How much should a law firm pay a law clerk?

The number everyone finds first describes the wrong population.

BLS's wage statistics do include a "law clerk" occupation — Judicial Law Clerks, SOC 23-1012 — but that series covers clerks employed by judges and courts, and it is not a market benchmark for the law-student clerk your firm hires.

Judicial clerkships are, as BLS describes them, typically 1- or 2-year terms taken by some graduates before they practice law, which is a different job from the part-time student clerkship you are pricing.

The judicial series is still worth reading for scale, with the caveat attached.

In the OEWS May 2025 release, judicial law clerks had a national median annual wage of $64,920 ($31.21 an hour), with the 10th percentile at $46,180 and the 90th percentile at $113,140.

Those are court positions, not firm positions.

The state-level figures sit on our law clerk salary data page with the same judicial framing, so use them as context for the legal labor market, not as the answer for this hire.

To ground the number in the market you actually hire from, use sources that measure the employers you compete with:

• Your law schools' career services offices. They see the clerkship postings employers send to their school and can tell you where your range sits against them.
• Peer firms' postings. In states with posting-range laws, the range is required, not voluntary — California requires employers with 15 or more employees to include the pay scale in job postings, and New York's Labor Law 194-b requires businesses with four or more employees to list compensation ranges in postings. Competitor postings are the nearest benchmark a part-time clerkship has — the survey data our research holds for this market describes salaried big-firm summer programs, not semester-hour roles — and collecting them doubles as pay benchmarking for the rest of your staff.
• Live postings on this board. The law clerk jobs page shows how firms describe the role, the hours and the terms when they post one.

Whatever the number turns out to be, the job's shape moves it — the candidate's class year, your practice area and your firm's size each change what you are buying, and the price follows.

Class year sets what you can delegate.

A first-year student is hired for structure and training, and the work needs to be self-contained.

A third-year brings two more years of law school with them, plus journal or clinic experience where they have it, and can take a research memo or discovery draft you can file with light edits.

A graduate awaiting bar results can carry the most responsibility of the three — and is still unlicensed for pay purposes, which the next section turns into a rule.

Each step up that ladder is worth more to your firm, and the rate should reflect it.

Practice area changes the product.

Assign by deliverable: a litigation clerk can summarize depositions, build exhibit sets and maintain discovery indices; a transactional clerk can keep closing checklists and entity files current; an appellate clerk can cite-check and draft sections of briefs.

The more self-contained and reviewable the product, the more usable hours each week of the clerkship buys — which is what you are really paying for.

Firm size shows up in the one sourced spread our research holds for this market.

NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey recorded a median weekly salary for second-year summer associates of $3,850 across all firms and $4,100 at firms of more than 700 lawyers.

Those figures describe weekly-salaried summer programs at the firms big enough to run them and report to NALP.

If your hire is a part-time student working during the semester, benchmark against other firms' part-time postings rather than against big-firm summer rates — an hourly school-year rate and a weekly program salary are different structures, and pricing one off the other is where a number goes wrong.

Start from classification, not the rate.

The federal regulation that exempts practicing lawyers from overtime — 29 CFR 541.304 — covers an employee who holds a valid license to practice law and is actually engaged in practice, and it waives its salary requirements for that employee.

A law clerk doesn't hold a license yet, so the regulation can't reach them.

That is why an unlicensed law clerk — including a graduate awaiting bar results — is not exempt under 541.304 and must meet another exemption's salary and duties tests or be paid overtime.

For a school-year clerk, that points to the simplest structure on the menu: hourly pay, with hours tracked and overtime paid as the law requires.

The hourly route needs no exemption analysis at all.

What the exemption structure looks like across law firm roles is in our guide to exempt and non-exempt law firm staff.

If you would rather pay a salary, the title does not do the work.

Under the Department of Labor's Fact Sheet 17D, job titles do not determine exemption status — the specific duties and the salary must meet the regulations.

Where another exemption is in play, the salary test differs by exemption: for the executive, administrative and professional exemptions, the federal standard salary level is $684 per week ($35,568 a year), the figure DOL's salary-levels page listed as of October 2026, and a salary at that level still needs the exemption's duties test behind it.

State salary levels can sit higher — confirm the current figure for your state with your state labor agency.

The weekly salary is nonetheless the shape of the large-firm summer market.

The weekly figures in NALP's 2025 survey — $3,850 at the median for second-year summer associates — describe exactly this arrangement: a summer clerk paid by the week.

