How much should a law firm pay a legal assistant?

Every BLS number for this title carries a scope note.

BLS publishes one occupation — Paralegals and Legal Assistants, SOC 23-2011 — so no figure isolates legal assistants, and the data cannot show whether paralegals out-earn legal assistants.

Benchmark the seat you scoped, not the label on the posting: where a firm's "legal assistant" is a secretarial seat and where it is paralegal-level work decides which end of these numbers describes you.

In the OEWS May 2025 release, the combined occupation had a national median annual wage of $62,890 — $30.24 an hour — with the 10th percentile at $44,740 and the 90th percentile at $101,500, and 392,880 employees in the occupation.

The 392,880 employment count excludes the self-employed.

Do not anchor an offer at the 10th percentile.

That figure marks the bottom tenth of a combined occupation across every state and seat type — it is not an entry-level wage for a hire you intend to keep.

The percentiles are the outer rails of the occupation; your market sets the number.

Two cuts land closest to a law-firm seat.

In May 2025, the occupation's median in the legal services industry was $61,770, just under the all-industry median, and BLS reports 75% of paralegal and legal assistant jobs were in legal services in 2025.

The state spread is wide: DC had the highest median at $89,750, followed by Washington ($79,400) and Colorado ($78,190), with Mississippi lowest at $46,180.

Your state's row sits on our legal assistant salary data page.

Treat all of it as floor-setting rather than the answer: these are medians for a combined occupation, not offers for your seat.

The sharper benchmark is what firms like yours are posting this month — our guide to benchmarking law firm pay turns those postings into a number you can defend.

Our research holds no dataset that splits this occupation's pay by experience, practice area or firm size: the federal figures we hold are the percentiles and the industry and state medians.

What those figures do document is employer type — and employer type matters.

In the same May 2025 release, the occupation's median ran $61,770 in legal services against $94,570 in management of companies and enterprises, the corporate-office cut.

Both figures describe the whole occupation in each industry, not any one seat, so read them as context for where a seat's market sits rather than offers to match.

A firm that benchmarks only against other firms should still know the occupation pays differently one employer type over.

On experience: BLS lists the typical entry-level education for the occupation as an associate's degree, and no advanced specialized academic degree is a standard prerequisite for entry into the field — the same fact that keeps the seat out of the learned-professional exemption.

So the premium you are pricing is demonstrated experience in the seat's work — the drafting speed, the calendar ownership, the deadline reliability — not the degree line on the résumé.

A candidate's years matter mainly as evidence they can run the duties you scoped without supervision.

Practice area and firm size have no published split in the data we hold, so price them from your own market instead: pull live postings for seats with the same duty list in your city, note where their ranges open, and set your premium for the skills your matters actually use — e-filing in the courts you file in, the document system your practice runs, the client-contact load your intake carries.

A short work-sample exercise in the interview will tell you more about which end of your range a candidate belongs on than any national percentile.

Structure starts with classification, and the federal rule is unusually direct here.

Under 29 CFR 541.301(e)(7), paralegals and legal assistants generally do not qualify as exempt learned professionals, because an advanced specialized academic degree is not a standard prerequisite for entry into the field.

For a seat scoped that way — no advanced degree required for entry — that points to the non-exempt side of the line: hourly pay, tracked time, overtime eligibility.

Two refinements keep that honest.

First, no title decides it — the Department of Labor's Fact Sheet 17D states that job titles do not determine exemption status; the specific duties and salary must meet the regulations.

Second, this subsection covers the learned-professional exemption only (the administrative exemption, for one, is a separate test the subsection does not cover), and within it there is a narrow carve-out for a paralegal who holds an advanced specialized degree in another professional field and uses it on the job — the regulation's own example is an engineer hired as a paralegal on patent or product-liability matters.

That exception is fact-specific, not a title upgrade.

Can you pay the seat a salary anyway?

You can — but a salary does not make a seat exempt.

The white-collar exemptions carry their own salary test: 29 CFR 541.600 sets the standard salary level for the executive, administrative and professional exemptions, and the Department of Labor's salary-levels page listed it at $684 per week ($35,568 a year) as of October 2, 2026.

A salary at that level still has to clear the exemption's duties test.

For a seat that cannot, the salary changes the arithmetic, not the overtime obligation.

Before you set the structure: classification is a legal call with a state layer on top of the federal rule — state wage-hour thresholds can differ, and this page does not attempt the full analysis.

