Attorney Salary in Washington, D.C. 2026,
$195,190 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Washington, D.C. figure is $195,190 a year, or $93.84 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $120,580 at the 10th percentile to $392,750 at the 90th. That is 22.2% above the national median of $159,670. The District employs 33,070 lawyers at a location quotient of 9.71 — nearly ten times the national employment rate for the occupation.

The District is a single jurisdiction, so there is no internal metro comparison to make: the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria figure and the District-wide figure are both $195,190, against a United States all-areas figure of $159,670. The meaningful comparison is with other jurisdictions — New York publishes $207,860, California $195,080 and Massachusetts $176,680.

Through the D.C. Court of Appeals Committee on Admissions, which offers several routes: a passing score on the Uniform Bar Examination administered in the District, a UBE score transferred from another jurisdiction, or admission on motion without examination for lawyers already admitted elsewhere who meet the practice-experience requirements. That last route makes the District unusually accessible to experienced lawyers relocating in — appropriate for a market built on federal and regulatory practice drawing from the whole country.

No, but it is close. New York publishes a median of $207,860 against the District's $195,190, with California at $195,080 essentially level with D.C. Where the District stands apart is concentration rather than rate: a location quotient of 9.71 means it employs lawyers at nearly ten times the national density, so the number of well-paid legal posts relative to the jurisdiction's size has no parallel.

Because there is very little low-paid legal work here. The 10th percentile is $120,580 and the 25th is $172,060 — the latter already above the national median of $159,670. Federal agency practice, association counsel and large-firm associate positions all start well above what entry legal work pays in most states, and the District has comparatively little of the small-town general practice and rural public-sector work that populates the bottom of other jurisdictions' bands.

It means the District employs lawyers at nearly ten times the rate you would expect from the size of its workforce — the most extreme concentration of any occupation in any jurisdiction in this batch. The cause is that Washington hosts the federal government, the regulatory agencies, the courts that review them, the trade associations and advocacy organisations that petition them, the international institutions headquartered here, and the law firms built to serve all of the above. Legal services are not a professional sector supporting the D.C. economy; to a substantial degree they are the D.C. economy.

The band is bimodal and the median sits in the trough. From the $172,060 twenty-fifth percentile to the $360,310 seventy-fifth is an enormous jump, and it reflects two largely separate populations: government, agency, association and public-interest lawyers on structured scales, and large-firm private practice on a completely different economics. The median of $195,190 describes the boundary between them rather than a typical D.C. legal salary — an agency attorney and a firm associate will both find it unrepresentative.

Sector, decisively. The move from government, agency or association practice into large-firm private practice is worth more than any other decision available and accounts for most of the distance from $172,060 to $360,310. Within private practice, regulatory, antitrust, government contracts and international trade are the District's specialisms. Above that, equity partnership drives the $392,750 top decile. And residence is a genuine financial variable: the District's 10.75% top rate applies to residents, while Virginia's tops out at 5.75%.