A city attorney is the lawyer for a city government: the in-house counsel its council, departments and staff turn to for legal advice, and the attorney who handles the city's own legal work.
A county attorney fills the same role for a county.
Who holds the office, how much of the job is courtroom work, and whether it includes prosecution all depend on the jurisdiction — here is how the role works and how to get hired.
Duties of city and county attorneys
A city or county attorney is the resident lawyer inside a local government — an in-house role.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) lists general counsel among the titles government lawyers hold, and the defining feature of the job is the client: the lawyer advises the organization rather than outside clients.
That organization is a city or county: its council or board, its departments and its employees.
The work follows the roles a local government plays.
A city is an employer, a property owner, a regulator and a party to contracts, and the attorney's files track all of it: agreements to review and draft, questions that need answers before the council votes, disputes to resolve short of court, and litigation when the government is sued or needs to sue.
Land-use questions can run through that mix as well, because deciding what may be built and used where is among the decisions a local government makes.
That list is the civil side of the office; how much courtroom time travels with it depends on the office.
If you are weighing the sector's size, BLS counted local government (8%) and state government (7%) among the largest employers of lawyers in 2025, behind legal services (52%) and self-employed lawyers (11%) and ahead of the federal government (5%).
Government is a minority of the profession's employment — and local government is the largest of its three levels in that table.
For how the whole family of public-sector roles fits together, see our government attorney guide.
Elected vs appointed
Before you apply, work out which kind of office you are looking at, because a city or county attorney position can be either an elected office answerable to the voters or an appointed post answerable to the council, board or executive that selected the lawyer.
Which form applies is a matter of local law, and the title alone will not settle it.
The difference shapes how you get in and what the job is.
An appointed post is a hire: application, interviews and an offer, through the government's normal personnel process.
An elected office is won at the ballot first, so the path to the desk runs through a campaign, and the accountability runs to the electorate on a fixed term rather than to a city manager or county board.
The two paths reward different preparation — a campaign skill set is not what a hiring committee screens for.
Our research for this page did not collect which jurisdictions elect their local government lawyers and which appoint them — that structure is decided jurisdiction by jurisdiction — so treat the city or county itself as the authority.
Its charter or the office's own pages will settle the question, and it is a fair question to ask directly in any interview.
When county attorneys prosecute
Prosecution — bringing criminal cases in the government's name — is its own function inside government legal work, and the BLS counts prosecutor among the titles government lawyers hold.
Whether that function sits inside a given county attorney's office is the real question, and it is not answerable from the title alone.
It is also the one question this page cannot settle for you: the research behind this page verified the shape of government legal careers, not each state's assignment of prosecutorial duties, and we will not name states we did not verify.
Where a county attorney's docket is civil, the criminal side is handled elsewhere in the system; where the office prosecutes, the job differs from the civil counsel role described above.
The county's own office description and the text of any job posting are the working authority — a posting that lists criminal dockets is advertising a different position from one that is entirely civil advisory.
For the prosecutorial side of local government legal work — the offices, the career and the caseload — see our district attorneys guide.
Hours, pay and stability
On hours, the BLS's description of the profession is the only benchmark the data behind this page supports: most lawyers work full time, and some work more than 40 hours a week.
That figure covers the profession as a whole rather than government offices separately, so a particular city hall or county attorney's schedule is a question for the job posting and the interview.
On pay, keep the labels with the numbers.
The BLS's OEWS survey for May 2025 puts the median annual wage for all lawyers (SOC 23-1011) at $159,670.
By industry, lawyers in local government earned a median of $131,350 and in state government $115,330 — both excluding schools and hospitals — while lawyers in legal services, the law-firm industry, earned $157,870.
Read those as medians across every lawyer in each industry (municipal attorneys are not broken out), and note that OEWS excludes the self-employed, so it says nothing about partners' or solo practitioners' income.
For new graduates, NALP's Class of 2025 study puts the median starting salary in government at $81,000 — against a record national median starting salary of $100,000 across all sectors for that class.
These are different surveys measuring different things — NALP tracks one graduating class's starting salaries, while OEWS covers wage-and-salary lawyers across an entire industry — so each figure informs but does not subtract from the other.
Where government pay trails firm pay in those medians, loan forgiveness is part of the math.
Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) forgives the remaining balance on eligible Direct Loans after the equivalent of 120 qualifying monthly payments made while working full-time for a qualifying employer, and qualifying employers include U.S. federal, state, local and tribal government entities.
Private, for-profit law firms do not qualify.
Two conditions are easy to miss: full-time means an average of at least 30 hours a week, and you must still be working full-time for a qualifying employer both when the 120th payment is made and when you apply for forgiveness.
On stability, BLS projects lawyer employment to grow 5% from 2025 to 2035 — faster than the average for all occupations — with about 28,700 openings a year over the decade, many from replacing workers who retire or change occupations.
That projection covers the profession; the data behind this page does not break it out for local government, so we cannot tell you whether city and county legal offices will grow faster or slower.
PSLF rules changed effective July 1, 2026
How to get hired
The floor is the profession's own.
BLS lists the typical entry-level education for lawyers as a doctoral or professional degree, and says lawyers typically need a law degree and a state license — which usually requires passing a bar examination.
Which state's license a particular city or county job requires is a question for the posting and the admitting authority in the state where you want to work; confirm it with them before you apply.
For an appointed post or a staff attorney position, the hiring then runs through the employer, and the practical currency is local: BLS notes that a successful summer job or internship during law school may result in an employment offer after graduation, and NALP found that 65.6% of employed Class of 2025 graduates worked in the state where they attended law school.
A city or county job sits in one place by definition, so the school you attend, the clinics you take and the local offices you work with are all part of the application.
Earn the law degree
Per BLS, the typical entry-level education for lawyers is a doctoral or professional degree.Get licensed
The requirement BLS describes is a state license, which usually requires passing a bar examination. Confirm which state's admission the job requires with the posting and the admitting authority.Build the local record
Summer jobs, internships and clinics near where you want to work: BLS notes a successful law-school summer job or internship may result in a post-graduation offer.Read the office before you apply
Settle the elected-versus-appointed question and whether the docket is civil or includes prosecution — it changes what you are actually applying to.Apply through the government's process
For an appointed or staff position, follow the posting's requirements exactly and have proof of licensure ready; an elected office is won at the ballot instead.
Context for the odds: public service overall — government, judicial clerkships and public interest — took 31.0% of Class of 2025 jobs in NALP's count, with government alone at 12.0%.
Government legal careers are a well-worn path out of law school, even though no statistic on this page tells you a specific city's chances.
Where to find government attorney jobs
City and county attorney openings surface on the employers' own channels: municipal and county human-resources pages, state and local government job boards, and bar association career centers.
For the wider set of public-sector legal roles this page belongs to — agency counsel, administrative judges, military and federal positions — start with our government attorney guide.
And when you want openings in one list, browse government attorney jobs on LawFirmHires.
This page is career information, not legal advice, and it is not help with any legal matter. Pay figures are BLS's OEWS May 2025 survey and NALP's Class of 2025 study; PSLF rules are federal and change, so confirm current terms at studentaid.gov; and confirm with the city or county itself how it fills its attorney office.