Lawyers
What the pay figures show
- New York pays lawyers the most, at $207,860. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $132,797 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- New York leads for lawyers at $207,860 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $132,797 in price-deflated terms. That robustness is the minority case: across the largest occupations, state income tax reorders the leader roughly a third of the time and price level does so more often still. Where the nominal leader survives both, the wage premium is large enough to absorb the state's own tax and price levels.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$159,670
People doing it
754,500
Highest paid
$207,860
NY
Best off, really
$132,797
NY, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$78,360
Highest tenth
$351,600
Lowest, really
$79,914
MS
States with data
51
National average
$185,840
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
107.63%
NY, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job roughly doubles depending on the state. That is a lot. Some of it is prices, because dear places pay more to make up for costing more. Most of it is not. In real money the range is still $79,914 to $132,797.
- About 754,500 Americans work in this job, on a middle wage of $159,670. Big enough that where you live changes the arithmetic.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $159,670. Nothing is missing.
- Interstate variation in lawyers pay approaches twofold nominally. The standard explanation — that high-wage states are merely high-cost states — is only partly supported here: after tax and price adjustment the range remains $79,914 to $132,797, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 754,500 workers, lawyers sits in the middle of the BLS headcount distribution. The state-level spread described above therefore applies to a meaningful population rather than a niche one.
- Coverage for lawyers is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Lawyers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $78,360 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $159,670 |
| Top tenth earn over | $351,600 |
| This salary | $159,670 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Lawyers
The national median for this job
$159,670around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $78,360 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $159,670 |
| Top tenth | $351,600 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Lawyers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $91,690 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New York · $207,860 |
| Spread | $116,170 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $154,200 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $158,683 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| NY | $207,860 | $142,924 | $132,797 |
| DE | $173,510 | $119,639 | $120,540 |
| TX | $154,200 | $116,662 | $120,053 |
| DC | $195,190 | $131,718 | $118,875 |
| CO | $168,520 | $119,743 | $118,111 |
| NV | $150,510 | $114,140 | $117,694 |
| PA | $157,180 | $113,873 | $116,793 |
| CA | $195,080 | $131,209 | $116,546 |
| VA | $167,210 | $116,700 | $115,832 |
| IL | $160,800 | $113,358 | $114,671 |
| MA | $176,680 | $123,513 | $114,112 |
| TN | $136,180 | $104,345 | $112,787 |
| AK | $149,940 | $113,750 | $111,832 |
| CT | $163,600 | $114,521 | $110,446 |
| MN | $155,140 | $107,959 | $109,695 |
| WA | $154,130 | $116,614 | $107,417 |
| AL | $131,970 | $96,054 | $106,763 |
| OH | $131,020 | $97,931 | $106,665 |
| MO | $133,450 | $97,144 | $105,865 |
| NJ | $161,430 | $113,510 | $104,250 |
| IA | $123,550 | $91,629 | $103,225 |
| IN | $126,860 | $94,262 | $102,254 |
| UT | $132,830 | $96,144 | $101,202 |
| MI | $130,520 | $95,180 | $101,058 |
| GA | $134,830 | $97,293 | $100,614 |
| NC | $127,710 | $93,969 | $99,819 |
| RI | $138,960 | $100,997 | $99,591 |
| AZ | $134,260 | $100,079 | $98,985 |
| FL | $133,180 | $102,295 | $98,881 |
| WI | $126,760 | $91,836 | $98,646 |
| NM | $119,680 | $88,491 | $97,904 |
| MD | $139,110 | $99,877 | $96,068 |
| VT | $127,310 | $91,990 | $95,194 |
| SC | $120,310 | $88,166 | $94,622 |
| ND | $106,880 | $83,195 | $93,929 |
| SD | $102,040 | $80,615 | $91,509 |
| NE | $109,170 | $81,367 | $90,032 |
| OR | $138,210 | $94,069 | $89,828 |
| LA | $104,100 | $79,328 | $89,793 |
| NH | $120,810 | $93,820 | $89,060 |
| OK | $103,060 | $77,196 | $87,438 |
| WY | $100,130 | $79,271 | $87,257 |
| AR | $98,880 | $75,192 | $86,919 |
| KS | $106,650 | $78,196 | $86,918 |
| WV | $102,420 | $77,081 | $85,863 |
| MT | $103,720 | $77,298 | $85,654 |
| KY | $101,550 | $76,834 | $84,929 |
| ME | $113,120 | $81,964 | $84,415 |
| ID | $103,400 | $76,945 | $84,162 |
| HI | $124,990 | $88,641 | $81,614 |
| MS | $91,690 | $69,758 | $79,914 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of lawyers earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $159,670.
- Take-home figures for lawyers assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In New York, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $142,924.
- Levelling out prices for lawyers is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Mississippi sits at the bottom on $79,914.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for lawyers, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $159,670, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- Take-home calculations for lawyers assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $142,924, in New York. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- The price deflation applied to lawyers uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Mississippi at $79,914. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Mississippi anchors the bottom at $79,914 — and the two source series are dated independently.