An assistant U.S. attorney (AUSA) is a federal prosecutor — a Department of Justice lawyer who represents the United States in criminal cases out of a U.S. Attorney's Office.
AUSAs screen charges, negotiate pleas and try cases, and the ethics rules add duties for prosecutors that ordinary advocacy does not carry.
This guide covers what the job involves, the U.S. Attorney vs AUSA distinction, how federal prosecutors are hired, DOJ's Honors Program for entry-level attorneys, and pay.
What AUSAs do: criminal and civil work
AUSAs are the federal branch of the prosecutor role — the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts prosecutor among the titles government lawyers hold, and the federal level is where this page lives.
If you want the job's day-to-day basics at any level of government, our prosecutor guide covers them in detail; this page stays on the federal layer.
The core of the work is criminal.
AUSAs review investigation files, decide which charges the government brings, negotiate pleas, appear at hearings and try federal cases — the prosecutor's job, carried out in federal court.
The role also carries duties that ordinary advocacy does not.
Prosecutors have their own conduct rule — Rule 3.8 in the ABA Model Rules, cited here in Ohio's adopted version — and Comment [1] to that rule describes the prosecutor as a "minister of justice and not simply that of an advocate."
Among the rule's special duties is timely disclosure to the defense of evidence that tends to negate guilt or mitigate the offense.
Ohio left several of the model rule's subsections reserved, so the exact list varies by state.
The courtroom is the visible part, but the federal attorney job family federal prosecutors sit in formally spans more: the Office of Personnel Management's classification guide lists trial work, legal advice to an agency, drafting regulations, contracts and legislative comments among the work in the GS-0905 General Attorney series.
How any given U.S. Attorney's Office splits criminal and civil work was not confirmed by the sources this page cites — the office-level pages our research attempted were unavailable — so treat an office's own postings as the authority on where its work sits.
Prosecutor conduct rules vary by state
U.S. Attorney vs AUSA: what's the difference?
The distinction is the one the titles encode.
The U.S. attorney leads the office; the assistant U.S. attorneys are its lawyers — the prosecutors who screen, negotiate and try the office's cases.
"AUSA" is simply the working abbreviation for assistant United States attorney.
What the data does show is scale.
The ABA's 2024 Profile of the Legal Profession reported that the Justice Department employs the most general attorneys — nearly 13,000 of them.
Everything past that hierarchy gets office-specific quickly, and this page is honest about a gap: the U.S. Attorney's Office pages our research attempted to read were unavailable, so details like how a U.S. attorney is appointed or how a particular office organizes itself were not confirmed here.
DOJ and each office's own site are the places to confirm them.
How AUSAs are hired (experience, clerkships)
Federal attorney hiring runs on different rails from private practice.
Federal attorney jobs are classified in the GS-0905 General Attorney series, and they sit in the excepted service under Schedule A (5 CFR 213.3102(d), "Attorneys") — so agencies hire attorneys directly rather than through competitive-service examining.
For new lawyers, DOJ's entry-level attorney recruitment program is the Attorney General's Honors Program — though the sources this page cites do not confirm whether or how Honors hires go to U.S. Attorney's Offices.
Eligibility is narrow: graduating law students, and recent graduates who entered a judicial clerkship, a graduate law program or a qualifying legal fellowship within 9 months of graduation.
That window is why clerkship timing matters — a clerkship is one of the three qualifying moves that keep recent graduates inside Honors eligibility.
Graduates still waiting on bar admission have a separate route: federal "law clerk trainee" appointments are for law graduates pending admission and may not exceed 14 months.
Beyond that entry-level program, hiring of experienced attorneys happens office by office — and here the trail goes cold.
The individual U.S. Attorney's Office hiring pages our research attempted were unavailable, so this page cannot confirm what experience a given office requires or how it weighs litigation backgrounds.
Each office's postings on DOJ's legal careers site are the authority for what an opening actually requires.
Moving from the government to a firm has rules of its own
The DOJ Honors Program route
The Attorney General's Honors Program has run since 1953, and DOJ describes it as its entry-level attorney recruitment program.
Eligibility is limited to graduating law students and recent graduates who entered a judicial clerkship, a graduate law program or a qualifying legal fellowship within 9 months of graduation — so the program is aimed at people at the very start of their careers, not lateral candidates.
The application window is short.
For the 2026–2027 cycle, the application — filed through DOJ's CORA system — opened August 28, 2026 and closed September 8, 2026, the Tuesday after Labor Day.
Each cycle sets its own dates; confirm the current window on DOJ's legal careers page before you plan around one.
DOJ's published timeline after the deadline: interview invitations in early October, interviews from late October to mid-November, and offers from November on.
DOJ bases selection on many elements of a candidate's background, including commitment to government service, academics, leadership, journal, moot court or mock trial participation, clinics, past employment and extracurricular activities.
One expectation to set: our research did not confirm whether Honors hires are placed in U.S. Attorney's Offices, so check DOJ's legal careers pages for the current cycle before treating Honors as an AUSA route.
The AUSA pay scale, in brief
The BLS does not publish a wage series for AUSAs specifically.
The closest federal figure is the lawyers occupation (SOC 23-1011) in the federal executive branch: in the May 2025 OEWS release, lawyers in the federal executive branch earned a median annual wage of $178,380, against a national median of $159,670 for lawyers across all industries in the same release.
Both figures are occupational medians for lawyers as a whole, not an AUSA salary scale; an individual federal job posting is where the actual range for a position appears.
These are lawyer-wide medians, not AUSA pay
Where to find prosecutor jobs
On the federal side, DOJ's legal careers site is where Honors and other attorney openings are posted, cycle by cycle.
On LawFirmHires you can browse prosecutor jobs in one place, with openings as employers post them.
This page is career information, not legal advice. Confirm licensing and conduct rules with the admitting or disciplinary authority in your state, and pay figures with the sources named above.