,900, McDermott and Quinn Emanuel at 2,000, and Milbank's memo listing no minimum.

Not every bonus carries a gate: Milbank's 2026 special bonuses, announced July 27, 2026, ranged from $6,000 (Class of 2026) to $25,000 (the Class of 2018 and above, and special counsel) with no minimum hours, payable August 31, 2026 — Cahill matched on September 24, 2026.

The bonus memos have their own calendar and logic; our guide to BigLaw bonuses follows them in detail.

Some bonuses sit outside the ladder entirely — 73% of law offices in NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey offered judicial clerkship bonuses, with amounts varying by clerkship type.

And at a merit-based firm the raise is the review itself: no public scale, no match cycle, no band to step to.

One timing note — we found no announcement of 2026 year-end bonus amounts in the sources we read through October 2, 2026, so read last year's scale as history rather than as this December's number.

Neither system is better in the abstract — they price different things.

The honest comparison:

The case for lockstep:

• Your next year's pay is public. The scale is published, the next band is known, and the step happens without a review or a negotiation.
• Same class, same base. Year-to-year bargaining over base salary — and the pay disparities it can create inside a firm — is off the table.
• Market resets move everyone at once. The 2026 raise lifted every class year between $10,000 and $20,000 in a single memo, as reported — nothing any individual associate had to earn.

The case against lockstep:

• The base tracks tenure, not output. The scale pays the class, and bonuses are where individual numbers enter.
• Flat markets hold everyone still. Cravath's November 2025 memo, as the ABA Journal reported it, kept 2026 bases flat from $225,000 to $420,000 — strong years notwithstanding.
• The ladder has a top. Per Above the Law's scorecard, Katten's 2026 schedule capped at $440,000 for the Class of 2019 and above — a top step below the market's $455,000.

The case for merit-based pay:

• Performance can be paid ahead of seniority, and pay can adapt to the firm's market, its finances and the person.

The case against merit-based pay:

• There is no public benchmark. NALP's data shows the range — $150,000 or less was the most common first-year figure at firms of 250 or fewer lawyers — so valuing an offer is on you.
• Raises can ride on the firm's finances. The utilization and collections numbers above — platform averages from mostly small firms — sketch the pool a raise would come out of.

So which is better?

If you want compensation decided by a formula you can read, lockstep wins on predictability.

If you want performance to move your pay — and you are willing to negotiate and carry the risk of a thin year — the merit-based firm gives you more room and less cover.

Either way, the question that matters is the one you ask in the interview: how are raises decided here, and what did the last two cycles look like?

Career information, not legal advice. Pay figures on this page are firm-announced numbers reported in legal press, plus the survey series named above; compensation is set firm by firm, so confirm current scale, bonus and raise terms with the firm or your offer letter.