Paying a summer clerk weekly is fine as a structure, with one limit: a weekly salary does not by itself create an exemption, so overtime still applies unless the clerk's duties and salary meet an exemption's tests.

What that weekly salary looks like from the candidate's side of the table is covered in our guide to summer associate pay.

A graduate awaiting bar results runs the same analysis until admission: still unlicensed, so still outside 541.304, and still owed overtime unless another exemption's tests are met.

The day they are sworn in and actually practicing, the analysis flips — the exemption reaches a valid license holder engaged in practice, with no salary requirements attached.

Unpaid is the arrangement to leave off the menu until it has been tested.

Whether an unpaid clerkship can work at a for-profit firm is its own analysis under the intern rules, and our guide to paid vs. unpaid law firm internships works through it.

Classification is employment-law ground: before you post a clerkship as unpaid, salaried-exempt, or for course credit alone, confirm the analysis with employment counsel and your state labor agency — state rules can be stricter than the federal ones.

A clerkship's perks run through two currencies: the path to an offer, and a schedule that survives a semester of classes.

The offer path is the perk with the longest shelf life.

BLS notes a successful summer job or internship during law school may result in an employment offer after graduation, and NALP reports that 1L summer associates received offers to return for the 2L summer at a record 94.2% rate.

A firm that says plainly what a clerk must show to earn a return offer — and then keeps that word — is offering the thing both of those findings measure, at no cost to the wage budget.

The scheduling perks cost nothing and compound: exam-week flexibility, a stated weekly-hours cap you actually honor, and feedback on drafts that teaches rather than only corrects.

For a student juggling classes, those terms can decide the offer alongside the rate itself — which is why they belong in the posting, not just the interview.

Benefits themselves are partly a posting requirement, not just an offer sweetener.

Washington requires employers with 15 or more employees to disclose the wage scale or salary range and a general description of benefits in each job posting, and Illinois requires employers with 15 or more employees to include the pay scale and benefits in any specific job posting.

Whatever benefits you attach to a clerkship, describe what actually applies to the role — a part-time student hire may not be eligible for the same package as a full-time staff member, and the posting should say what is true.

Confirm the posting requirements for your state with your state labor agency.

An offer wins on clarity before it wins on size.

Make the terms a candidate can verify easy to find: the rate or weekly salary, the hours, who reviews their work, and what happens at the end of the term.

State all four in the posting — the posting-range rules above decide whether the number must be public anyway — and the offer conversation becomes a confirmation instead of a negotiation from zero.

The schools' calendar is your timeline: a summer clerk's availability is set by their academic year, so anchor the recruiting window to it.

And a definite offer extended early competes better than a generous one extended late.

Decide the rate internally before the first interview so the offer never waits on a partner debate.

The honest guard against overpaying is benchmarking, not instinct: refresh the postings-and-career-office method from the market section each cycle before you set the number.

And price the whole hire, not just the wage — add the supervising lawyers' review time to the true cost.

A clerk who produces self-contained, reviewable work at a higher rate can cost the firm less in total than a cheaper rate attached to work that has to be redone.

Close the loop deliberately.

Hold the end-of-term conversation while the work is fresh, and give a definite answer — a return offer, an associate conversation to revisit at graduation, or a clear thank-you.

The process around this hire — sourcing, screening, conflicts, onboarding — is in our guide to how to hire a law clerk.

There is no published review cadence for law clerk pay — no survey our research could cite sets an annual cycle for it.

Anchor the review to the events that actually move the number instead:

• Each recruiting cycle. Your recruiting window moves with the schools' academic year, so refresh your benchmark against postings and the career offices before you post the next role, not after.
• Class-year jumps. The rate set for a first-year is not the rate for a third-year producing filing-ready drafts. Re-price when the work changes, and say the new rate in the return offer.
• Wage-floor movements. If an exemption is part of your structure, its salary test carries a number that can change: DOL's salary-levels page listed the federal standard salary level at $684 per week ($35,568 a year) as of October 2026, and state levels differ on their own schedules — confirm both with your state labor agency when you review.
• Admission. When your clerk passes the bar, this page's analysis ends. A licensed lawyer actually practicing sits under the lawyer's overtime exemption, and the pay conversation becomes an associate conversation on a different ladder — our guide to hiring an associate attorney picks it up from there.

This page is employer information, not legal advice. The classification, posting-range and benefits rules above come from the Department of Labor's regulations and fact sheets and from the state statutes named; they change, and states adopt their own versions. Confirm your structure with employment counsel and your state labor agency before you post the number.