Honest answer first: our research found no practice-area breakdown for lawyer pay in the federal data — BLS counts every lawyer, from corporate to criminal, in one occupation.
What the verified numbers do show is wide, measurable gaps by employer type, firm size and sector: a $100,000 median starting salary for the Class of 2025, $155,000 in private practice against $75,000 in public interest, and a $159,670 median for all lawyers.
Below is what each type of lawyer can be documented to make — and where the data stops.
Pay by practice area at a glance
Start with the honest boundary: our research found no federal pay series for lawyers by practice area.
BLS counts every lawyer — corporate, criminal, environmental, entertainment — in a single occupation (SOC 23-1011), and BLS publishes no table that breaks median pay out by specialty.
A ranking that says IP lawyers earn $X while family lawyers earn $Y is not built on BLS data — BLS has no practice-area series to build it from.
What the verified series do measure is the employer.
The two comparison points the data supports — where a new graduate's first job sits, and which industry employs the lawyer — are the closest verified thing to a comparison of lawyer pay by type.
The table below is that comparison: median starting salaries for the Class of 2025, by the sector that hired them.
| First-job sector (NALP, Class of 2025) | Median starting salary |
|---|---|
| Private practice (law firms) | $155,000 |
| Business | $100,000 |
| Government | $81,000 |
| Public interest | $75,000 |
| Judicial clerkships | $72,533 |
| Education | $63,000 |
The national median across all Class of 2025 salaries was a record $100,000, up from $95,000 for the Class of 2024, and NALP measured these outcomes as of March 16, 2026, about ten months after graduation.
On the federal side, the May 2025 wage series for all lawyers (SOC 23-1011) puts the median at $159,670, with a 10th percentile of $78,360 and a 90th percentile of $351,600.
That top figure sits above BLS's $239,200 disclosure flag, so treat it as approximate — and the series excludes self-employed lawyers entirely, so it does not measure solo practitioners' or equity partners' income.
The salary hub carries the full national and state series — see all lawyer salary data for every table.
Where per-specialty salary tables come from
Transactional practice areas
Transactional lawyers structure and document business rather than argue cases: corporate and M&A work, tax, real estate, intellectual property licensing, and the regulatory side of fields like health care and privacy.
Employers here run from solo practices to corporate legal departments — and note that the large-firm figures below are firm-wide: they are cut by firm size and class year, not by practice department.
One entry gate is field-specific: patent practice.
BLS notes patent lawyers typically need a science or engineering background and must pass a USPTO-administered exam — a requirement that shapes who can move into that corner of IP work.
The large-firm numbers, in order of recency.
NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey put the median first-year associate base at $200,000 as of January 1, 2025 — $215,000 at firms of more than 700 lawyers — and $225,000 was the most common first-year salary, reported by 32% of offices overall and 45% of offices in 701+-lawyer firms.
Since July 1, 2026, the market scale set by Milbank's June 2, 2026 memo starts at $235,000 for first-years and tops out at $455,000 for the Class of 2018 — firm-memo figures reported in legal press, not a government series.
Matching was not uniform across the reported memos: Katten's topped out at $440,000, and Susman Godfrey was reported at $240,000 for first-years.
On the in-house side, the closest BLS proxy is the Management of Companies and Enterprises industry — corporate head offices — where all lawyers earned a median of $223,560 in May 2025.
That is an industry median for the whole occupation in that setting, not a corporate-department pay table.
Where these areas have pages of their own: corporate attorney salary data, tax attorney salary data, intellectual property attorney salary data, real estate attorney salary data and in-house counsel salary data.
For transactional fields without a page — health care, privacy and cyber, international work — the employer question in the last section below is the number you can actually anchor to.
Litigation practice areas
Litigation covers the dispute side: criminal defense and prosecution, personal injury, insurance defense, employment claims, family law and complex commercial cases.
Unlike the deal side, litigation jobs exist across the entire firm-size ladder — a solo criminal-defense practice and a 500+-lawyer firm's litigation department are the same practice area on paper and different worlds in pay.
NALP's Class of 2025 data shows how wide that ladder is inside private practice: the median starting salary was $155,000 overall, but firm-size medians ran from $84,000 at firms of 1–10 lawyers to $225,000 at firms of 500+ lawyers.
That spread — not the label on the docket — is the first thing to check about a litigation offer.
Government courtroom work has its own rows.
