How much more do lawyers make than paralegals?
In the May 2025 federal wage data, the national median for lawyers was $159,670 a year; for paralegals and legal assistants, $62,890 — a gap of $96,780.
Whether closing it justifies the cost of law school is a harder question: median federal debt at JD graduation runs about $105,900.
Starting lawyer pay, meanwhile, splits between two very different peaks.
Median pay compared
Both medians come from the same source — the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) release for May 2025 — so they read against each other cleanly.
Lawyers (SOC 23-1011) had a national median annual wage of $159,670, or $76.76 an hour, with 754,500 employed.
Paralegals and legal assistants (SOC 23-2011) had a national median of $62,890, or $30.24 an hour, with 392,880 employed.
The gap is not a median-only artifact — it repeats across the distribution, with one overlap at the edges:
| Measure (national, May 2025) | Lawyers (SOC 23-1011) | Paralegals and legal assistants (SOC 23-2011) |
|---|---|---|
| Median annual wage | $159,670 | $62,890 |
| Median hourly wage | $76.76 | $30.24 |
| 10th percentile | $78,360 | $44,740 |
| 90th percentile | about $351,600 | $101,500 |
| Employment | 754,500 | 392,880 |
The table needs three reading rules.
The 90th-percentile lawyer figure sits above $239,200 — the level at or above which BLS footnotes a published wage — hence the "about."
The paralegal series combines paralegals and legal assistants into one occupation, so it cannot separate the two titles.
And OEWS excludes the self-employed entirely, so neither column measures solo practitioners or equity partners.
The edges still overlap: the top tenth of paralegals and legal assistants earned more than $101,500, while the bottom tenth of lawyers earned less than $78,360.
The medians do not overlap — the tails do.
Cut both occupations to law firms and the gap survives: inside the Legal Services industry (NAICS 5411), the same release puts lawyers at a $157,870 median and paralegals and legal assistants at $61,770.
Geography moves each figure — state medians for lawyers ran from $91,690 (Mississippi) to $207,860 (New York), while paralegals' ran from $46,180 (Mississippi) to $89,750 (DC).
The full percentile tables, national and state by state, live on the programmatic pages: lawyer salary and paralegal salary.
The lawyer column hides its own spread — we follow where lawyer pay actually lands, median versus the BigLaw headline, in do lawyers make a lot of money.
Every figure here is a dated release — check the current one
Pay after law school debt
A $96,780 gap is gross pay; law school debt is what comes out first.
The Department of Education's College Scorecard — field-of-study data for federal aid recipients — puts median federal loan debt (Stafford plus Grad PLUS) at graduation for law programs at about $105,900 across the 178 schools with data, with school medians ranging from about $45,200 to $229,700.
That figure covers federal loans only: private loans and undergraduate debt are not in it.
The distribution also has a tail worth knowing before you pick a school — 30 law programs report median federal debt of $150,000 or more, four of them above $200,000.
Tuition varies widely too.
ABA 509 data for 2025 puts median full-time resident tuition at about $49,910 a year, ranging from about $11,338 to $85,368; median full-time nonresident tuition was about $53,640.
Those figures exclude fees and living costs.
The borrowing rules themselves changed in 2026: beginning July 1, 2026, graduate and professional students — law students included — may not take out new Grad PLUS loans, with a carve-out for students already enrolled on June 30, 2026 who hold a Direct Loan for that program, during their expected time to credential.
How that reshapes financing packages is its own topic; our guide to average law school debt follows it.
One federal lever changes the math on the public-service side: PSLF forgives the remaining balance on eligible Direct Loans after the equivalent of 120 qualifying monthly payments made while working full time — a weekly average of at least 30 hours — for a qualifying employer, which means U.S. government organizations at any level and 501(c)(3) nonprofits.
Private law firms do not qualify, so for a paralegal weighing a move to a firm, the lever does not apply.
The employer-by-employer detail is in PSLF for lawyers.
