To get into law school in the U.S., the pieces are: a bachelor's degree — admission to a JD program requires one — an admission test score (LSAC says the LSAT is the only test accepted by all ABA-approved law schools), your undergraduate GPA, and the application itself, whose test registration, score release and Credential Assembly Service reports run through LSAC.
That is the field in numbers: 196 law schools filed ABA Standard 509 disclosures for 2025.
Here are the law school requirements, piece by piece.
Do you need a bachelor's degree?
Yes.
In the U.S., admission to a JD program requires a bachelor's degree, per LSAC.
The requirement our sources document is the degree itself.
Our research for this page did not surface any rule about which major that degree must be in — if you are choosing coursework with law school in mind, ask the admissions offices on your list what they look for.
The bachelor's comes first among the law school prerequisites; the JD is what law school itself adds.
Most JD programs are three-year, full-time programs, and part-time programs take about four years.
Part-time study is a real track rather than an edge case: 86 of the 196 ABA schools that filed 2025 disclosures reported part-time first-year students in fall 2025.
One boundary worth knowing early: the degree gets you into the profession's education step, not into practice.
Licensing is a separate process run by the bar admission authority where you plan to work, under that jurisdiction's own rules.
For the degree itself — what a JD is, how long it runs and how it differs from the LLM — see our guide to what a JD is.
What GPA and LSAT do you need?
The LSAT is the constant across the field: LSAC says it is the only admission test accepted by all ABA-approved law schools, and scores run from 120 to 180.
So what number gets you in?
The honest answer lives in school-level data, not in one score.
Across ABA schools in fall 2025, school median LSAT scores ranged from 139 to 175 — the median of those school medians was 159 — and median undergraduate GPAs ranged from 3.09 to 4.00, with a median of 3.67.
A school's median is the middle of its admitted class, not a floor; the distance between a 139-median school and a 175-median school is the range of the market itself.
Two alternatives exist at some schools, with caveats attached.
ETS says 130+ ABA-approved law schools accept the GRE — a count from the test maker itself — and that the ABA formally recognized the GRE as a valid admissions test in 2021.
Actual use is small: in the ABA's fall 2025 data, 92 of 196 reporting schools enrolled at least one first-year admit with a GRE score, and GRE-based enrollees totaled about 530 of 42,812 first-years.
JD-Next, a newer admission test, held ABA variances at 68 ABA-accredited schools as of the variance list we read in October 2026, and 30 schools reported JD-Next admits in fall 2025 — about 127 students in total.
Per JD-Next's own publisher, whose description of the standard we could not check against the ABA's own text, a variance is ABA permission for a school to use JD-Next in place of the LSAT or GRE, and ABA Standard 503 calls for a "valid and reliable" admission test.
For a sense of scale, the field those numbers sit inside: in fall 2025, 196 schools reported 517,099 applications — counted per school, so one applicant applying to five schools appears five times — 137,721 admission offers and 42,812 first-year enrollees.
Medians describe the class, not a cutoff
What application materials are required?
The mechanical side of applying — test registration, score release and Credential Assembly Service reports — runs through LSAC.
For the August 2026–June 2027 cycle, the LSAT costs $253 — a price that includes LSAT Argumentative Writing — registration for LSAC's Credential Assembly Service (CAS) costs $219, and each CAS Law School Report or LSAT-Only Law School Report costs $45 per school.
The writing sample is part of the package, not an afterthought.
The LSAT has two parts: four 35-minute multiple-choice sections plus an unscored writing sample, LSAT Argumentative Writing.
If you are a first-time test taker, you must complete it and have it approved before LSAC releases your score, and processing can take up to three weeks — build that lag into your schedule.
Where you sit the test has changed.
Starting with the August 2026 LSAT, LSAC requires in-person testing at Prometric test centers; remote testing is limited to medical or disability accommodations, or to test takers living more than 180 miles or three hours from a test center.
Cost help exists on the LSAC side: a Tier 1 fee waiver covers up to two LSATs within the two-year waiver period, while a Tier 2 waiver does not include a retake.
The sources we read for this page document LSAC's side of the process in detail, but they do not catalogue each school's required essays, recommendations or forms.
Each school's application instructions name those pieces, so treat the school's own list as your checklist.
LSAC's fees are cycle-specific
Do criminal records or past discipline matter?
Conduct history raises two different questions, and it is worth separating them.
The first — what a given law school's application asks about criminal history or prior academic discipline — is answered on that school's own form.
The sources we read for this page document scores, GPAs and application mechanics rather than individual schools' application questions, so if something in your history is on your mind, the application form itself and that school's admissions office are where a straight answer lives.
The second question is the one the record documents clearly, because it reaches every future lawyer: the licensing gate after graduation.
Background (character and fitness) investigations are part of the admission process in every jurisdiction.
NCBE, the National Conference of Bar Examiners, runs investigations and hosts applications for many — but not all — jurisdictions, and it makes no character and fitness decisions or recommendations: each jurisdiction decides who is fit to practice.
The review can also start before graduation.
In Texas, for example, first-semester JD students at Texas law schools must file a Declaration of Intention to Study Law with the Texas Board of Law Examiners — by October 1 of their first semester for fall entrants — which starts the character and fitness review early.
Character and fitness standards are set jurisdiction by jurisdiction
Does work experience help?
Here the honest answer is that the verified data goes quiet.
The numbers schools report in common — entering-class LSAT and GPA medians, applications, offers, enrollees — are the ones this page cites, and work experience does not appear in them.
Our research did not surface verified data on how admissions committees weigh a candidate's work experience.
Practically, the move is the one this page keeps returning to: ask the schools you are targeting.
Admissions offices can tell you how they read work history, what they want it to show and where it belongs in your application.
Experience in a law firm, in a courtroom-adjacent job or in any field that taught you to write and to argue is something you can present — the weighing is the school's, not yours to predict.
Career information, not legal advice. Law school admission requirements come from LSAC and from each school; character and fitness standards come from the bar admission authority where you plan to practice. Confirm current details with them before you act on anything here.