You become a health care lawyer the way you become any lawyer: lawyers typically need a law degree and a state license, which usually requires passing a bar examination, and the specialty is built on top of that baseline.
The work centers on the rules governing hospitals, insurers, drug and device companies and government health programs.
This page maps what the work involves, who hires health care attorneys, and how new and lateral lawyers break in.
What does a health care lawyer do?
Health care law is the specialty that sits where medicine meets regulation.
Health care lawyers — you will also see healthcare attorney and health law attorney for the same role — advise the organizations that deliver and pay for care: hospitals and health systems, physician groups, insurers, drug and device companies, and the government programs that regulate and reimburse them.
The subject matter runs through everything they touch:
- Regulation and compliance. The federal rules governing health information privacy, fraud and abuse in government health programs, and those programs' enrollment, billing and reimbursement requirements.
- Transactions. Hospital mergers and affiliations, physician practice acquisitions and joint ventures — deals structured around the same regulatory limits.
- Privacy and data. How patient information is collected, shared and protected as records move among providers, payers and vendors.
- Disputes and enforcement. Responding to government investigations and audits, and handling commercial and payer disputes that grow out of regulated relationships.
- In-house counseling. Turning the rules above into operating decisions alongside clinical, finance and compliance teams.
Read together, those are counseling functions: the point of the work is to structure a relationship, a deal or a program so it survives regulatory scrutiny before a dispute exists.
One honesty note before the detail: no source behind this page documents a single health-care legal office the way some specialties can be profiled, so the picture above is the field's own shape rather than one measured employer's split — and how much of each bucket a given seat carries depends on the employer.
Where the specialty sits in the profession: our types of lawyers guide surveys the practice areas, and the attorney careers hub covers the profession as a whole — same license baseline, different body of statutes.
Who hires health care lawyers? Firms, government, in-house and nonprofits
Start with the honest caveat: BLS counts employers for lawyers as a whole, not by practice area.
In 2025 the largest employers of lawyers were legal services (52%), self-employed lawyers (11%), local government (8%), state government (7%) and federal government (5%).
BLS publishes no health-care-only version of that table — which is also why nothing on this page can tell you what share of the specialty each employer type takes.
Law firms.
Health practices inside firms serve hospital systems, insurers and life-sciences clients with a mix of regulatory, transactional and litigation work.
The firm-size data describes new graduates generally, not health-law hires, but it shows where the seats are concentrated: firms of more than 500 lawyers are the single largest employer of new law graduates, taking more than one in five employed Class of 2025 graduates, and about one in four once 251–500-lawyer firms are counted.
Across all Class of 2025 law-firm jobs, firms of 501+ lawyers accounted for 33.2% and firms of 1–10 lawyers for 26.4% — the big-firm and small-firm ends of that size split.
Government.
Federal attorney jobs sit in the GS-0905 General Attorney series — covering trial work, legal advice to an agency, drafting regulations, contracts and legislative comments — and are filled outside competitive-service examining as Schedule A excepted-service appointments.
That series covers federal attorneys whatever the subject matter, so federal attorney jobs at the agencies that write and enforce health regulation are classified in it too.
Among government lawyers generally, BLS's described titles include prosecutor, public defender and general counsel, and the Justice Department alone employed nearly 13,000 general attorneys, per the ABA's 2024 Profile (December 2023 figures).
In-house.
Hospitals, health systems, insurers and drug and device companies employ lawyers directly.
The business-sector data is where in-house work shows up: among Class of 2024 graduates in business-sector jobs, in-house lawyer was the most common job type at 22.6% of business jobs — though only 32.6% of all business-sector jobs required bar admission, a reminder that some legal-adjacent corporate roles sit outside licensed practice.
What that data does not show is the route: it does not quantify how many graduates reach an in-house seat directly versus laterally.
Nonprofits and academia.
Nonprofit hospital systems, universities and academic medical centers, and organizations working on coverage and access are part of the employer mix.
The closest measured category is NALP's: public interest took 9.0% of Class of 2025 jobs, and public service overall — government, public interest and judicial clerkships — accounted for 31.0%, but the sources behind this page don't define which employers NALP counts in that category, so read the 9.0% as the profession-wide public-interest share rather than a nonprofit-specific one.
For the segment in depth, see our public interest law guide.
What background and courses help health care lawyers?
First, the license: the baseline is the lawyer baseline.
BLS lists the typical entry-level education for lawyers as a doctoral or professional degree, and its summary is that lawyers typically need a law degree and a state license, which usually requires passing a bar examination.
No separately named health-law credential appears in the licensing requirements the sources behind this page describe — the specialty is built on top of the standard license, not beside it.
One specialty BLS's own lawyer profile gives added requirements for is patent law: BLS notes patent lawyers typically need a science or engineering background and must pass a USPTO-administered exam.
