How much does a solo practitioner attorney make?
Our research found no federal number: BLS wage estimates exclude the self-employed, so they do not measure solo income.
What a solo keeps is what clients pay minus the cost of running the practice, and it moves with billable hours, realization and collection.
For scale, employed lawyers earned a median of $159,670 in May 2025 — a salary, not an owner's income.
Typical solo income
The direct answer is that the federal wage data do not give a typical solo figure, and our research found no other federal figure for solo income.
BLS OEWS wage estimates exclude self-employed workers, so they do not measure what solo practitioners make, and the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook says the same for its lawyer series: the wage data do not cover the self-employed or owners and partners of unincorporated businesses.
What the federal series does give is the employed-lawyer benchmark: a national median annual wage of $159,670 (SOC 23-1011, May 2025) across 754,500 lawyers — a count that excludes the self-employed.
The 10th percentile was $78,360 and the 90th reached $351,600, a figure above the $239,200 line where BLS footnotes its published wage values, so read the top end as approximate.
State breakdowns are in our lawyer salary data.
Solo practice was a large share of private practice the last time it was counted: the American Bar Foundation's 2005 Lawyer Statistical Report — the most recent ABF census, and our research found no newer primary figure — counted solo practitioners at 49% of private practitioners in 2005.
That is a share of private practitioners only, not of all lawyers.
So the question this page answers is not "what is the number," but how a solo's income is built: fees collected, minus the cost of running the practice.
That makes it a function of three rates — how much of your day is billable, how much of the billable work gets invoiced, and how much of the invoiced work gets paid — with overhead sitting underneath.
BLS wage data do not cover solo income
Overhead and what you keep
A solo's income runs through the same funnel every firm's does: hours worked become billable hours, billable hours become invoices, and invoices become collected cash.
Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report puts the average law-firm utilization rate at 38%, meaning about 3 of 8 hours in a workday are billable.
Utilization is the share of an eight-hour day spent on billable work — the first of three rates.
The next two each take a cut.
Realization averaged 88%: only 2.6 of those hours actually reach client bills.
Collection averaged 93%: 2.4 hours' worth of billable work per day ends up collected.
Each leak is yours to manage when you are the firm.
What you keep is what remains of the collected share after the practice's costs — rent, insurance, software, staff — plus what an employer would otherwise have provided, from health coverage to retirement contributions.
How big that cost side is has no sourced national number: our research found no overhead percentage for solo practices that we can cite, and we will not invent one.
The honest budget is the one you price in your own market.
The fee structure you choose — hourly, flat fee or contingency — shapes when the money arrives; our guide to how lawyers get paid compares the models.
Where these averages come from
First-year ramp-up
For the ramp itself, our research has no sourced number to give: no federal or industry figure we read states what a first-year solo makes or how many years building a book of business takes.
What the class data does show is how rare the straight-from-graduation route is: NALP's Class of 2024 findings counted 174 graduates who started as solo practitioners — 0.8% of law firm jobs.
However you arrive, the first year of a firm is a build year.
The work is double — practicing law and standing up a business — and the funnel above means cash follows the work rather than preceding it.
The setup mechanics, from entity to trust account to insurance, are the career move covered in our guide to starting your own law firm; this page stays on the income math.
Solo vs associate salary
The employed side of the comparison is well documented, as long as each figure keeps its own series.
NALP's Class of 2025 salary distribution — all reported full-time jobs, not only law-firm associate jobs — was bimodal: 50.0% of the 22,715 reported full-time salaries fell between $60,000 and $100,000, while 21.5% sat at $225,000.
For first-years specifically, NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey put the median base at $200,000 as of January 1, 2025 — and $215,000 at firms of more than 700 lawyers — a sample that skews large-firm.
Among firms of 250 or fewer lawyers, the most common first-year salary was $150,000 or less, reported by 44% of offices.
That is the nearest employed comparator our sources carry for a small-firm seat — and note that NALP's associate survey does not represent two-to-twenty-lawyer firms well.
The federal series sits underneath: a $159,670 median for employed lawyers (SOC 23-1011, May 2025) and $157,870 in legal services (law firms).
Both are employee wages — the OEWS series excludes the self-employed, so its tables contain no solo income to subtract against.
The market scale has since moved: as reported in legal press, Milbank's June 2, 2026 memo set the scale's first-year base at $235,000 effective July 1, 2026.
The structural difference does not need a forecast.
A salary is fixed — it arrives in good months and slow ones.
A solo's income is the residual after overhead, so it moves with the funnel in the section above.
And keep the series straight when you compare: OEWS, NALP's surveys and Clio's report are different samples, and a federal median, a survey statistic and a software-user average do not subtract cleanly.
Which practice areas pay best solo
There is no sourced ranking of solo income by practice area, and the two anchors that could support one do not exist: BLS has no salary series by practice area, and its lawyer figures exclude the self-employed entirely.
A "highest-paying solo practice areas" list carrying specific dollar ranges is repeating someone's sample, not a measurement — treat any such ranking as unverified unless it names who was surveyed.
What can be said is structural rather than a ranking.
The fee model does more visible work than the practice label: hourly practices collect as the work happens, flat fees set the number up front, and contingency practices carry a case's costs until a fee lands, if one does.
The costs practices carry differ the same way, and so does the cash-flow shape of a ramp-up.
The models are compared in our guide to how lawyers get paid, and the employed-lawyer side of the specialty question is in our lawyer salary by practice area guide.
Career information, not legal advice. The figures on this page carry their source dates — BLS OEWS May 2025, NALP's 2025 surveys, Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report, an ABF census from 2005 — and none of them predicts what your practice will collect; check the current releases before you act on any number here.