Prosecutors and public defenders are among the titles BLS lists for government lawyers, and the May 2025 sector medians for the industries that employ them were $131,350 in local government and $115,330 in state government (both excluding schools and hospitals) — industry medians for all lawyers in those settings, not prosecutor-specific pay tables.
For appointed federal criminal work, the maximum CJA panel rate is $177 per hour in non-capital cases for work performed on or after January 1, 2026 — a set maximum for panel appointments, not a market rate.
Where these areas have pages of their own: litigation attorney salary data, criminal defense attorney salary data, personal injury attorney salary data, insurance defense attorney salary data, employment attorney salary data, family law attorney salary data, public defender salary data and prosecutor salary data.
Public-interest practice areas
Civil rights, human rights, legal aid and indigent defense are the practice-area searches with the clearest verified answer, because the sector rows are unambiguous: the Class of 2025 median starting salary was $75,000 in public interest and $81,000 in government.
Public service overall took 31.0% of Class of 2025 jobs — 12.0% government, 9.0% public interest and 10.0% judicial clerkships.
For civil rights, human rights and legal aid work, the public-interest row is the closest sector median this table can offer — our research has no pay figure for those practice areas separately.
Federal loan policy is part of the pay structure here.
PSLF forgives the remaining Direct Loan balance after 120 qualifying monthly payments made while working full time — a weekly average of at least 30 hours — for a qualifying employer, and eligibility runs on the employer, not the job: U.S. government organizations at any level and 501(c)(3) nonprofits make the qualifying list, and for-profit employers — private law firms included — do not.
Program rules change, so confirm current terms on studentaid.gov before you count on them.
Immigration work straddles the line, with nonprofit legal aid on one side and private firms on the other: immigration attorney salary data.
The broader government category has its own page too: government attorney salary data.
Niche areas: sports, entertainment, environmental
Sports, entertainment and environmental law are the practice-area searches with the least data behind them — our research found no federal series that breaks them out.
For these fields the employer question comes first: a role can sit at a firm, a government agency, a nonprofit or an in-house legal department, and each of those settings carries a different verified median in the tables above.
The honest answer to how much an environmental lawyer makes is therefore an employer question.
A government environmental role maps to the state or local government medians in the tables above; an in-house role at a studio or an energy company maps to the corporate-head-office proxy; a small-firm practice maps to the small-firm medians.
The practice label tells you the subject matter.
The employer row is the number.
The long tail follows the same rule.
International, constitutional and nurse-attorney searches — the last pairing nursing with law practice — have no separate federal series in our research either.
For a niche field with no page of its own, a live job posting that publishes a pay range is the closest practice-specific figure we can point to — check current postings for your market.
Why practice area matters less than employer
Put the verified series side by side and the pattern holds: the dollar spread runs along the employer lines the data measures, not the practice-area lines it does not.
BLS's May 2025 medians for all lawyers (SOC 23-1011), by industry:
- Management of Companies and Enterprises — corporate head offices, the closest in-house proxy: $223,560
- Federal executive branch: $178,380
- Legal services — the law-firm industry: $157,870
- Local government (excluding schools and hospitals): $131,350
- State government (also excluding schools and hospitals): $115,330
Two structural cautions before reading that list as a ladder.
First, the series excludes self-employed workers, so it does not measure solo practitioners' or equity partners' income.
Second, industry medians describe where lawyers work, and that mix is lopsided — BLS's 2025 employment shares put legal services at 52% of lawyers, with 11% self-employed, 8% in local government (excluding education and hospitals), 7% in state government (also excluding education and hospitals) and 5% in federal government.
Starting-salary data shows the same shape from the other end.
NALP's Class of 2025 distribution is bimodal: 50.0% of the 22,715 reported full-time salaries fell between $60,000 and $100,000, while $225,000 accounted for 21.5% — two peaks, not one curve.
The unadjusted mean overstates the true average by an estimated 5.5%, because large-firm salaries are more completely reported — which is why a single average lawyer salary is the least useful number on this page.
Geography is the third measured driver.
Among states in May 2025, New York had the highest lawyer median at $207,860, followed by DC at $195,190 and California at $195,080, with Mississippi lowest at $91,690.
Career information, not legal advice. Every figure here is a statistical median or percentile from the named federal, NALP or legal-press-reported market-scale series — not an offer, a guarantee, or pay data for any specific specialty or employer. Pay is set employer by employer, so confirm current figures with the source series or the employer's own posting.