The debt median is not the whole cost of the detour, either.
It leaves out the paralegal wages given up while enrolled — every year of school is a year of the $62,890 median not earned — and we found no federal release that prices that line.
Whether what remains of the gap clears the debt service depends on where on the lawyer pay curve you land, which is where this page goes next.
Hours and stress
The salary difference also buys a different relationship to the clock.
Under the federal wage-and-hour rules, a licensed lawyer who is actually engaged in the practice of law is an exempt professional, and the federal salary-level and salary-basis requirements do not apply to that lawyer.
Paralegals and legal assistants, by contrast, generally do not qualify as exempt learned professionals, because an advanced specialized academic degree is not a standard prerequisite for the field.
Job titles settle neither question: the Department of Labor states that duties and salary must meet the regulations.
State rules can also run stricter than federal — California, for example, requires practising lawyers to meet a salary test on top of the duties test.
The practical read for the comparison: a practising lawyer is an exempt professional, so the FLSA's overtime requirement does not apply to that lawyer any more than the federal salary requirements do, while the paralegal's seat generally sits outside the learned-professional exemption.
On workload itself, the evidence for the two occupations is different in kind.
BLS's outlook for paralegals describes most as working full time and flags the work as potentially stressful — fast paced, with multiple projects under tight deadlines and occasional travel to depositions or trials.
The outlook publishes no average weekly-hours figure for the occupation.
For lawyers, a large survey of attorney well-being — Krill, Johnson and Albert, published in the Journal of Addiction Medicine in 2016, covering 12,825 licensed, employed U.S. attorneys — found 20.6% screened positive for hazardous or harmful drinking, and 28%, 19% and 23% reported symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress, respectively.
Those are 2016 figures from one survey population, not a current census of either occupation.
The schedules behind each side get their own pages: how many hours lawyers work, and what paralegal hours and schedules look like in practice.
Exemption turns on duties and salary — confirm before relying on it
When law school pays off
Where a new lawyer lands on the pay curve is the open variable in the math — and the starting data shows two very different landing spots.
NALP's salary curve for the Class of 2025 is bimodal: $60,000–$100,000 held 50.0% of the 22,715 reported full-time starting salaries, while $225,000 alone held 21.5%.
The curve covers reported full-time jobs lasting a year or more, not just law firms.
Averages mislead on a curve like that.
NALP notes the unadjusted mean starting salary overstates the true average by about 5.5%, because large-firm salaries are more completely reported than others.
Inside law firms the same split shows up.
NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey — a large-firm-heavy sample — put the median first-year associate base salary at $200,000 as of January 1, 2025, but at firms of 250 or fewer lawyers the most common first-year salary was $150,000 or less, reported by 44% of offices.
The $225,000 right-peak figure also predates the 2026 raise: as reported in legal press, the large-firm market scale has started at $235,000 since July 1, 2026.
The paralegal figures come from a different series — OEWS whole-occupation wages, not NALP starting salaries — so they cannot be subtracted from or ranked against NALP's curve.
What the federal data does show is where paralegal pay reaches without a JD: the top tenth of paralegals and legal assistants earned more than $101,500, the median in corporate offices was $94,570, and DC's $89,750 median led all states.
Six figures is reachable from the paralegal desk.
We found no source that nets lawyer pay against law school debt and the paralegal wages given up while enrolled, so this page does not put a number on when the degree pays off; the question to answer for yourself is which part of the curve you would realistically land in.
The mechanics of making the move are their own subject — see the paralegal to lawyer path guide — and the broader financial evaluation is the math of whether law school is worth it.
Career and salary information, not legal or financial advice. Pay figures are BLS OEWS May 2025 and NALP releases; debt figures are the Department of Education's College Scorecard; the overtime and exemption rules summarized here are federal regulations administered by the U.S. Department of Labor, with state law sometimes stricter — confirm your own situation with the agency before acting on it.