How much should a law firm pay a personal injury attorney?

Start from the lawyer data, because that is what our research has.

We found no personal-injury pay series in the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) May 2025 release — the series that covers the role is all lawyers, SOC 23-1011 — so every benchmark below is the all-lawyers proxy, and the state tables on our personal injury attorney salary data page use the same series.

Nationally, the spread for Lawyers (SOC 23-1011) ran from $78,360 at the 10th percentile to $351,600 at the 90th, with the median at $159,670 and the middle half between $102,990 and $221,370 (OEWS May 2025).

BLS footnotes lawyer values of $239,200 a year and above, so read the top of that distribution as approximate rather than exact.

The cut closest to your P&L is industry, not practice area: lawyers working in the legal services industry — law firms, NAICS 5411 — had a median annual wage of $157,870.

Geography moves the number sharply.

New York had the highest lawyer median among the states in May 2025 at $207,860, followed by DC at $195,190 and California at $195,080; Mississippi was lowest at $91,690 — a spread the state tables map percentile by percentile.

Two limits keep these figures honest for a personal injury hire.

OEWS excludes the self-employed, so it says nothing about what firm owners take home from contingency fees — it measures the wage-earning market your job posting competes in.

And a percentile is a distribution, not a requirement: the 10th-percentile figure describes the bottom of the lawyer market, not a starting offer you should anchor to.

Our research found no sourced experience curve for personal injury attorneys — no survey we could cite says a fourth-year plaintiff-side litigator out-earns a second-year by a set amount — so build the ladder from the firm-size and market cells the data does publish, then price the case record on top.

The new-graduate numbers come from NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey, as of January 1, 2025 — and the sample carries a warning label: 437 offices reported, 87% from firms of 250 or more lawyers, so it skews large-firm.

The sample also does not represent 2–20 lawyer firms well.

The cells worth your attention: the median first-year base was $200,000 overall and $215,000 at firms of more than 700 lawyers; among firms of 250 or fewer lawyers, a first-year salary of $150,000 or less was the most common, reported by 44% of offices — the cell to read if your firm sits at the smaller end.

$225,000 was the single most common first-year figure in the survey (32% of offices, and 45% of offices in firms of 701+ lawyers), and among NALP's 19 major-market cities, six had a median first-year salary of $225,000: Austin, Boston, Houston, New York City, San Francisco and the Washington, DC area.

Outside those 19 cities, medians ran $181,900 in the West, $170,000 in the Northeast, and $160,000 in the South and Midwest.

Two different series, not one ladder: the OEWS figures above cover the lawyer occupation as a whole, while the NALP figures cover first-year associates in a large-firm-heavy sample.

Don't set a range by mixing them — pick the cell that matches your firm and region, and treat the gap between the candidate's last role and your caseload as the negotiation.

What no table prices is the asset you are actually bidding for.

Decide before the interview what a first-chair trial record, a portable referral network and case-mix fit are worth to your firm — that judgment, written down, is the part of the number no benchmark supplies.

Three structures you can build from: a straight salary; a base plus a bonus tied to case outcomes (resolved files, fee collections, or the verdicts and settlements you define in the plan); and a percentage of the fees on resolved cases, whole or in part.

Our research found no sourced benchmark for how personal injury firms combine them, and we won't invent percentages — the mix is yours to design.

What the record does establish is the floor under the base and the rules around the formula.

The floor first.

Under federal law (29 CFR 541.304), a lawyer who holds a valid license and is actually engaged in the practice of law is an exempt professional, and the federal salary-level and salary-basis requirements do not apply — so federal overtime law sets no minimum salary for a practicing personal injury associate.

The exemption reaches licensed lawyers practicing law: a candidate awaiting bar results is not exempt under it and must meet another exemption's salary and duties tests or be paid overtime.

Duties and salary decide exemption status, not the title on the business card.

California is the exception our research documents: there, a practicing lawyer is exempt only if the salary is also at least two times the state minimum wage for full-time work — $70,304 a year ($1,352 a week) at the 2026 minimum wage of $16.90 — and the state has no duties-only carve-out for lawyers the way federal law does.

The formula second.

The ABA's Model Rules are a model — your firm answers to the version your state has adopted — and the model text our research read polices fee sharing with nonlawyers, not with your associate: Model Rule 5.4(a) bars a lawyer or law firm from sharing legal fees with a nonlawyer, subject to four listed exceptions.

Rule 1.5(e), the fee-division rule, governs division between lawyers in different firms — proportional shares or assumed joint responsibility, the client's confirmed writing with each share, a reasonable total fee — not the internal pay plan of one firm.

