How much should a law firm pay a paralegal?

Start from the honest label on the data.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey measures this hire under one occupation — Paralegals and Legal Assistants, SOC 23-2011 — so every figure below covers both titles together.

In the May 2025 national release, the occupation had a median annual wage of $62,890 ($30.24 per hour), a 10th percentile of $44,740, a 90th percentile of $101,500, and employment of 392,880, a count that excludes the self-employed.

Read the percentile columns for what they are: not an experience ladder.

The 10th percentile is not entry-level pay — it is simply the wage below which one worker in ten falls.

Turning these columns into a band for your market is its own exercise; our guide to benchmarking law firm pay walks it step by step.

Location moves the number.

Among states, the District of Columbia had the highest paralegal and legal assistant median in May 2025 at $89,750, followed by Washington at $79,400 and Colorado at $78,190; Mississippi was lowest at $46,180.

The full state tables sit on our paralegal salary data page.

Employer type matters too, because you are not the only buyer of these workers.

In the same release, paralegals and legal assistants in the Legal Services industry had a median annual wage of $61,770 — slightly below the all-industry median.

Corporate offices paid well above the occupation median: the Management of Companies and Enterprises industry had a median of $94,570.

The rest of the industry table: the federal executive branch $81,470; finance and insurance $80,120; local government $63,370; and state government $59,320.

When a corporate department or a government agency is hiring in your city, that is the competition your band has to meet.

One more caveat before you anchor anything: because BLS combines paralegals and legal assistants in a single occupation, the federal data cannot tell you whether one title out-earns the other in your market.

To see the range rivals actually advertise, browse the live paralegal jobs on this board and price against postings, not against memory.

Be skeptical of any table that claims to price paralegal experience directly.

The percentile columns in the section above are not experience steps, and our research found no sourced salary ladder by paralegal seniority in the primary data.

Price experience by scope instead: write down whether the hire should run a caseload in week one or grow into one under review, and let the band move with the scope you are actually buying.

Certification is one input employers weigh, and the honest answer is that the federal data cannot price it.

BLS says paralegal certification is not required, but that some employers prefer or require it, and that certification typically means passing an exam plus ongoing continuing education.

OEWS publishes no credential split, so there is no verified dollar figure for what a certified paralegal earns over an uncertified one.

Decide internally what the certification is worth as a signal of the level you need, verify the credential directly with the issuing body, and treat any vendor table that promises a fixed premium with suspicion.

Practice area is the same story.

Our research found no verified pay premium for any paralegal practice area, and we are not going to invent one — resist adding a "litigation premium" or an "estate planning discount" to your band on instinct.

The closest sourced split by employer type is the industry table above: legal services, corporate offices and government are the segments with real numbers behind them.

Our research found no paralegal-specific firm-size pay curve either.

What you can do is work the cost honestly on your side of the ledger: the wage is one line, and payroll taxes, benefits, software and space are others.

Add them up for your firm rather than applying anyone's ready-made multiplier — our research found no sourced loaded-cost benchmark for paralegals, so the calculation your own books produce is the one to use.

Start from the classification federal law produces.

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.

That is why the working default for this hire is hourly pay with the role treated as overtime-eligible — and why a flat annual salary does not, by itself, settle the overtime question.

Two qualifications keep that honest.

The regulation carves out a paralegal who holds an advanced specialized degree in another professional field and uses it on the job — the rule's own example is an engineer hired as a paralegal on patent or product-liability matters.

And classification is always a duties-and-salary question, not a title question: DOL's guidance under Fact Sheet 17D says job titles do not determine exemption status, the specific duties and salary must meet the regulations, and the administrative exemption is a separate test with its own requirements.

If a particular hire is classified exempt under a different exemption, the federal salary floor applies: the standard salary level for the executive, administrative and professional exemptions is $684 per week under 29 CFR 541.600 — the level DOL's salary-levels page listed at $684 per week ($35,568 a year) as of October 2, 2026.

Your state may set a higher salary threshold and its own overtime rules; our guide to overtime rules works through the full analysis, and you should confirm each hire's classification with employment counsel before the first payroll runs.

Bonuses are where pay structure meets the ethics rules.

ABA Model Rule 5.4(a) bars a lawyer or law firm from sharing legal fees with a nonlawyer, subject to four listed exceptions — and one of those exceptions, 5.4(a)(3), lets a firm include nonlawyer employees in a compensation or retirement plan even if the plan is based in whole or in part on profit-sharing.

The line the state authority draws is firm-wide money, not case money.

New York's Comment [1B] to Rule 5.4, quoted in NYSBA Ethics Opinion 887, says profit-sharing with nonlawyer employees must be based on the total profitability of the firm or a department, not the fee from a single case — and in the same vein, D.C. Bar Ethics Opinion 322 concluded a firm may not pay a nonlawyer employee a percentage of the profits from designated cases.

