There is no single good LSAT score — the useful target is a number that clears the medians of the schools on your list.
Scores run from 120 to 180, and the medians ABA-approved schools reported for fall 2025 ran from 139 to 175, with 159 the median of school medians.
The same score can sit above one school's median and well below another's.
What is a good LSAT score?
"Good" on the LSAT is relative, not fixed.
The test itself is scored on a single scale — 120 at the bottom, 180 at the top, with every question weighted equally and no deduction for wrong answers, per LSAC — but no point on that scale is good or bad on its own.
What makes a score good is where it lands against the schools you are targeting.
The comparison point that matters is the median each school reports to the ABA in its disclosures: the middle score of the class the school enrolled, with half of the class above it and half below.
Score above a school's reported median and you are in the upper half, by LSAT, of the class that school has actually enrolled.
Score below it and you are not disqualified — a median describes a class, not a minimum — but the recent middle of that school's admits sat above your number.
Percentiles are the other context LSAC gives you: a percentile rank reflects the share of test takers scoring lower over the previous three testing years, and LSAC updates the ranks every year by the end of July.
Our research for this page did not capture LSAC's current percentile table, so for a specific percentile, check the tables on LSAC's own scoring pages rather than relying on an article like this one.
What is the average LSAT score?
Two different numbers hide behind that question, and it matters which one you mean.
The average across everyone who sits the LSAT is not something our research could confirm — the current percentile table behind LSAC's ranks was not among the sources we could verify, so we won't quote a number we can't support.
What the ABA's fall 2025 school-level data does show: across the schools reporting to the ABA, school medians ranged from 139 to 175, and the median of those school medians was 159.
Read that number for what it is — the middle of schools' reported medians, with half of ABA schools above it and half below — not the average score of everyone who takes the test.
We can't confirm the test-taker average
What score do you need for top, regional and local schools?
No source we verified publishes a score threshold per tier, and the ABA disclosures our research drew on do not sort schools into tiers at all — they report each school's median.
The tier labels you see elsewhere come from commercial rankings, not from those disclosures.
The spread in the data is the real story: fall 2025 medians ran from 139 at one end of ABA-approved schools to 175 at the other, so the score that clears one school's typical class can sit far below another's.
A score that is decent for one list is a stretch for the next.
At the top of the table, the highest medians reported to the ABA for fall 2025 were:
- 175 — Washington University in St. Louis
- 174 — Yale, Harvard and Chicago
- 173 — Virginia, Stanford, Penn, Northwestern, Cornell and Columbia
For Harvard specifically, the number to know is 174: the median Harvard reported for the class it enrolled in fall 2025 — a description of the class, not a published minimum requirement.
Below the top, the same compilation runs down to school medians of 139, with the rest of ABA-approved schools filling in a wide middle.
That is why the practical method is list-first: pick the schools you would actually attend, look up each one's most recent reported median in its ABA disclosure, and read your score against those numbers rather than against a generic benchmark.
Two pieces of context from the same data: the 196 schools that filed 2025 disclosures reported 42,812 first-year enrollees against 137,721 offers extended, and their median undergraduate GPAs ran from 3.09 to 4.00 (median 3.67) — grades are the second number schools report alongside the score.
Is there a passing score?
No. The LSAT is an admission test, not a pass/fail examination: it produces a score on the 120–180 scale, and no point on that scale is a pass line.
Per LSAC, it is the only admission test accepted by all ABA-approved law schools, and each school reads the score in its own admissions process — which is why the same score can clear one school's median and fall below another's.
If your score is not where your list needs it to be, the test can be retaken — within limits.
LSAC allows five attempts within the current reportable score period and seven over a lifetime, and from August 2026 through June 2027 the LSAT costs $253 per sitting, including LSAT Argumentative Writing.
One structural fact should shape any retake decision: law schools receive all of your reportable scores, not a hand-picked best.
LSAC advises schools that the average score is the best predictor, while noting that some schools weigh the highest score more.
LSAC also says test takers taking their second test in the same testing year raise their scores by 2 to 3 points on average — a typical gain, not a guarantee.
How does your score change scholarship offers?
Here we have to be straight with you: how any school converts an LSAT score into a scholarship offer is not something the sources we verified document, and we won't invent score-to-aid bands.
Aid policies are school-specific, so the reliable move is to ask each school's financial aid office directly how LSAT scores figure into its award decisions — before you rely on any score-to-scholarship chart, including ones you will find elsewhere.
What the verified numbers do show is how much money that decision touches.
Full-time tuition across ABA schools in the 2025 disclosures: a median of about $49,910 per year for residents — a range that runs from about $11,338 up to $85,368 at the top — plus a median of about $53,640 for full-time nonresidents; figures exclude fees and living costs.
On the debt side, the Department of Education's College Scorecard puts median federal loan debt at graduation for law programs at about $105,900 — school medians run from about $45,200 to $229,700.
That is the range a tuition discount is measured against.
Your score is the part of that equation you still control at application time.
If it sits below the medians of the schools on your list, the retake facts in the section above — a modest average same-year gain, with every reportable score visible to schools — are the practical frame for deciding whether to test again before you apply.
Costs and aid change every cycle — confirm with the school
How does school choice affect where you can work after?
The career question this chain leads to — how a school's graduates split between large firms, small firms, government and clerkships — is not quantified in the ABA disclosures our research drew on, and we did not capture school-by-school placement data.
We won't estimate those splits here.
The reliable source for them is each school itself: ask for its most recent employment-outcome reporting for its recent graduating classes, and weigh a school's willingness to share that data as part of the answer.
What our research does document are national aggregates across ABA schools — baselines, not per-school outcomes.
Of 2025 graduates who took a bar exam for the first time, 84.2% passed — 29,300 of 34,806 takers across 195 schools, per the ABA's 2026 bar passage report — and for 2023 graduates the two-year ultimate passage rate was about 92.3%.
The Department of Education's College Scorecard puts median earnings for law program completers at about $67,500 one year after completion and about $97,900 four years after — medians of program medians, counting federal-aid recipients only.
Use those aggregates as the starting line for per-school comparison.
The score that gets you admitted is the entry condition; after that, the outcomes each school documents for its own graduates — placement, bar passage, debt levels — are a better guide to where you can realistically work than any score band.
For the large-firm end of that spectrum, our guide to BigLaw covers how the biggest firms work and who they hire.
Career information, not legal advice. Medians, fees, tuition, debt and outcome data change each cycle — confirm current numbers with LSAC, the ABA's disclosures, and each school's admissions and financial aid offices before you act on them.