Attorney Salary in Georgia 2026,
$134,830 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Georgia figure is $134,830 a year, or $64.82 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 — 15.6% below the national median of $159,670. The band matters more than the median here: $58,750 at the 10th percentile, $84,460 at the 25th, $202,800 at the 75th and $317,820 at the 90th. A single median across a profession with that distribution describes very few of the lawyers in it.

Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell at $138,210, then Brunswick-St. Simons $125,480, Augusta-Richmond County $123,960, Savannah $123,050 and Warner Robins $118,750. About twenty thousand dollars separates the top and fifth, which is narrow relative to the profession's overall spread — practice type separates Georgia lawyers far more than location does.

Yes. Georgia administers the Uniform Bar Examination through the Supreme Court of Georgia's Office of Bar Admissions, and a qualifying UBE score earned in another UBE jurisdiction may be transferred within the applicable time limit. Georgia also runs its fitness process before the examination rather than after, which affects the sequencing of an application. Admission carries mandatory membership of the State Bar of Georgia, which administers continuing legal education.

Because of the mix, not the market. A location quotient of 1.01 shows Georgia employs lawyers at almost exactly the national rate, so there is no oversupply. What differs is composition: the national median is lifted by states where large-firm, financial-services and technology legal work makes up a bigger share of the profession, while Georgia has a large population of small-firm, solo, government and public-interest lawyers occupying the $58,750 to $84,460 part of the band. Atlanta's top end competes nationally; the state's overall median does not reflect it.

The published data cannot break that out, but the ladder gives a defensible read. Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell's metro median is $138,210, and large-firm associate compensation sits above it — the $202,800 seventy-fifth percentile and $317,820 ninetieth are where the city's large-firm and senior in-house population concentrates. Firms following national associate pay scales in Atlanta will exceed the metro median substantially from early in the track, which is precisely why the Georgia band is as wide as it is.

Because 'lawyer' is a licence, not a job. The same bar admission covers a solo practitioner handling family law in a rural county, an assistant district attorney, a legal aid attorney, a corporate associate at an Atlanta firm following national pay scales, and a general counsel. Those are different labour markets that share a credential, and OEWS reports them in one row. Georgia's $58,750 to $317,820 spread is the visible consequence, and it is the reason the median is the least useful number on this page.

Partnership income is the largest omission. Equity partners are not employees in the ordinary sense and their distributions are not wages, so the top of the Georgia legal market is systematically under-represented in this data — the $317,820 ninetieth percentile is closer to a senior salaried figure than to a partner's income. Contingency-fee practice is similarly awkward to measure, and solo practitioners are largely outside an employer wage survey altogether. The figure describes salaried lawyers well and the profession as a whole imperfectly.

Practice setting first and by an enormous margin — the difference between government or small-firm practice and a large Atlanta firm or corporate legal department is most of the distance from the $84,460 twenty-fifth percentile to the $202,800 seventy-fifth. Then practice area, with corporate, healthcare regulatory, intellectual property and complex litigation paying above family, criminal and general civil work in this state. Then client origination, which is what converts a senior associate into a partner. And then metro, though Atlanta's $138,210 lead over the rest of Georgia is modest by comparison.