Reading the permissible side, NYSBA Opinion 887 — written about a nonlawyer marketer's bonus — found it acceptable when it comes from a profit-sharing plan based on overall firm profits or is a percentage of base salary, and unacceptable when based on referrals of particular matters.

The practical translation for your payroll: a bonus pool keyed to firm-wide or department profitability is the structure the model-rule exception describes; a bonus keyed to a single case's fee is the one the New York comment and the D.C. opinion prohibit.

A per-signup bonus — pay for each client signed up — runs into a separate line: Model Rule 7.2(b) bars giving anything of value to a person for recommending the lawyer's services, subject to narrow exceptions.

The New York and D.C. authority applies in those states only, so before you roll out any bonus design that touches case revenue, put it in front of your state bar's ethics counsel.

Our guide to staff bonuses under Rule 5.4 covers the structures in depth.

Be honest about what the research can and cannot tell you.

The sources behind this page measure what paralegal jobs pay; none of them is a ranked survey of what paralegal candidates value in a benefits package.

Any "perks that matter most" list you find is somebody's guess, including ours — so build the package from what you can verify and what your own candidates ask for.

Three items do have something concrete behind them.

First, retirement plans: Model Rule 5.4(a)(3) expressly lets a firm include nonlawyer employees in a compensation or retirement plan even if the plan is based in whole or in part on profit-sharing — the same exception that makes a firm-wide bonus pool workable also covers a retirement plan built on it.

Second, credential support: certification typically requires passing an exam plus ongoing continuing education, so funding exam fees and continuing education is a perk that maps onto how the credentials your candidates pursue actually work.

Third, paid time to keep those obligations current is the same offer stated as a schedule rather than a fee.

Writing the package down is also becoming posting content, not just offer content.

California requires employers with 15 or more employees to include the pay scale in any job posting.

New York requires businesses with four or more employees to list compensation ranges for advertised jobs.

Of these three, only Minnesota's rule names benefits: employers with 30 or more employees must list the starting salary range and a general description of benefits in each posting, and its ranges may not be open-ended.

Draft the actual package — coverage, retirement, credential support, schedule — before you post, and you will have it ready for candidates and for whichever posting-disclosure rules apply where you hire.

Confirm the current requirement where you practice with your state labor agency.

Build the number from your band, not from the candidate's past.

That second input is restricted by state law.

The salary-history rules our research verified include: Connecticut bars employers from asking about a prospective employee's wage and salary history unless the applicant has voluntarily disclosed it; Nevada bans seeking salary history and requires the employer to give the wage or salary range to an applicant who has completed an interview; and Virginia requires employers to disclose the wage, salary or range in each public and internal posting and bans seeking salary history.

Hawaii and Colorado salary-history bans are also on that verified list.

It is not a complete count — other states and cities have their own rules — so confirm the current rule where you hire with your state labor agency.

Ask about salary expectations for the role instead, and weigh the answer against the state figures and the live postings from the first section.

A candidate anchored far above your band is telling you which firms they are shopping; one anchored far below may be telling you they have not seen the market — posting the range fixes that for both of you.

Put the offer's pay terms in writing as the firm states them: the rate or salary, the classification you have assigned and why, how overtime is recorded and approved, and any bonus formula written out in full.

The classification line matters for this role in particular — it is the sentence that shows the overtime decision in the pay-structure section above was made deliberately rather than inherited from a template.

Keep the non-pay checks moving in parallel so the offer is not the thing that exposes a gap: credential verification with the issuing body, references who can describe the supervision the candidate worked under, and your own plan for who supervises the hire.

Those steps, and the order to run them in, are covered in our guide to how to hire a paralegal — the offer should not go out before they clear.

A paralegal band goes stale from three directions at once — the published data, the legal thresholds and your own payroll — so put the review on a calendar instead of waiting for a resignation to schedule it for you.

Data first.

The BLS OEWS May 2025 release is the latest one as of this writing; before each benchmarking round, check whether BLS has published a newer release and refresh the state and industry medians your band anchors to.

Date-stamp whatever number you bring into the discussion so the comparison is honest — a figure quoted without its release date is not a benchmark.

Thresholds second.

If any member of your staff is classified exempt, the federal salary level that test requires — $684 per week, the level DOL's salary-levels page listed as of October 2, 2026 — moves when DOL or your state moves it, and a state threshold, where one applies, can sit above the federal level.

Recompute the floor whenever the underlying rate changes rather than discovering the gap in an audit.

Internal third.

Set the first pay review when you make the offer, and bring the refreshed band to it: a raise decided from data reads as a system, while one decided by a competing offer reads as a discount that got corrected.

The cheapest review is the one that keeps a paralegal you have already trained and supervised into your practice — replacing one restarts the search, the verification and the client handoffs all at once.

Employer information, not legal advice. The wage figures on this page are BLS OEWS May 2025 data, and the classification, posting-disclosure and bonus rules described here change and vary by state — confirm what applies to your firm with your state labor agency, employment counsel, and your state bar's ethics counsel before you act on them.