Measured on the national medians, the physician occupation in the sourced comparison — family medicine — out-earned lawyers in May 2025: $244,180 against $159,670 in BLS's OEWS survey.
Both figures cover wage-and-salary employees only, and both carry caveats — lawyer pay stretches from $78,360 at the 10th percentile to $351,600 at the 90th, and BLS footnotes its highest published values.
Here is what the sourced data establish, and what they leave open.
Median pay compared
The one like-for-like comparison in the sourced data is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey for May 2025 — national figures for wage-and-salary employees.
On that table, family medicine physicians (BLS tracks each physician occupation separately; family medicine is the one in our sourced comparison) had a median annual wage of $244,180, against $159,670 for lawyers (SOC 23-1011).
Lower down, the gap nearly closes: lawyers' 10th percentile ($78,360) actually sits above family medicine's ($76,830).
By the 25th percentile the order reverses — family medicine's $162,420 already tops the lawyer median — and the gap widens from there:
| Annual wage percentile | Lawyers | Family medicine physicians |
|---|---|---|
| 10th | $78,360 | $76,830 |
| 25th | $102,990 | $162,420 |
| Median (50th) | $159,670 | $244,180 |
| 75th | $221,370 | $334,270 |
| 90th | $351,600 | $428,550 |
National annual wages, wage-and-salary employees, BLS OEWS May 2025. Lawyers' mean annual wage was $185,840, above the median — the pull of the top of the distribution.
One caution before you read the top rows: BLS adds a footnote to published OEWS values of $239,200 a year ($115 an hour) and above, and the exact figures above that line — the family medicine median, its 75th- and 90th-percentile values, and the lawyers' 90th percentile — come through the BLS API rather than the capped published tables.
Treat them as approximate markers of where the distribution lands, not precise cutoffs.
For the lawyer numbers on their own — by state, percentile and setting — see our lawyer salary data.
Employees only
Training time and debt
Pay is where the sourced data are strong; training time and educational debt are where they run out.
The federal wage series behind this page measures what employees were paid in May 2025 — not how many years of school each career demands or what the loans cost, and our pay research holds no verified law-vs-medicine debt comparison.
We won't quote one.
The training-years-and-debt side of the decision is its own comparison; our lawyer vs doctor guide covers it.
What the pay data does pin down is one federal lever that changes the debt math for both professions: Public Service Loan Forgiveness.
PSLF forgives the remaining Direct Loan balance after the equivalent of 120 qualifying monthly payments made while working full time for a qualifying employer.
Eligibility follows the employer, not the occupation — U.S. government organizations at any level and 501(c)(3) nonprofits qualify, while private law firms do not — and full time means a weekly average of at least 30 hours.
Studentaid.gov also lists the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) as PSLF-qualifying, with special payment rules for borrowers with any loan disbursed on or after July 1, 2026.
Because the test keys on the employer, it lands identically on both careers: a lawyer in a government legal office and a physician employed by a 501(c)(3) hospital are on the qualifying side of the same line; private-practice owners on either side are not.
The details — qualifying payments, employment certification, plan fine print — live in our PSLF for lawyers guide.
Forgiveness rules move
Peak earnings
At the 90th percentile, family medicine physicians stood at $428,550 against $351,600 for lawyers — and both figures sit above BLS's $239,200 footnote line, so read them as approximate markers of where the top tenth lands.
Lawyers' mean annual wage, $185,840, sits above the $159,670 median — the shape of a distribution with a long top tail.
The table also has a structural blind spot at the top: it counts employees.
Equity partners, solo practitioners and physician-owners sit outside OEWS entirely, so whatever the very top of either profession earns by owning the practice, it is not in these percentiles.
For employed lawyers, one marker of the top of the employed market is the large-firm base-salary scale.
Legal press reported in June 2026 that Milbank set a new associate scale effective July 1, 2026, running from $235,000 for the entering class to $455,000 for eighth-year associates, and that other firms matched — though not all on the same terms (one firm set first-year pay at $240,000; another capped the scale at $440,000).
That scale is firm-memo reporting carried by legal press, not a government series — don't line it up against the BLS table as if the two measured the same thing.
Hours: what the pay data capture
Neither median says anything about the hours that produced it — OEWS reports annual wages, not schedules.
On the physician side, our research holds no sourced hours figure at all, so this page makes no head-to-head claim about who works longer; the honest answer is that the sourced data can't support one.
For law firms, the sourced hours material describes billing mechanics rather than schedules.
Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report put average utilization at 38% — the share of an eight-hour day spent on billable work — with 88% realization (2.6 hours invoiced per 8-hour day) and 93% collection (2.4 hours collected per day).
Those averages describe Clio's users, mostly small firms; they are not a large-firm figure and shouldn't be read as one.
At the large firms, the sourced figure is not an hours average but a policy expectation: legal press reported that firms matching the 2026 scale raise commonly tie the scale to a 1,900- or 2,000-hour billable expectation (one firm at 1,900; others at 2,000; Milbank itself lists none).
No primary "average associate bills X hours" figure was located in the research behind this page — so treat those as firm policies at the top of the market, not a profession-wide norm.
The lawyer schedule itself — weeks, nights, part-time options — is its own question: how many hours lawyers work covers it.
Scope of the hours figures
Which pays more over a career
A career total is the number people actually care about, and it is the number no sourced data on this page provides: our research holds no lifetime-earnings study for either profession, and we won't manufacture one.
What the May 2025 snapshot does support is a picture of the shapes each career's earnings can take.
At the medians, family medicine led lawyers ($244,180 vs $159,670 — the medians from the table above).
But where a lawyer lands in that spread depends heavily on setting: in the same BLS dataset, the median was $115,330 in state government (a cut that excludes school and hospital lawyers), $157,870 in legal services — the industry classification that covers law firms — and $223,560 in corporate head offices, the closest thing BLS publishes to in-house pay.
Entry pay splits that way too.
NALP's salary curve for the Class of 2025 — a count of all full-time jobs lasting a year or more, not just law firms — predates the July 2026 large-firm raise and was two-peaked: 50.0% of the 22,715 reported full-time starting salaries fell between $60,000 and $100,000, while 21.5% clustered at exactly $225,000, the most common first-year salary in NALP's 2025 associate survey — not today's scale.
Whether the lawyer distribution's top end closes the gap against the family medicine figures can't be settled in the abstract — it depends on setting and ownership.
If you're weighing the lawyer side, the honest deep-dive is our do lawyers make a lot of money piece, and lawyer salary by years of experience follows the curve from year 1 to partner.
Career information, not legal or financial advice. Wage figures are BLS OEWS May 2025 unless noted; confirm current data with BLS and current loan and forgiveness terms at studentaid.gov before you rely on them.