There is no official pay split between paralegals and legal assistants in BLS's wage data: BLS counts both titles as one occupation, so its wage data cannot show whether paralegals out-earn legal assistants.
The occupation they share paid a national median of $62,890 in May 2025.
Where a legal assistant title means secretarial work, the matching BLS occupation — legal secretaries and administrative assistants (SOC 43-6012) — paid a lower median of $55,570.
Here is how the pay compares, and what it can and cannot tell you.
Paralegal vs. legal assistant pay compared
Start with the constraint, because it shapes everything else on this page.
BLS's wage program, the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), reports one occupation — Paralegals and Legal Assistants, SOC 23-2011 — so every wage figure it publishes for paralegals includes legal assistants too, and the reverse.
In the May 2025 release, that combined occupation paid a national median annual wage of $62,890, or $30.24 an hour.
The outer percentiles ran from $44,740 at the 10th percentile to $101,500 at the 90th, and BLS counted 392,880 workers in the occupation — a count that excludes the self-employed.
The industry split shows in the same release: paralegals and legal assistants working in legal services — the industry category that covers law firms — had a median of $61,770, below the occupation-wide figure.
Because the two titles share one BLS line, the occupation data behind our paralegal salary page and our legal assistant salary page is the same series.
Our research found no separate federal statistic that prices the two titles apart — the combined occupation is the series.
Medians describe occupations, not offers
Why BLS data can't split paralegal and legal assistant pay
The single line has a parallel in the profession's own usage: NALA — the body behind the Certified Paralegal (CP) credential — treats legal assistant and paralegal as synonymous terms, saying state supreme court rules, statutes, ethics opinions and bar guidelines define them that way.
One state statute merges the labels explicitly.
California's paralegal statute says that for purposes of that chapter the terms paralegal, legal assistant, attorney assistant, freelance paralegal, independent paralegal and contract paralegal are synonymous (Business and Professions Code section 6454).
However BLS arrived at its one occupation, the effect is practical: no BLS figure prices paralegal work separately from legal assistant work.
The question of who earns more has to be answered from what the titles cover at a specific employer rather than from a wage table.
Usage varies by employer — a firm can attach either title to different kinds of work, so two legal assistant postings can describe different jobs.
The duty list is the tell for which one it is.
Legal secretary pay: the comparison the data can make
Legal secretaries do have their own BLS occupation: Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, SOC 43-6012.
In the May 2025 release it paid a national median of $55,570 ($26.72 an hour), across 156,280 workers, with a range from $36,500 at the 10th percentile to $91,730 at the 90th — again excluding the self-employed.
| Paralegals and legal assistants (SOC 23-2011) | Legal secretaries and administrative assistants (SOC 43-6012) | |
|---|---|---|
| Median annual wage, May 2025 | $62,890 | $55,570 |
| 10th percentile | $44,740 | $36,500 |
| 90th percentile | $101,500 | $91,730 |
| Employment | 392,880 | 156,280 |
So for the question of who makes more money, a paralegal or a legal secretary, the occupation medians favor the paralegal side: $62,890 against $55,570, both national medians drawn from the same May 2025 release.
Two caveats keep the comparison honest:
- The $62,890 figure is the combined paralegal and legal assistant occupation, so it is not a pure paralegal number — part of the workforce it counts holds the legal assistant title.
- Both wage rows are occupation-wide medians, not offers; the callout above applies to every pay number in the table.
Where a posting's legal assistant title is describing secretarial work, the legal secretary occupation — not the paralegal line — is the BLS occupation that matches that job, and its figures sit on our legal secretary salary page.
Moving from legal assistant to paralegal
NALA treats the two terms as synonymous, and BLS counts both titles in one occupation — so the move is defined by the work you take on: the paralegal vs legal assistant: duties comparison covers that line in detail.
On pay, the honest position is that no BLS figure measures the raise, because both titles sit in the same occupation statistic.
What the federal rules do say is that retitling changes nothing about exemption status by itself.
The Department of Labor is explicit that job titles do not determine exemption status — duties and salary must meet the regulations.
Its rules also treat the two titles the same way: paralegals and legal assistants generally do not qualify as exempt learned professionals, because an advanced specialized academic degree is not a standard prerequisite for the field.
The exception the rules name: a paralegal who holds an advanced specialized degree in another professional field and uses it on the job can qualify for the exemption — the DOL's own example is an engineer hired as a paralegal for product-liability or patent matters.
How exempt and non-exempt status plays out job by job is its own topic — see the guide to paralegal overtime and exempt status.
Practically, the levers you can point to in a negotiation are the duty list in the posting and the occupation-wide figures above — the title alone settles neither the pay nor the overtime treatment.
Career information, not legal advice. Pay figures are BLS OEWS May 2025 national medians and percentiles for the named occupations, plus one median for the legal services industry, and the overtime rules are the Department of Labor's — check the latest BLS release for current figures, and confirm a specific job's classification with the DOL's guidance or employment counsel.
A title change does not settle overtime status