Litigation Paralegal Salary 2026,
What Litigation Paralegals Actually Earn

How much do litigation paralegals make in 2026?

Litigation paralegals are counted in the BLS paralegals and legal assistants series, where OEWS May 2025 reports a national median of $62,890 a year ($30.24 an hour) for SOC 23-2011, a bottom 10% near $44,740 and a top 10% at $101,500 across 392,880 workers. That code pools every paralegal specialism, so it is not litigation-specific. Two features distinguish litigation work within it. The first is that base pay understates actual earnings, because trial preparation and trial itself generate substantial overtime for hourly paralegals — weeks of long days assembling exhibits, managing witnesses and running the war room — and a busy trial year can add a great deal to the published figure. The second is that discovery has become the technical core of the job. A litigation paralegal who is genuinely capable in a review platform, who can build search terms, manage productions, handle privilege logs and troubleshoot load files, is doing work that firms otherwise buy from vendors at a considerably higher rate. That capability, plus command of court rules and filing systems across jurisdictions, is what puts a litigation paralegal in the upper quartile. Employment across the pooled series is projected to grow 0.2% through 2034 with roughly 39,300 openings a year — flat, and stated plainly. → Full litigation paralegal 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 →