How much should a law firm pay an associate attorney?

Three published numbers answer this question, and they measure three different things.

Knowing which one describes your market is most of the work.

BLS's OEWS May 2025 release puts the median annual wage for lawyers (SOC 23-1011) at $159,670 nationally, with the 10th percentile at $78,360 and the 90th percentile at $351,600, across 754,500 wage-and-salary lawyers.

That series is the whole 23-1011 occupation across all industries — not just firm associates — and OEWS wage estimates exclude self-employed workers, so it describes the entire occupation, not the associate market you are hiring in.

Its mean, $185,840, sits well above the median because top-end pay pulls the average up; anchor on the median, not the average.

The cut closest to firm work is BLS's industry series for legal services (NAICS 5411), where lawyers had a median annual wage of $157,870 in May 2025.

Treat it as context for what firms pay across every experience level — BLS's sector cuts are context, not a role series — rather than as a first-year number.

Geography moves the number.

Among states, BLS recorded the highest lawyer medians in New York ($207,860), DC ($195,190) and California ($195,080), and the lowest in Mississippi ($91,690).

NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey, outside its 19 major-market cities, recorded median first-year salaries of $181,900 in the West, $170,000 in the Northeast, and $160,000 in the South and Midwest; in six metros — Austin, Boston, Houston, New York City, San Francisco and the Washington, DC area — the median first-year salary was $225,000 as of January 1, 2025.

The state-by-state BLS table lives on our associate attorney salary data page.

Postings are the other benchmark, and in several states they carry a range by rule: California requires employers with 15 or more employees to include the pay scale in job postings, and New York requires businesses with four or more employees to list compensation ranges.

Competitor postings show what firms your size, in your city, are offering this month — the associate attorney jobs on this board are one place to read them.

Class year is the axis the big-firm market prices on.

The market scale that took effect July 1, 2026 runs by law-school class year, from $235,000 for the Class of 2025 and 2026 up to $455,000 for the Class of 2018 — a ladder set by a Milbank memo dated June 2, 2026 that firms including McDermott, Quinn Emanuel and Sullivan & Cromwell matched, per the legal-press scorecard our research relies on for these figures (a secondary source, and it is marked as unverified in our notes).

Whatever your firm's ladder looks like, pricing by class year gives you a defensible answer to the candidate who asks why a peer earns more.

Below the big-firm market, there is no published step schedule our research could cite.

NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey recorded a median first-year base of $200,000 as of January 1, 2025 — $215,000 at firms of more than 700 lawyers — but the survey skews large (437 offices, 87% of them at firms of 250 or more lawyers) and its figures predate the July 2026 raise.

Build your own ladder against your associates' actual files, and write the next step down at the same time you set the first one.

Practice area has no national price list.

Our research found no source that splits lawyer pay by practice area — BLS counts every lawyer under one occupation code — so a premium a candidate quotes for their practice area has to be tested against offers and counteroffers in your own market, not against a table.

Firm size moves the number.

At firms of 250 or fewer lawyers, the most common first-year salary in NALP's 2025 survey was $150,000 or less, reported by 44% of offices — with the caveat that even that slice of the sample underrepresents firms of 2 to 20 lawyers, so read it as a marker, not a small-firm median.

NALP's separate Class of 2025 salary curve covers all full-time jobs, not just law firms, so it does not split by firm size — but it is bimodal: of 22,715 reported starting salaries, 50.0% fell between $60,000 and $100,000 while $225,000 accounted for another 21.5%.

Start with classification, because it decides how much freedom the rest of the structure has.

Under the federal regulation, an employee holding a valid license to practice law who is actually engaged in practice is an exempt professional, and the salary requirements do not apply — the Department of Labor's Fact Sheet 17D says the same for bona fide practitioners of law.

For a licensed associate doing lawyer work, federal law imposes no salary floor, so the structure is a market decision, not a compliance minimum.

How the exemption map looks across every role in the firm is in our guide to exempt and non-exempt law firm staff.

States diverge from the federal rule.

California has no lawyer carve-out: a licensed attorney practicing law is exempt there only if they also earn a monthly salary of at least two times the state minimum wage — $70,304 a year ($1,352 a week) at the 2026 minimum wage of $16.90.

Washington and Colorado exempt practicing lawyers on duties alone, matching federal law.

Confirm the rule where your firm operates with employment counsel.

The exemption also has a timing edge worth pricing into a first hire: a graduate awaiting bar results does not hold the license, so they sit outside 541.304 and must meet another exemption's salary and duties tests or be paid overtime — federally, the standard salary level for those exemptions was $684 a week ($35,568 a year) on DOL's salary-levels page as of October 2026.