That gap is the point: for a lawyer employee's own case-linked formula, our research surfaced no rule text that settles it — the rule that binds your firm is the version your state adopted, so put the formula in front of your state bar's ethics counsel before the offer letter is signed.

The staff side of the same question is its own page: how Rule 5.4 treats staff bonuses tied to case outcomes.

Say plainly what our research does and doesn't have: no sourced survey ranks what personal injury attorneys value in a benefits package, so there is no "candidates want X" list here.

What an offer competes on beyond base is knowable from the role: health coverage that starts day one, a retirement plan, who pays bar dues and CLE, trial-skills training, the paralegal and intake support that decides how many files they can carry, and a written policy on credit for cases they bring in.

One sourced signal from the adjacent market: among law offices in NALP's 2025 survey, 73% offered judicial clerkship bonuses, with amounts varying by clerkship type — if your candidate is coming off a clerkship, that is the per-credential add-on nearly three-quarters of surveyed offices were paying.

Whatever package you land on, the posting may have to describe it.

The posting laws our research verified from statute or the state agency reach benefits as well as pay: Washington (15+ employees), Illinois (15+) and Minnesota (30+) each require a general description of benefits alongside the pay figure, and Minnesota adds that ranges may not be open-ended.

California defines its pay scale as a good-faith estimate of the salary or hourly range the employer reasonably expects to pay on hire, with penalties running $100 to $10,000 per violation.

Write the benefits paragraph before the posting goes up, not after the first complaint.

The offer conversation has legal rails.

Four states we read the statutes for — California, New York, Illinois and Massachusetts — bar an employer from seeking a candidate's salary history, and Connecticut, Virginia and Nevada also bar seeking it under the rules we read.

That is not a count of every ban — many other states and cities have their own versions — so run your interview scripts past employment counsel before the first call.

The mechanics, as the statutes read: California bars seeking salary history, including compensation and benefits, orally or in writing, personally or through an agent, and bars relying on it in deciding whether to hire or what to pay — but lets you ask about salary expectations for the position and lets you consider history the candidate volunteers unprompted.

New York bars relying on wage or salary history and requesting it as a condition of being interviewed, considered, hired or promoted, and lets you confirm history in one posture: after you have made a compensation offer, if the candidate responds by citing prior pay to support a higher number.

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, and allows confirmation only after voluntary disclosure or after an offer with compensation has been made.

Two disclosure rules sit on your side of the table.

In California, an employer must give an applicant the position's pay scale on reasonable request, whatever the firm's headcount.

In Nevada, the range is an offer-stage document: employers give the wage or salary range to an applicant who has completed an interview — and there, too, seeking salary history is barred.

If the winning structure includes a signing bonus with a repayment clawback, California's stay-or-pay law (Business and Professions Code section 16608, AB 692) governs contracts entered on or after January 1, 2026: requiring a worker to pay a penalty, fee or cost if employment ends is unlawful, and a signing-bonus repayment clause survives only if it meets every one of the statute's conditions — it is in a separate agreement; the worker is told they may consult a lawyer and gets at least five business days; repayment is interest-free and prorated over a retention period of no more than two years; the worker may instead defer the bonus to the end of the period; and repayment applies only on a voluntary quit or a firing for misconduct.

A worker handed a non-compliant term can sue for actual damages or $5,000 per worker, whichever is greater, plus injunctive relief and attorney's fees.

Clawback rules outside California were not part of our research — do not assume the clause travels; ask employment counsel in every state you hire in.

Then the strategy half, which is yours: lead with the total package rather than the base, put the case-linked formula in writing with the metrics you will actually measure, and check the market you are bidding in — browse the personal injury attorney jobs board to see how competing postings present pay, and our guide to how to hire a personal injury attorney covers the licensing, screening and red flags that come before the number.

Set the review cadence yourself rather than inheriting it from a counteroffer.

The benchmarks on this page carry their as-of dates — the OEWS figures are the May 2025 release, the latest available when we researched this page, and the NALP survey speaks as of January 1, 2025 — so calendar a re-run when BLS publishes its next release and when your state's numbers move.

A raise decided against current data is defensible; a raise decided against a departing attorney's counteroffer is a negotiation you restart every time.

Adjustments can trigger disclosure, not just a new letter.

New York's posting law covers promotions and transfers as well as advertised jobs, and Illinois requires employers to announce promotion opportunities to current employees no later than 14 calendar days after an external posting.

When the number moves, the range you publish moves with it.

Employer information, not legal advice. Pay structures sit where compensation meets your state's ethics rules and wage-and-hour law — confirm the structure and the offer documents with your state bar's ethics counsel and employment counsel, and posting requirements with your state labor agency.