Nothing in the BLS lawyer-profile material behind this page's facts pairs health care practice with an equivalent requirement.
What the sources behind this page also do not do is measure how much any particular degree or coursework matters to health-care employers — no source read for this page quantifies that, so read the postings for the employers you actually want rather than any general claim about backgrounds.
What is documented is what a major federal selector says it weighs.
DOJ lists its Honors Program selection criteria as commitment to government service, academics, leadership, journal/moot court/mock trial, clinics, past employment and relevant extracurriculars — the places where a health-care interest gets demonstrated rather than asserted.
- Electives your school offers in health law, administrative law, business associations, tax or compliance
- A clinic with real docket or client work you can name in interviews
- Journal, moot court or mock trial participation — named criteria in DOJ's Honors selection
- Summer positions in the offices you're targeting — BLS notes a successful summer job or internship may result in an offer after graduation
Still deciding whether this is your specialty?
Our guide to choosing a practice area walks through the decision from the other direction.
Licensing is set jurisdiction by jurisdiction
How do lawyers break into the field?
The entry levers the sources document are general rather than specialty-specific, because no health-care-specific entry data exists in the research behind this page.
BLS notes a successful summer job or internship during law school may result in an employment offer after graduation, and that judicial clerkships are typically 1- or 2-year terms some graduates take before practicing.
For federal work, the entry-level program documented in detail is the Department of Justice's Attorney General's Honors Program — DOJ's entry-level attorney recruitment program, running since 1953.
Eligibility is narrow: graduating law students and recent graduates who entered a judicial clerkship, graduate law program or qualifying legal fellowship within 9 months of graduation.
The window is short — for the 2026–2027 cycle, the application opened Aug 28, 2026 and closed Sept 8, 2026 — and DOJ's published timeline runs interview invitations in early October, interviews from late October to mid-November, and offers from November on.
Two mechanical notes for reading federal postings: federal "law clerk trainee" appointments exist for law graduates pending bar admission and may not exceed 14 months.
And calibrate expectations on volume — NALP measured a 37.0% drop in new graduates hired by the federal government excluding judicial clerkships, from nearly 1,100 in the Class of 2024 to about 690 in the Class of 2025 — so treat federal openings as one competitive path, not a plan with slack in it.
Geography compounds the planning: 65.6% of employed Class of 2025 graduates worked in the same state where they attended law school, so where you study shapes which employers are realistically in reach.
For lawyers already in practice, one route in is adjacent work: regulatory, corporate or litigation matters for health-industry clients, or compliance experience inside a health organization, which a health practice can be built on.
Job market and demand
BLS publishes no count of health care lawyers: it tracks the lawyer occupation as a whole and does not break employment out by practice area.
Any precise "number of health care lawyers" or "health lawyer growth rate" figure you encounter therefore came from someone other than BLS — treat it accordingly.
What the primary sources do measure is the profession.
Lawyers held about 863,700 jobs in 2025 (SOC 23-1011).
BLS projects 5% employment growth from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations, with about 28,700 openings a year on average over that span, many from replacing workers who retire or change occupations.
BLS also expects some routine legal work to be automated but does not expect that to reduce overall demand for lawyers.
For the profession-wide outlook in depth, see our attorney job outlook article — this page stays on what the specialty can and cannot claim from the same data.
The entry-level market the Class of 2025 graduated into was strong by NALP's measures: 92.8% of graduates were employed about ten months after graduation, 84.6% held jobs requiring or anticipating bar admission — the highest share since NALP's current job classifications began in 2001 — and 60.9% of employed graduates went to private practice, the highest share since the Class of 1990.
BLS doesn't track pay for the specialty either.
Its median annual wage for lawyers was $159,670 in May 2025 (SOC 23-1011) — a figure that excludes self-employed lawyers and owners and partners of unincorporated businesses, so it describes neither solo nor partner income.
By sector, BLS's May 2025 medians were $178,380 in federal government, $157,870 in legal services, $131,390 in local government and $115,330 in state government.
NALP's Class of 2025 numbers tell the entry-level side: a record $100,000 national median starting salary, a $155,000 private-practice median ranging from $84,000 at 1–10-lawyer firms to $225,000 at 500+, and sector medians of $81,000 in government and $75,000 in public interest.
All of these describe lawyers as an occupation, not health-care specialists.
Where to find health care attorney jobs
Start wide: browse attorney jobs to see current openings across employers, search more than one title, and read each posting against the employer types in this page's second section — the regulatory-to-litigation mix tells you which seat you're actually interviewing for.
For the general path this page specializes — college through law school, the bar and a first legal job, in order — see how to become a lawyer.
Career information, not legal advice. The licensing summary here is BLS's occupation-level description; confirm current bar admission requirements with the bar admission authority in your state.