How do you set pay for attorneys and staff at a small firm?

The free floor is federal.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program (OEWS) surveys employers, and its latest release is May 2025.

For lawyers (SOC 23-1011), the national median annual wage is $159,670, with a 10th percentile of $78,360 and a 90th percentile of about $351,600 across 754,500 employed lawyers.

BLS footnotes published lawyer values of $239,200 a year and above, so read the top of that range as approximate — and note that OEWS excludes the self-employed, so it says nothing about what equity partners or solo practitioners take home.

Staff roles get their own lines, each with a SOC code worth naming whenever you quote one.

Paralegals and legal assistants share SOC 23-2011 — BLS combines the two titles in one occupation, so the line cannot tell you whether paralegals out-earn legal assistants — at a national median of $62,890 (10th percentile $44,740, 90th percentile $101,500) across 392,880 workers.

Legal secretaries and administrative assistants (SOC 43-6012) have a national median of $55,570 (10th percentile $36,500, 90th percentile $91,730).

For associates, the specialist series is the NALP Associate Salary Survey — and its sample leans large.

The 2025 edition found a median first-year base salary of $200,000 as of January 1, 2025, and $215,000 at firms of more than 700 lawyers.

In the same survey, $225,000 was the most common first-year salary, reported by 32% of offices overall — but at firms of 250 or fewer lawyers, a first-year salary of $150,000 or less was the most common response, at 44% of offices.

NALP's Class of 2025 curve shows why a headline number is dangerous to copy: of the 22,715 full-time salaries reported in it — a set spanning all full-time jobs, not just law firms — half fell between $60,000 and $100,000 while 21.5% sat at $225,000.

NALP also cautions that the unadjusted mean overstates the true average by about 5.5% because large-firm salaries are more completely reported.

Clio's Legal Trends Report measures a different thing: the economics a salary has to survive.

Its 2025 report — drawn from Clio users — puts average utilization at 38% (the share of an eight-hour day spent on billable work), realization at 88% (the share of billable work invoiced) and collection at 93% (the share of invoiced work paid).

The user base is mostly small firms, so treat those as small-firm rates: when you test a proposed salary, these are the levers it has to clear.

For staff-side numbers beyond BLS, ask the associations directly — NALA for paralegals and the Association of Legal Administrators for legal-management roles.

The ALA's compensation and benefits survey sits behind a paywall, so this page does not quote its figures; where an association's data is not public, request current numbers from the association rather than anchoring a band to a secondhand table.

And when you are ready to connect pay to the rest of the hiring picture, that is our guide to hiring for your law firm.

National medians are the start of the adjustment, not the end of it.

Geography moves the number more than anything else: in the May 2025 OEWS data, the lawyer median is $207,860 in New York, $195,190 in DC and $195,080 in California, against $91,690 in Mississippi (all SOC 23-1011).

Paralegals and legal assistants are paid most in DC ($89,750), Washington ($79,400) and Colorado ($78,190), and least in Mississippi ($46,180) (SOC 23-2011).

Pull your own state's line before you touch the national figure.

Inside the big markets, NALP's 2025 survey put the median first-year salary at $225,000 in six cities: Austin, Boston, Houston, New York City, San Francisco and the Washington, DC area.

Outside its 19 major markets, medians were $181,900 in the West, $170,000 in the Northeast, and $160,000 in the South and Midwest.

Mind the series as you compare: these are NALP associate numbers, the earlier figures are BLS ones — name which series a number comes from, and never subtract one series from another.

One more BLS cut is useful for a firm specifically: lawyers in the Legal Services industry — law firms, NAICS 5411 — had a median of $157,870 in May 2025, next to the $159,670 all-industry lawyer median.

Both come from the same OEWS release, so the comparison is like-for-like, and it says the all-industry lawyer line is a serviceable stand-in for firm pay when you need a single number.

What the sources on this page do not give you is a practice-area premium: none of them breaks pay out by practice area, so this page cannot price one, and a table that claims to deserves a question about its underlying data.

The same honesty applies to contract and document-review rates — our research found no primary source publishing hourly ranges for those roles by market, so price them from live postings in your market instead of from a blog table.

Turn the benchmark into a band before you talk to a candidate: a floor you can pay someone still developing into the role, a midpoint for solid experienced performance, and a top you reserve for the scarce combination of skills you are actually hunting for.

Anchoring the band to published percentiles keeps it defensible — BLS publishes 10th and 90th percentiles for every line above, so a band that starts near the median and tops out well under the 90th percentile can be shown to a partner or a candidate with the source attached.

The band is also public whether you like it or not, because more than a dozen states plus DC now require pay ranges in job postings.

The statutes we verified:

• California — employers with 15 or more employees must include the pay scale in any posting, and must give it to a third party that posts for them; pay scale means a good-faith estimate of what the employer reasonably expects to pay on hire, with penalties from $100 to $10,000 per violation.
• Washington — employers with 15 or more employees must post the wage scale or salary range plus a general description of benefits; in effect since January 1, 2023.
• Illinois — employers with 15 or more employees must include pay scale and benefits in each posting.
• Minnesota — employers with 30 or more employees must list the starting salary range and a general description of benefits, and ranges may not be open-ended.
• Massachusetts — employers with 25 or more employees; in effect since October 29, 2025.
• New York State — businesses with four or more employees; New York City has required a good-faith pay range since November 1, 2022.
• Colorado — compensation and benefits belong in all internal and public postings.
• Connecticut — in effect since October 1, 2026.
• Virginia — the wage, salary or range in each posting, a ban on seeking salary history, and penalties up to $1,000 for a first violation and $5,000 after that.
• Nevada — the range goes to an applicant who has completed an interview rather than into the posting.