On bonuses, no primary source in our research documents a standard associate bonus percentage or a typical billable-hours target, so any "normal" bonus number you find is not something we can verify.

What the data does support is a caution about what you key a bonus to.

Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report — a survey of Clio users, mostly small firms, not big firms — put average utilization at 38%, realization at 88% and collection at 93%: the hour worked, the hour invoiced and the dollar collected are three different quantities, and a bonus keyed to the wrong one pays for work the firm never collected.

Key a bonus to the measure you can compute from your own books, and set the target from your own realized history — our research found no sourced average to copy.

At market firms that matched the 2026 scale, the legal-press scorecard reports that firms commonly tie the scale to 1,900- or 2,000-hour billable expectations — again secondary-sourced.

Which leaves the scale itself.

The $235,000 first-year figure, as reported in the legal press, is the entry point of the big-firm market scale — the number your big-firm-bound candidates will quote you, not a floor your firm must match.

Build your own structure beneath it on purpose — a stated salary, a bonus tied to a measure you can verify, and a written path between class years.

The benefit your offer cannot replicate is the one worth understanding first.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness forgives the remaining balance on eligible Direct Loans after 120 qualifying payments made while working full-time for a qualifying employer — and private, for-profit law firms are not PSLF-qualifying employers under the regulation (34 CFR 685.219).

A candidate weighing your offer against a government or 501(c)(3) role is weighing something real that years at your firm do not accrue.

Competing honestly means beating the whole package on its merits, not talking around the loan component.

Spell the rest of the package out in the posting, because some states make you: Washington requires employers with 15 or more employees to disclose a general description of benefits in each posting alongside the wage scale, and Illinois requires employers with 15 or more employees to include the pay scale and benefits.

Where a benefits description is required, describe what actually applies to the role rather than the firm-wide package.

Beyond what the posting law requires, the rest of the offer can make the number believable: a named supervising partner, a written review cadence, bar dues and CLE covered in plain terms, and a stated path to the next class year.

None of that substitutes for the salary — it is what makes a candidate trust the salary you posted.

Benchmark in layers, and keep each layer's scope straight: BLS's OEWS medians for the all-lawyers figure in your state, NALP's firm survey for what reporting offices pay (dated January 1, 2025 and skewed toward large firms), and live postings for what your actual competition is offering this month.

Weight the layer that describes the firms you actually compete with — of the three, only the postings layer shows what firms your size, in your city, are offering right now.

Where a range is required, it is a term with teeth: California defines the pay scale as a good-faith estimate of what you reasonably expect to pay, with penalties of $100 to $10,000 per violation.

Set the range before the first interview, decide where a given candidate sits on your class-year ladder before the offer call, and never let the posting range and the offer number drift apart without a stated reason.

Price the placement, not just the person: class-year credit for experience, the review path, and the bonus measure from the structure section, all in writing in the offer letter.

And price the seat honestly — if this would be your first associate, whether the firm can carry one at all comes before what to pay, and our guide to when a law firm should hire its first associate works through that decision.

The rest of the process — sourcing, screening, red flags and onboarding — is in our guide to how to hire an associate attorney.

This page picks up at the number.

There is no published review cadence for associate pay in our research, so anchor the review to the events that actually move the number:

• When the data refreshes. The BLS figures on this page are the May 2025 release and NALP's survey figures are as of January 1, 2025 — both age. Re-pull your benchmarks when the next releases land instead of reusing this page's numbers indefinitely.
• When the market scale moves. The big-firm scale moved effective July 1, 2026, and the move was public. Expect a candidate who follows the legal press to ask where your firm stands when the scale moves, whether or not your firm pays on it.
• When wage floors move. California's exemption threshold is a multiple of the state minimum wage, so it rises whenever the wage does, and the federal standard salary level — listed at $684 a week as of October 2026 — can change too. Either move can flip a classification in your payroll — California's threshold, for the practicing-lawyer exemption; the federal level, for any hire who has to rely on another exemption.
• On each class-year jump. Whatever ladder you set, the next step should already be written and dated — not renegotiated from zero each year.

This page is employer information, not legal advice. The wage figures come from BLS's OEWS May 2025 release and NALP's published surveys as named, the overtime and posting rules from the Department of Labor's regulations and fact sheets and the state rules cited, and the loan-forgiveness rule from 34 CFR 685.219. They change, and states adopt their own versions — confirm your pay structure and classifications with employment counsel and your state labor agency.