Legal Assistant Salary 2026,
What Legal Assistants Actually Earn

How much do legal assistants make in 2026?

Legal assistants share the BLS paralegals and legal assistants series with paralegals: OEWS May 2025 gives SOC 23-2011 a national median of $62,890 a year ($30.24 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $44,740 and the top 10% at $101,500 across 392,880 workers. The most useful thing to understand about this title is that it is used for two different jobs. In much of the market, particularly at larger firms and in corporate legal departments, legal assistant is simply an alternative name for paralegal and carries the same substantive responsibilities and pay. In other settings, especially smaller firms, it describes a support role closer to legal secretarial work — scheduling, correspondence, file management, client intake — which is priced considerably lower and is captured in a different occupational code when the employer classifies it that way. Before comparing an offer to a published median, it is worth establishing which version of the job it is, because the difference across the same title can be twenty thousand dollars or more. The route from the administrative version to the substantive one is taking on case responsibility deliberately: managing deadlines, drafting rather than typing, and handling clients directly. Employment across the pooled series is projected to grow 0.2% through 2034 with roughly 39,300 openings a year. → Full legal assistant career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $62,890 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 23-2011, 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 →