Full-time resident tuition at ABA-approved law schools runs from about $11,338 to $85,368 per year, with a median of about $49,910 in the ABA's 2025 Standard 509 data.
Tuition is not the whole bill — fees and living costs sit on top — and what a student actually pays can differ from the sticker price once scholarships enter the picture.
Here is how much law school costs, and why the published number is only the start.
How much is law school tuition?
ABA-approved law schools file annual Standard 509 disclosures, and 196 schools filed for 2025.
Those disclosures record each school's published tuition — the sticker price.
Across the compilation, median full-time resident tuition was about $49,910 per year, and median full-time nonresident tuition was about $53,640.
The spread matters as much as the middle.
Full-time resident tuition ranged from about $11,338 at the low end to about $85,368 at the high end — the same credential, at annual rates several times apart.
- Median full-time resident tuition (2025): about $49,910 per year
- Median full-time nonresident tuition (2025): about $53,640 per year
- Full range, full-time resident tuition: about $11,338 to $85,368 per year
These are annual figures, and they repeat every academic year you enroll — a three-year full-time JD means three years at your school's rate.
The medians also describe tuition only: the figures exclude fees and living costs, which is where the full cost of attendance begins.
Sticker tuition, 2025 data
What is the full cost of attendance?
The cost of law school is bigger than the tuition line.
The tuition figures above exclude fees and living costs.
The fuller number that bundles tuition with those other costs is what schools and students call the cost of attendance — each school's figure is its own, so read it rather than infer it from tuition.
Time multiplies the whole budget, not just tuition.
Most JD programs are three-year, full-time programs; part-time programs take about four years.
Part-time study is not a niche either: 86 of the 196 schools that filed 2025 disclosures reported part-time first-year students in fall 2025.
A fourth year brings a fourth year of fees and living costs — the trade-off a part-time schedule makes.
One limit to keep in mind: the national cost figures on this page cover tuition only.
There is no verified national cost-of-attendance number behind this article, so ask each school for its full cost of attendance rather than scaling the medians here.
Public vs private law school tuition
The resident/nonresident split in the data is a public-school structure.
Private law schools report a single tuition figure whether a student is a state resident or not.
Public schools are where residency changes the rate: in the 2025 509 data, the median full-time nonresident rate of about $53,640 ran above the median resident rate of about $49,910.
Residency is therefore the obvious tuition lever at a public school.
The sources behind this page do not cover how an individual school determines residency, so treat it as a question to ask the school's admissions or financial aid office, not an assumption to make.
What the compilation does not give is a verified public-versus-private average — the medians above mix both sectors.
That is fine for orientation and wrong for a decision: when you shortlist schools, read each school's own 509 figures, which show its actual rates rather than an average across 196 very different schools.
Sticker price vs what students actually pay
The sticker price is the published figure each school reports — every tuition number above is sticker tuition.
What a student actually pays is the net price: the sticker price reduced by grants and scholarships, set student by student.
The same 2025 509 disclosures show how common that aid is: 92,105 of 116,343 JD students at 196 ABA schools (79.2%) received grants or scholarships from their school, 7.0% received grants of full tuition or more, and 51.9% of grant recipients got less than half tuition.
Across schools, each school's median full-time grant (its 50th-percentile grant) had a middle value of about $24,176, ranging from $1,000 to $60,000 by school.
That is a median of school medians, not a typical discount — don't subtract it from the tuition median to get a net price.
The sticker-versus-net distinction is why the tuition medians here should be read as a starting line, not a receipt.
Two students at the same school can pay different net prices depending on the aid each is offered, and a school with a higher sticker price can, for a particular student, cost less out of pocket than a cheaper one.
The practical way to price a school: take each school's full cost of attendance, subtract the grants and scholarships it actually offers you, and compare the remainder — scholarships and grants are the lever between the sticker price and the check you write, which makes the aid conversation part of the school decision, not an afterthought.
No verified national net price
How cost should factor into choosing a law school
Price is a constraint, not a ranking.
The more useful comparison is cost against realistic return, and the national benchmark our sources carry is the Department of Education's College Scorecard: across law programs, the middle value of each program's median completer earnings was about $67,500 one year after completion and about $97,900 four years after.
Those figures are a median of program medians and cover federal-aid recipients only.
Hold that against the tuition range above and the decision gets sharper.
A school at the top of the range and one near the bottom both grant the same JD, so the question is what each school's full cost of attendance buys you — the curriculum, the location, the practice-area depth and the outcomes in the market you plan to work in — and what it leaves you paying.
Keep the rest of the path in the calculation too.
Admission to a JD program requires a bachelor's degree, and the JD is what LSAC calls the 'first degree' in law needed in almost all cases to practice in the U.S. How you finance it all — savings, scholarships or loans — is a decision of its own.
Career information, not legal or financial advice. Tuition and cost figures above are 2025 data; confirm current tuition, fees and cost of attendance with each school's financial aid office and its ABA Standard 509 disclosure before you decide.