The best states for lawyers by headcount are New York, California, Texas, Florida, the District of Columbia and Illinois — but the right state for you depends on what you weigh: pay against living costs, demand, bar-admission portability and quality of life.
Location sticks, too: 65.6% of employed Class of 2025 graduates work in the state where they attended law school.
Here is the framework, the data and the thinner markets worth a look.
How to compare states: pay, cost of living and demand
Judge a legal market on three things, in this order.
First, what lawyers are paid there — and what housing, taxes and childcare cost, because a wage only means something net of them.
Second, how much work there is: the size and mix of the employer base.
Third, whether your license can travel, which decides how reversible the move is.
On pay, the national benchmark is the BLS median annual wage for lawyers (SOC 23-1011): $159,670 in May 2025.
Two cautions apply before you compare states against it.
The BLS wage series excludes self-employed lawyers and owners or partners of unincorporated businesses, so it does not describe solo or partner income.
And it comes with no cost-of-living adjustment: the same median supports a different life in different metros, so price out the housing and taxes where you would actually live before ranking states by pay.
Our attorney salary by state page lays out the BLS medians state by state.
Demand is harder to read from a single number.
The signals that travel are the employer mix and the firm-size mix in the market you're considering — the next section gives the national benchmarks to compare against.
For the national picture itself — projected growth and annual openings — see the attorney job outlook guide.
The top metros and states for attorney jobs
Start with scale.
The ABA's 2025 Profile of the Legal Profession counted 1,374,720 active U.S. lawyers in 2025, and six jurisdictions hold the largest numbers of them:
| Jurisdiction | Active lawyers (2025) |
|---|---|
| New York | 190,015 |
| California | 181,048 |
| Texas | 99,867 |
| Florida | 80,976 |
| District of Columbia | 65,824 |
| Illinois | 61,945 |
Headcount marks the deep markets — the most lawyers in one place — and with it the deepest competition for the work.
New York's density is the country's highest at 9.6 lawyers per 1,000 residents, against roughly four per 1,000 nationally, per the ABA's 2024 Profile.
Beyond raw counts, compare a metro on two mixes.
Employer mix: nationally in 2025, legal services employed 52% of lawyers, 11% were self-employed, 8% worked in local government, 7% in state government and 5% in federal government (BLS).
A metro whose mix leans harder on one employer type moves with that type's fortunes.
Firm-size mix: among Class of 2025 law-firm jobs nationally, firms of 501+ lawyers took 33.2% and firms of 1–10 lawyers took 26.4% (NALP) — a market with both ends of that spectrum offers more different ladders than one with only small firms.
For a pay read on specific cities, NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey found a median entry-level associate salary of $225,000 in six of the 19 cities surveyed: Austin, Boston, Houston, New York City, San Francisco and the Washington, DC area.
That survey is a large-firm-heavy sample that predates the 2026 raise, so this is neither today's figure nor an all-lawyers median like the BLS number above.
Depth shows up in hiring too: NALP counted an average of eight 2L summer associates per office in 2025 — and New York City offices averaged 29.
UBE portability as a location factor
Portability decides how reversible a move is, and it is not one national rule — it varies jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
NCBE — the organization that writes the exams and admits no one itself — lists 42 jurisdictions that have adopted the Uniform Bar Examination since 2011, most recently Wisconsin, which held its first UBE in July 2026.
A UBE score transfers between adopting jurisdictions, but each jurisdiction sets its own minimum passing score, and that same standard applies to people transferring a score in as to those who tested there.
Scores also expire at different speeds: most UBE jurisdictions accept transferred scores for three years, with the limits running from two years to five.
How the mechanics work is its own topic: our UBE score transfer guide walks through it.
Already licensed?
Admission on motion is the second path: per NCBE, 43 jurisdictions allow experienced lawyers to be admitted on motion, with practice requirements its pages typically list as "3 of past 5" or "5 of past 7" years — Washington's is "1 of past 3".
Eight states have no motion route at all: California, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, Nevada, Rhode Island and South Carolina (as of October 2026).
If you're licensed and eyeing one of them, check that state's admission routes before planning a move around a waiver that doesn't exist.
Which states let experienced lawyers waive in, and on what terms, is the subject of our bar reciprocity guide.
Portability rules change
Underserved states with opportunity
Opportunity can hide where the lawyer count looks thin.
Nationally there are roughly four lawyers per 1,000 residents; New York tops the table at 9.6, and South Carolina sits at the bottom with a little over two per 1,000 (ABA 2024 Profile).
A low ratio is not automatically opportunity — it can reflect thin demand as much as thin supply — but it does change the math a newcomer faces: fewer lawyers per resident means less established competition for whatever work the state generates.
Growth points the same direction.
Over the 10 years to 2025, the lawyer population grew 11% in the South and 7% in the West, rose about 3% in the Northeast, and fell 1.4% in the Midwest — the only region to shrink (ABA).
Headcount is supply rather than demand, but a profession adding lawyers fastest in the South and West is at least expanding there.
South Dakota has turned rural recruitment into a program: its Rural Attorney Recruitment Program pays attorneys $12,513.60 a year for five years — $62,568 in total to practice continuously in a county of 10,000 or fewer people or a town of 3,500 or fewer.
A state writing incentive payments — sized, per the program, at the equivalent of 90% of one year's resident law-school tuition and fees — to move lawyers into its smallest communities is a signal of how thin rural lawyer supply can run.
County-level "legal desert" counts, on the other hand, did not turn up in the primary sources we read for this page, so no such figure appears here — the state-level numbers above are the verified picture.
And whatever thin-market state you're considering, check its admission routes too: South Carolina, the lowest-density state in the ABA's table, is also one of the eight with no admission-on-motion route (NCBE, as of October 2026).
Where to find attorney jobs
Once you've shortlisted markets, the listings are the test.
Browse attorney jobs on LawFirmHires — openings at law firms across the states and cities above, alongside the legal-staff roles firms hire for.
If you're still mapping the profession itself, the attorney careers hub is the starting point: settings, paths, licensing and pay.
Career information, not legal advice. Pay figures come from BLS (May 2025) and NALP surveys as dated above; bar admission, UBE score transfer and admission-on-motion rules change, so confirm them with the admitting authority in the state where you want to practice.