How much should a law firm pay a document review attorney?

Start with the honest gap: no wage series in our research isolates document review, and our research found no primary source that publishes document-review hourly rates for any market.

What BLS does publish is the lawyer occupation.

In the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) May 2025 release, Lawyers (SOC 23-1011) had a national median annual wage of $159,670 — $76.76 an hour — with the 10th percentile at $78,360 and the 90th at $351,600, across 754,500 wage-and-salary lawyers.

The 90th-percentile figure sits above BLS's $239,200 publication cap, so read it as an approximation.

The series covers the whole occupation, in every industry, so read the median as the occupation's midpoint — not as this role's rate card.

Three scope limits sharpen that reading.

BLS does not split the lawyer occupation by practice area, so a document-review cut does not exist in the data.

The estimates cover employees and exclude the self-employed, so a reviewer in business for themselves is not measured in the series at all.

And the occupation cut spans every industry; the nearest sector cut, Legal Services (law firms, NAICS 5411), had a lawyer median annual wage of $157,870 in the same release — the firm-sector view, and still context rather than a role series.

Geography moves the occupation number too: among states, BLS recorded the highest lawyer median in New York ($207,860) and the lowest in Mississippi ($91,690) for May 2025.

What remains is a layered benchmark rather than a lookup: the occupation series above for what lawyer time pays, live postings for what your market is offering right now, and the scope you write for the project.

The document review attorney salary data page carries the state-by-state tables for the all-lawyers series that stands in for this role, and the document review attorney jobs on this board show the postings you are bidding against.

Our research found no published ladder for document-review pay — no class-year schedule, and no practice-area table; BLS does not split the lawyer occupation that finely.

The adjustments below are ones you make by shaping the role first, then pricing what you built.

Experience changes what the review can carry — so let it change the scope before it changes the rate.

A reviewer with years in your practice area and jurisdiction can take the calls that need legal judgment: privilege questions, the documents that escalate to the case team, the write-up the supervising attorney relies on.

A newer admit — or a graduate awaiting bar results, who sits outside the exemption for licensed practitioners entirely — needs defined tasks and review.

Write down which scope you are buying, because the same document that sets the tier also sets the classification question in the next section.

Practice area has no national price in our research.

BLS does not split lawyer pay by practice area, so a premium a candidate quotes for review in a specialty — regulatory productions, foreign-language documents, privilege-heavy sets — has to be tested against the offers in your own market, not against a table.

Firm size moves attorney pay, and the published evidence is from the associate market.

In NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey, $225,000 was the most common first-year associate salary, reported by 32% of offices overall and 45% of offices in firms of more than 700 lawyers; at firms of 250 or fewer lawyers, a first-year salary of $150,000 or less was the most common, at 44% of offices.

That is a different market from document review — the survey prices first-year associates, not reviewers — so use it as context for the local lawyer market, not as a reviewer rate, and let it be the backdrop against which your offer's non-pay terms do their work.

Start with classification, because it decides which pay rules attach to the structure you pick.

Federally, an employee holding a valid license to practice law who is actually engaged in practice is an exempt professional under 29 CFR 541.304 — the salary-level and salary-basis requirements do not apply to that lawyer.

So paying hourly is not what makes a practicing lawyer overtime-eligible, and a salary is not what makes the role exempt: job titles do not determine exemption status, the Department of Labor's fact sheet says — the specific duties and salary must meet the regulations.

Document review is where that duties test gets hard.

The exemption is written around a lawyer actually engaged in the practice of law, and a review project that uses a lawyer's license without the legal judgment is the gray area.

Our research flagged a 2015 Second Circuit case involving contract document reviewers and FLSA overtime; the summaries we read were secondhand and we did not review the opinion text itself, so we cannot tell you how it comes out — treat review-heavy classifications as a question to put to employment counsel before the first hour is worked, not a settled one.

License status is part of the same analysis.

The exemption covers a holder of a valid license who is actually practicing; a law-school graduate awaiting bar results is not exempt under it 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) as of October 2026.

If your reviewer bench includes pending admittees, the rate conversation and the classification conversation are the same conversation.

States diverge from the federal rule.

California, unlike federal law, does not exempt lawyers from the salary test: a licensed attorney practicing law there is exempt only if they also earn a 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.

A non-exempt reviewer in California earns daily overtime — 1.5x for hours over eight in a workday, not just over 40 in a workweek.

Washington and Colorado exempt practicing lawyers on duties alone, without a salary floor, matching federal law.

The full walkthrough — the tests, the thresholds and the state-by-state detail — is in our guide to overtime rules.

Within the container that survives those rules, the structure should follow the scope you wrote: an hourly W-2 rate fits capacity that scales with production volume and turns off when the project ends, and an annual salary fits a reviewer who holds a standing place on your staff.