Confirm any exemption decision with employment counsel or your state labor agency.

Where the overtime mechanics live — thresholds, timekeeping, how hours get authorized — our guide to overtime rules covers the wage-hour baseline.

And on the comparison the title invites: because BLS publishes one combined occupation, its figures cannot show whether paralegals out-earn legal assistants, so don't price a legal-assistant seat as "paralegal minus X" from the published numbers — benchmark the duties you actually assigned.

We won't invent a ranking: our research holds no survey of what legal-assistant candidates weight most in a package.

What we can do is flag the two places where this seat's package differs from a salaried professional's, and the categories worth deciding deliberately before the posting goes up.

First, the classification shapes the deal.

An hourly, overtime-eligible seat lives by its schedule: predictable hours, clear rules for how overtime is assigned and approved, and a staffing plan that doesn't treat extra hours as free capacity.

Those read as working conditions, but for a non-exempt hire they are part of the compensation conversation.

Second, decide each element of the package out loud rather than leaving it as "competitive": health coverage and whether it extends to family; retirement plan and any match; paid time off; schedule and remote flexibility; support for certification coursework; and how performance reviews and raises work.

Then state what is actually true for this seat in the posting.

A posting that names its conditions gives a candidate something to compare; a vague benefits line gives them nothing.

Posting requirements are jurisdiction-specific, and they change: where your state requires pay disclosure in job ads, the range is public to every competitor anyway.

Check your state's posting rules with your state labor agency before you publish.

Set the number before the first interview, not during it: take the range you built in the first section, mark the top you will actually pay, and write it down.

Deciding the ceiling after a candidate impresses you is how a firm overpays; deciding it in advance is how a firm moves fast.

The pay conversation itself has legal edges.

In California, Labor Code 432.3 bars every employer — any size — from seeking an applicant's salary history, including compensation and benefits, orally or in writing, and from relying on it in deciding whether to hire or what to pay; the same statute lets you ask about salary expectations for the position and lets you consider history the applicant volunteers unprompted, and it requires the position's pay scale on reasonable request at any employer size.

New York's Labor Law 194-a bars relying on an applicant's wage or salary history and requesting it as a condition of being interviewed, considered, hired or promoted, or seeking it from a current or former employer — confirmation opens only if, after a compensation offer, the applicant responds by citing prior pay to support a higher number.

Illinois (820 ILCS 112) makes it unlawful to screen applicants by salary history, to request it as a condition of an interview or offer, or to seek it from a current or former employer.

Massachusetts (G.L. c.149 §105A) bars seeking a prospective employee's wage or salary history from the candidate or a current or former employer; it may be confirmed only after the candidate volunteers it or after an offer with compensation has been made.

That is not a full map, and it is not a count of ban states: many cities and states have their own rules, and this page draws only on the four state statutes cited above.

Script the interview questions for the jurisdictions you hire in and confirm them with employment counsel before the first screen.

Inside those rules the play is straightforward: anchor on the role and your number, not on the candidate's past.

State the hourly rate and how overtime works plainly, and put the whole package into the offer — schedule, benefits, review timeline, and any bonus with its metric written down, so the number is auditable on both sides.

The full process around the offer, from scoping the seat to screening, is in our guide to how to hire a legal assistant.

Our research holds no published review cadence for legal-staff pay, so anchor the review to the events that move the number:

• Each hiring cycle. Re-run the posting benchmark before you post the next seat, not after — the benchmarking law firm pay guide is the method, and a rate set from last cycle's postings ages quietly.
• Each BLS release. Every wage figure on this page is May 2025 data; when BLS publishes its next OEWS release, re-read your state's row before you reuse these numbers.
• Wage-law changes. The federal exemption salary level was $684 a week as of October 2, 2026 — a dated figure by design — and state wage-hour thresholds can differ from the federal baseline. When either moves, classification and the overtime line in your budget move with it.
• Your own drift. If the seat's duties have grown — a legal assistant who now runs calendars for three attorneys is doing a different job than the one you priced — re-scope the seat and re-price it, rather than folding the extra work into the old rate.

This page is employer information, not legal advice. The wage figures come from BLS's OEWS May 2025 release for SOC 23-2011, the classification rules from the federal regulations and DOL guidance named, and the salary-history rules from the state statutes cited; all of them change. Confirm your pay structure and your interview script with employment counsel and, for posting requirements, your state labor agency.