Connecticut and Virginia also bar asking candidates for salary history — Connecticut's unless the applicant volunteers it first — so a written band does double duty: it is what you post and what you pay, and it replaces the salary-history question you can no longer ask.

Practically, that means the range you set is the range every candidate sees — set the band you are genuinely willing to pay, not a wide one you hope to negotiate under.

Budget the loaded cost, not just the base: salary plus payroll taxes plus benefits plus software and space.

That is a calculation your firm runs on its own numbers — our research found no primary source for a fully loaded cost multiplier for law-firm staff, so be skeptical of any advice to multiply salary by a fixed factor.

The band you benchmark is base pay; the figure you check against the budget is the loaded one.

Your band competes with more than other firms.

In the same May 2025 OEWS data, lawyers in the federal executive branch had a median of $178,380, in local government $131,350, and in state government $115,330 — all SOC 23-1011, the same series as the firm figures above.

Corporate head offices, the closest BLS proxy for in-house roles, paid lawyers a median of $223,560.

A candidate weighing your offer against a government or in-house move can find every one of those numbers too.

The staff lines show the same shape.

Paralegals and legal assistants in corporate offices had a median of $94,570, in the federal executive branch $81,470, and in the Legal Services industry $61,770 (SOC 23-2011, one series).

The industry you are in pays the lowest of the three medians for this occupation — so with an experienced staff hire, expect the pay conversation to cover more than base.

Government and nonprofit employers also carry something a firm cannot replicate: Public Service Loan Forgiveness forgives the remaining Direct Loan balance after 120 qualifying monthly payments, eligibility turns on the employer — U.S. government organizations at any level and 501(c)(3) nonprofits qualify, and private law firms do not — and full-time work means a weekly average of at least 30 hours.

When a candidate takes a public-interest job below your band, the forgiveness math is part of the offer you are competing against, so know what the other side of the table can offer before you assume a higher base wins.

Every figure on this page carries a date, and each source refreshes on its own clock: BLS's latest OEWS release is May 2025, NALP's associate medians are as of January 1, 2025, and Clio's figures are its 2025 report.

Re-pull each one when the publisher updates, and re-date your bands the same day.

Rules move your floor too, and several reset on a calendar.

Federal law sets the exempt salary level at $684 per week ($35,568 a year) as enforced by DOL as of October 2026, and a licensed lawyer actually practising law is exempt, with no federal salary test at all.

California is the outlier: practising lawyers there must also clear a salary test of at least twice the state minimum wage — $70,304 a year at the 2026 minimum wage of $16.90.

Washington's 2026 threshold is $80,168.40 a year for exempt employees generally, though it exempts practising lawyers from the salary test the way federal law does; Colorado's is $57,784 in 2026, again with the lawyer carve-out.

New York's thresholds from January 1, 2026 — $1,275.00 a week in New York City, Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester, and $1,199.10 a week elsewhere — apply to executive and administrative employees, not professional employees.

Where your state sits on that map is an annual check to run with your employment counsel.

Classification belongs in the same review: paralegals generally do not qualify as exempt learned professionals under federal rules, the exception being a paralegal who holds an advanced specialized degree in another professional field and uses it on the job — and job titles decide nothing, because duties and salary do.

Whether each of your roles is exempt or non-exempt is a question to re-ask whenever the band moves.

Bonus structures deserve the same look, and there the rule that matters is ethics, not wage-hour: ABA Model Rule 5.4(a) bars sharing legal fees with a nonlawyer, while Model Rule 5.4(a)(3) allows a firm to include nonlawyer employees in a compensation or retirement plan based in whole or in part on profit-sharing.

States adopt their own versions of the rule, so confirm any plan with your state bar's ethics counsel — our guide to Rule 5.4 staff bonuses walks the line in detail.

Our research found no primary benchmark for staff bonus ranges either, so set the structure on your own economics rather than on a copied range.

Finally, watch the large-firm anchors without copying them.

Milbank's June 2, 2026 announcement — reported across legal press — set a new associate scale effective July 1, 2026, starting at $235,000 for first-years and topping out at $455,000; the raise added $10,000 for the first four class years and $20,000 for fifth through eighth years, from a scale that ran $225,000 to $435,000.

That is the top of the large-firm market moving, and it is worth knowing which way the news cuts — it is not a small-firm band.

The number to benchmark against is the one from earlier in this page: half of the salaries in NALP's curve sat between $60,000 and $100,000 — remembering that the curve spans all full-time jobs, not just law firms.

Employer information, not legal advice. Pay-transparency, overtime-classification and bonus-structure questions for your firm belong with your employment counsel and your state bar's ethics counsel; confirm current thresholds and posting rules with the agencies and statutes named above.