Associate Attorney Salary 2026,
What Associate Attorneys Actually Earn

How much do associate attorneys make in 2026?

Associate attorneys are counted inside the BLS lawyers series, where OEWS May 2025 reports a national median of $159,670 a year ($76.76 an hour) for SOC 23-1011, a bottom 10% near $78,360 and a top 10% at $351,600 across 754,500 lawyers. That series pools associates with partners, government lawyers and in-house counsel, so it is not an associate-specific figure. Associate pay is set by a mechanism the median cannot show: most large firms pay on a published lockstep scale by graduating class year, matched across the market within days of a leading firm announcing a change, with an annual bonus on a similarly published scale conditional on hitting a billable hours target. Everyone in a class year at a firm on that scale earns the same, regardless of performance, until the point where performance determines whether they stay. Outside that market, mid-market and regional firms pay materially less, and often more sanely, sometimes with a bonus tied to originations or collections rather than to hours. The economics behind the scale are leverage: firms profit on the gap between what an associate is paid and what their hours bill for, which is why the target hours attach to the scale and why the two are not separable. Employment is projected to grow 4.1% through 2034 with roughly 31,500 openings a year. → Full associate attorney career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $159,670 blends every experience level and every setting in this occupation. For pay by level alone, see Pay by Level below.

Published (BLS): BLS OEWS May 2025, SOC 23-1011, United States national estimate. Public, methodologically rigorous, but sampled on a rolling 3-year basis and published ~10 months after collection — so it reflects wages that are already 1–2 years old by the time you read them.

Level and certification medians: distributed across the published BLS percentile range for this SOC code (P10 through P90) according to the credential tiers this occupation actually hires at. They are modeled reference points, not separately surveyed wages.

State and metro figures: modeled — the BLS national median multiplied by the GlobalCybers state wage index, and for metros by the published metro index for that state. They are estimates of local pay, not BLS state or metropolitan-area observations, and are labelled as modeled in the tables below.

No verified placement sample:GlobalCybers does not yet publish a placement median for this role, so no "verified" figure appears anywhere on this page.

Full site methodology & data sources →