Whichever you pick, state the overtime treatment in the offer letter — the duties the role carries, the exemption the firm is applying, and what happens to hours past the thresholds — so the structure you chose is the one on paper.

No survey in our research ranks what document review attorneys value in a benefits package, so treat this as a list of levers you control rather than a ranking to copy.

The levers start before the offer: for this role, the benefits description is part of the first document a candidate reads, because the posting laws in several of the states we read require pay-scale and benefits information in the posting itself — Washington, Illinois, Minnesota and, since October 1, 2026, Connecticut.

The offer conversation is constrained too.

California's salary-history ban covers compensation and benefits — an employer there cannot seek the compensation and benefits of an applicant's history, orally or in writing, personally or through an agent.

You cannot reverse-engineer a package from a candidate's old one in California, so decide what the package is before interviews start: the coverage, the retirement plan, the paid time off, and which of them attach to an hourly engagement versus a staff salary.

That is the trade to work out: the flexibility of an hourly rate against the stability of a staff position with benefits, priced as one total offer.

Our guide to benefits small firms offer covers the package side in full — the plans small firms actually run and the rules that attach to them.

Sequence the offer the way you sequenced the role: duties first, number second.

The scope document from the structure section — what the reviewer takes, what escalates, who supervises — prices the engagement; a number negotiated before the scope is written is a number negotiated twice.

Post a real range.

In the states whose statutes we read, the range is a posting requirement, not a courtesy: California at 15 or more employees (with the pay scale due to any applicant on request, at any employer size), New York at four or more employees, Washington at 15, Illinois at 15, Minnesota at 30, Massachusetts at 25, and Connecticut's law took effect October 1, 2026; Virginia requires disclosure in each posting and Colorado requires compensation and benefits in job postings.

California defines the pay scale as a good-faith estimate of the salary or hourly range the employer reasonably expects to pay on hire — with penalties of $100 to $10,000 per violation — and that definition is the right standard for the range everywhere: the number you can actually pay, not the number that flatters the ad.

Run the interview on the lawful questions.

The statutes we read bar seeking salary history: California bars it orally and in writing, personally or through an agent, including compensation and benefits, and bars relying on it in deciding whether to hire or what to pay; New York bars relying on an applicant's wage or salary history and requesting it as a condition of being interviewed, considered, hired or promoted, or from a current or former employer; Illinois bars screening applicants by salary history and requesting it as a condition of an interview or offer; Massachusetts bars seeking it from the candidate or a current or former employer.

Connecticut, Virginia and Nevada surfaced in our pay-transparency research as well — Connecticut bars asking unless the applicant volunteers it, Virginia's 2026 law bans seeking salary history, and Nevada's ban sits in the same statute as its interview-stage disclosure duty.

We have not read every state and city statute, so confirm your jurisdiction's rule before you script the interview.

The question California's statute permits expressly — and the natural substitute where history is off the table: ask what the candidate expects this position to pay.

Then let the candidate move first where the law allows it.

Under New York's law you may confirm salary history only after a compensation offer is made, if the candidate responds by citing prior pay to support a higher number; Massachusetts allows confirmation only after voluntary disclosure or after an offer with compensation has been made.

Those are invitations to price the offer on the scope, not loopholes to price it on the past.

Benchmark in layers — our guide to benchmarking law firm pay walks the layering — decide the walk-away number before the first call, and put the terms in writing: the rate or salary, the overtime treatment, the term, and the renewal.

The rest of the hire — sourcing, the license checks, the conflicts screen, supervision — is in our guide to how to hire a document review attorney.

This page picks up at the number.

Our research found no published review cadence for document-review pay, so anchor the review to the events that actually move the number:

• When the data refreshes. The figures on this page are the OEWS May 2025 release, and they age. Re-pull the occupation and state numbers when the next release lands instead of reusing this page's figures indefinitely.
• When the wage floors move. California's lawyer-exemption floor is a multiple of the state minimum wage, which rose to $16.90 on January 1, 2026 and moves the floor to $70,304 with it; the federal standard salary level for the white-collar exemptions was $684 a week as of October 2026. Either number moving can flip a classification on your payroll — re-check both with employment counsel when they change.
• When the posting rules move. Posting laws carry effective dates — Connecticut's took effect October 1, 2026 — and the thresholds behind them are set in each state. Check your state labor agency's current requirement at each posting cycle rather than reusing last cycle's range logic.
• At every project cycle. Re-benchmark the rate before each new review project and re-confirm the scope while you are at it: a rate set for one production is not automatically the rate for the next.

This page is employer information, not legal advice. The wage figures come from the BLS OEWS May 2025 release as named above; the overtime rules from the Department of Labor's regulations and fact sheets and the state rules cited; and the interview and posting rules from the state statutes cited. They change, and each state's adopted version controls — confirm your pay structure, classifications and postings with employment counsel and your state labor agency before you act.