Yes.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects lawyer employment to grow 5% from 2025 to 2035 — faster than the average for all occupations — with about 28,700 openings a year.
The American Bar Association counted 1,374,720 lawyers in 2025, up 1.38% in a year, and 92.8% of the Class of 2025 were employed about ten months after graduation.
Here is the lawyer job outlook in detail: where the profession is growing, and where it isn't.
What does BLS project for lawyer employment?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes the closest thing the U.S. has to an official lawyer job outlook.
Its Occupational Outlook Handbook counted about 863,700 lawyer jobs in 2025 (occupation 23-1011) and projects 5% employment growth from 2025 to 2035 — faster than the average for all occupations.
Read the two numbers together.
The 5% is steady rather than spectacular growth; the openings figure is the one a job seeker actually feels.
BLS projects about 28,700 openings for lawyers each year, on average, over the decade, and notes that many of them are expected to result from the need to replace workers who transfer to different occupations or exit the labor force — to retire, for example.
Replacement demand is why hiring in a large, established profession stays active even when growth is modest: lawyers retire and change occupations every year, and their work has to be covered.
One scope note before going further: these projections describe the occupation as a whole.
BLS does not project demand separately by practice area, so a 5% outlook is not a promise about any one kind of law.
Which practice areas and regions are hiring most?
Practice areas first, with the honest limit: BLS does not split the lawyer occupation into practice areas, and we found no primary-source count of how many lawyers practice personal injury, immigration or family law, so no such figure appears here.
The split the official data does publish is employer type: in 2025, legal services employed 52% of lawyers, 11% were self-employed, 8% worked in local government (excluding education and hospitals), 7% in state government (also excluding education and hospitals) and 5% in federal government.
For what each area's day-to-day work involves, our types of lawyers guide covers every practice area.
Regions are better documented.
Per the ABA's 2025 profile, the states with the most active lawyers were New York (190,015), California (181,048), Texas (99,867), Florida (80,976), the District of Columbia (65,824) and Illinois (61,945).
Headcount is supply rather than demand, but the same ABA data shows where the profession is actually adding lawyers: 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.
For a new graduate, the regional market is mostly local: 65.6% of employed Class of 2025 graduates worked in the same state where they attended law school.
Where you go to school is, in practice, where your entry market usually is.
How are new graduates doing in the job market?
The entry-level market has rarely looked better on paper.
NALP — the association that measures law graduate outcomes — evaluated the Class of 2025 as of March 16, 2026, about ten months after graduation, covering more than 97% of graduates of ABA-accredited schools.
92.8% were employed, the second-highest rate on record after the Class of 2024's 93.4%.
The mix behind the rate is the demand signal.
84.6% of the class took jobs requiring or anticipating bar admission — the highest share since NALP introduced its current job classifications in 2001 — and NALP's Class of 2024 report credited growth in public defender and prosecutor hiring as a key driver of the recovery since bar-required jobs bottomed at 64.4% for the Classes of 2012 and 2013.
Private practice absorbed 60.9% of employed graduates, the most since the Class of 1990.
Firms of more than 500 lawyers were the single largest employer of new graduates, taking more than one in five employed graduates — about one in four once 251–500-lawyer firms are counted.
The firm-size split ran the full width of the market: firms of 501+ lawyers took 33.2% of Class of 2025 law-firm jobs, and firms of 1–10 lawyers took 26.4%.
Government was the mixed story.
Public service overall — government, judicial clerkships and public interest — accounted for 31.0% of Class of 2025 jobs: government 12.0%, clerkships 10.0% and public interest 9.0%.
Federal hiring moved the other way: about 690 graduates were hired by the federal government excluding clerkships, a 37.0% drop from nearly 1,100 the year before.
Pay moved with the market.
The class's national median starting salary reached a record $100,000, up from $95,000 for the Class of 2024; our guide to lawyer starting salaries puts that number in context.
Which NALP numbers these are
Is there a lawyer shortage anywhere?
Shortage is a where question before it is a whether question.
Nationally, the ABA's 2024 profile put lawyer density at roughly four lawyers per 1,000 residents.
The spread underneath that average is wide: New York tops it at 9.6 lawyers per 1,000, while South Carolina sits at the bottom with a little over two per 1,000 — the fewest per capita.
At least one state has put cash on the table: South Dakota's Rural Attorney Recruitment Program pays $12,513.60 a year for five years — $62,568 in total to attorneys who practice continuously in a county of 10,000 or fewer people or a town of 3,500 or fewer; per the program, each payment works out to 90% of a year's resident law-school tuition and fees.
A state writing checks sized to law-school tuition to move lawyers into its smallest counties is a fairly direct signal of where supply runs thin.
A caveat on the word "shortage": county-level counts of legal deserts — counties with few or no lawyers — did not turn up in the primary sources we read for this page, so no such figure appears here.
What the state-level data does support is narrower: lawyer supply is uneven across states, and at least one state pays attorneys to practice in its smallest communities.
How do law firm layoffs and AI factor in?
AI is the question with a documented official answer.
BLS expects some routine legal work to be automated and says that increased efficiency is not expected to reduce overall demand for lawyers.
The deeper dive — which tasks AI already assists with, which roles are most exposed, what stays human — is its own page: AI and lawyer jobs.
Layoffs are the harder half to generalize about, deliberately: they are firm-by-firm, year-by-year events, while every figure on this page is market-wide — a ten-year BLS projection, an ABA count of the whole profession, an NALP measurement of an entire graduating class.
With about 28,700 openings a year, many of them created by lawyers retiring or leaving the occupation, individual firms can shrink while the profession as a whole keeps growing.
Where to find attorney jobs
The projections are the backdrop; the listings are the market.
Browse attorney jobs on LawFirmHires — openings posted by law firms, alongside the legal-staff roles firms hire for.
If you are still shaping the decision itself, the attorney careers hub maps the whole role: settings, paths and pay.
Career information, not legal advice. Market figures on this page come from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook (2025–2035 projections), NALP's Class of 2025 Selected Findings (August 5, 2026 preview; the full Jobs & JDs report is scheduled for October 2026) and the ABA's 2024 and 2025 Profile of the Legal Profession — check each source for updates before you act on them.