Attorney Salary in Louisiana 2026,
$104,100 Median | BLS Data by City

Louisiana attorneys earn a median $104,100 a year, or $50.05 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $50,140 at the 10th percentile to $227,230 at the 90th. That is 34.8% below the national median of $159,670. The most informative comparison on the page is that Louisiana's 75th percentile of $159,100 sits within six hundred dollars of the national median — the top quarter of the state's bar earns roughly what a typical US lawyer does.

New Orleans-Metairie, at $121,290, well clear of the rest. Lafayette follows at $111,160, then Alexandria $108,720, Baton Rouge $102,070 and Lake Charles $101,690. New Orleans concentrates the state's maritime, energy, insurance and commercial litigation practices, which is where the fee rates are. Baton Rouge, despite being the capital, sits below the state median because its legal market is weighted toward government and regulatory work paid on public-sector scales.

No. Louisiana neither administers the UBE nor accepts a transferred UBE score. Its bar examination is its own, and it tests Louisiana civil law — the state's private law derives from the civil-law tradition rather than the common law used in the other 49 states. Admission runs through the Supreme Court of Louisiana's Committee on Bar Admissions, and membership of the Louisiana State Bar Association is mandatory. A lawyer moving to Louisiana should assume they will sit the Louisiana examination.

More at the top of the band than at the bottom. The 2026 flat 3% rate replaced a schedule reaching 4.25%, so the absolute saving scales with income — modest on the $104,100 median, substantial at the $227,230 ninetieth percentile. It does not begin to close the 34.8% gap to the national median. The genuine Louisiana advantage for a lawyer is cost structure: office overhead, staff costs and housing are all far below coastal norms, which changes the economics of owning a practice more than it changes the economics of being an associate.

Composition of the legal market. The national median is lifted by large corporate firms and in-house departments in a handful of metropolitan centres; Louisiana has comparatively little of that tier. Its bar is weighted toward personal injury and insurance defence, family and criminal practice, small-firm general civil work, and public-sector employment — all real legal careers, none of them priced like corporate transactional practice. The location quotient of 1.09 confirms the state is not short of lawyers; it is short of the practice types that pay at the top of the profession.

More than most out-of-state lawyers expect. Louisiana's private law — obligations, property, successions, matrimonial regimes — comes from the Civil Code rather than from common-law precedent, which means the substantive law a Louisiana attorney practises is not portable to another state and another state's is not portable here. Practically this cuts two ways. It protects the Louisiana bar from casual entry by out-of-state lawyers, since there is no UBE transfer and no easy reciprocal route; and it makes leaving expensive, because a Louisiana civil-law practice does not translate. That closure is part of why the state supports 10,200 lawyers at a location quotient of 1.09 on a median of $104,100 — the market clears locally.

OEWS surveys employers, so it captures salaried lawyers well and self-employed ones poorly. A large share of Louisiana practice is solo and small-firm, and plaintiff-side contingency work — a significant part of the state's legal economy — produces income that is lumpy across years and is not a wage at all. The $227,230 ninetieth percentile therefore understates what the most successful Louisiana practitioners earn while the lower percentiles may overstate how many lawyers are salaried at those levels. Treat this row as a good description of employed legal practice in the state and an incomplete one of legal income.

Practice area and ownership, not tenure. The distance from the $104,100 median to the $159,100 seventy-fifth percentile in Louisiana is usually the distance between insurance defence or general civil work and maritime, energy or commercial litigation — the practices where New Orleans-Metairie's $121,290 metro figure comes from. Beyond that, the move from employee to equity is the decisive one: the state's low overhead means a small Louisiana firm keeps a larger share of its billings than an equivalent firm in a high-cost market, which is why the top of this band is populated by owners rather than by senior employees.