Law firms bill paralegal time at an hourly rate each firm sets; the paralegal doing the work earns a wage — a national median of $30.24 an hour for paralegals and legal assistants in the BLS's May 2025 survey.
The billing rate and the paralegal hourly rate are different numbers: one is the firm's price, the other is your pay.
This page covers what firms charge for paralegal time, what paralegals earn, and what the Supreme Court held about paralegal time in fee awards under 42 U.S.C.
1988.
Typical paralegal billing rates
A paralegal billing rate is the price a law firm charges a client for one hour of paralegal time.
It attaches to the timekeeper, it is set firm by firm, and it is the number that turns your recorded hours into firm revenue.
Now the honest part.
Our research looked for a primary-source benchmark — an official paralegal rate table, the way the government publishes wage data — and did not find one: no primary-source paralegal billing-rate benchmarks, paralegal billable-hour targets, or staff bonus ranges turned up.
When we researched this page, no published paralegal rate range checked out against a primary source, so this page quotes no dollar range.
Treat any single typical paralegal rate you see online as unverified until the source behind it is named.
What can be said precisely is the structure: the rate is each firm's own price, and the two numbers that are published with sources — the wage data in the next section and the fee-award case law at the bottom of this page — measure different things from the rate.
No official paralegal rate table exists in our research
Typical paralegal hourly pay
The pay side is measured.
BLS's Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey for May 2025 put the national median annual wage for paralegals and legal assistants (SOC 23-2011) at $62,890 — $30.24 an hour.
That is a wage: what employers reported paying across the occupation, and the survey excludes the self-employed.
Two reading notes.
BLS counts paralegals and legal assistants as one occupation, so the survey cannot say whether paralegals out-earn legal assistants.
And because the survey excludes the self-employed, a freelance paralegal's earnings and rates sit outside it — the freelance rate is a price, not a wage.
For the percentiles, the state medians and where pay runs higher by employer type, see our paralegal hourly pay data.
Why the gap exists
The gap is definitional.
The wage is what the firm pays you; the rate is the price the firm asks a client for your time.
The one fee-award case in our research draws the same line: in that case, covered below, the Supreme Court held that awards under 42 U.S.C.
1988 may compensate paralegal work at market rates rather than at the firm's cost.
Arithmetic is the second reason, though the sourced numbers measure lawyer time.
In Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report — drawn from the law firms that use its software, mostly small firms, so not a BigLaw benchmark — the average utilization rate is 38% of a lawyer's eight-hour day: billed hours are a minority of worked hours in its data.
Of the billable work, an average realization rate of 88% gets invoiced — 2.6 hours of the day — and an average collection rate of 93% gets paid: 2.4 hours.
Utilization, realization and collection are the report's own three-step funnel from hours worked to money collected.
Our research found no paralegal equivalent of these figures, so read them as the lawyer-side picture, not your own billable share.
The honest limit: our research found no sourced formula that converts a paralegal wage into the rate a firm bills — no verified overhead multiple, no markup calculation.
Be wary of any formula that claims to derive one from the other.
The billed-rate-versus-kept-pay question has a lawyer-side version too; our attorney rates vs pay guide walks the attorney version of it.
How billing affects your value
The rate is the employer-side measure of what your time is worth to a firm — the number a client sees for an hour of your work.
The wage data is the worker-side benchmark for what you take home.
When you evaluate an offer or a raise, benchmark against wages: the rate your hours bill at is revenue, not pay.
The rate is also not quietly yours.
Ethics rules govern how staff share in fee revenue.
Under the ABA's Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 5.4(a) bars a lawyer or law firm from sharing legal fees with a nonlawyer, subject to listed exceptions.
The written exception that matters here: Model Rule 5.4(a)(3) allows a firm to include nonlawyer employees in a compensation or retirement plan even if it is based in whole or in part on profit-sharing.
The Model Rules are the ABA's model text — the version your state adopts is the one that governs.
And the exception is about plans, not cases: a percentage of one specific fee or a per-signed-case bounty is a different arrangement, one that state ethics rules treat as their own question.
Confirm any bonus structure against the rule as adopted in your state.
Benchmark pay with wage data, not billing rates
Recoverable paralegal fees
The one place our research found an official, sourced statement on how paralegal time is valued is fee-award litigation.
In Missouri v. Jenkins, 491 U.S. 274 (1989), the Supreme Court held that fee awards under 42 U.S.C.
1988 may compensate paralegal and law clerk work at market rates rather than at the firm's cost.
The choice the Court framed is the same gap this page measures: cost to the firm — the wage side — versus the market rate for the service.
Scope matters.
The holding addressed fee awards under 42 U.S.C.
1988, the federal statute the case arose under.
It is not a pricing rule for client bills, and this page does not extend it to other statutes or courts.
The career takeaway: in settings where your time is billed, accurate time entry is what makes your hours legible — career work, not admin busywork.
Career information, not legal advice. Figures here come from BLS's OEWS May 2025 survey, Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report and the Supreme Court's Missouri v. Jenkins decision; the Model Rules cited are the ABA's model text, and states adopt their own versions. Confirm billing, fee-award and bonus questions with the firm, the court or your state's ethics authority.