Insights · August 13, 2026 · 9 min read
What Legal Work Pays in 73 US Legal Markets
By John Voll, Founder
Every attorney who calls me about moving markets asks a version of the same question, and almost nobody can answer it with numbers: is this a real legal market, or does it just have a few big names in it? Salary surveys will tell you what a fourth-year associate makes at a national firm. They will not tell you how much legal work a city actually contains, whether that work sits inside large firms or hundreds of small ones, or how any of that compares with the market you are leaving.
So we built the comparison from public data. What follows is every US metro area with a meaningful legal sector, 73 of them, ranked by what legal work pays, sized by how many people it employs, and scored on a measure I have not seen published anywhere else: how many people work at the average legal employer in that market. Together those three numbers describe a legal economy far better than a salary scale does.
Read the pay column correctly, or it will mislead you
One caveat first, because it governs everything below and I would rather put it at the top than bury it in a footnote.
The pay figure is the average annual pay across the entire legal services sector, not attorney salary. It is total payroll divided by total employment in NAICS 5411, which means it includes paralegals, legal assistants, records staff and office administrators alongside attorneys, and it includes bonuses and partner compensation wherever partners sit on payroll. A market at $291,000 a year is not a market where attorneys earn that. It is a market whose legal payroll per worker is that high, which is a function of both what attorneys are paid and how many support staff sit behind each one.
Used that way it is genuinely useful, because the distortion is roughly consistent from market to market. Comparing DC with Cleveland on this measure tells you something real. Reading any single row as a salary does not.
What legal work pays, by market
All 73 metros, ranked by average annual pay across the legal services sector. Together they hold 962,256 legal-sector jobs. Each market links to its own page, where the figures are broken out for that state's side of the metro.
| Market | Legal jobs | Avg annual wage | Jobs per employer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Washington DC/MD/VA | 46,413 | $291,000 | 9.9 |
| San Jose CA | 6,823 | $287,000 | 7.3 |
| New York NJ/NY | 138,295 | $253,000 | 9.9 |
| San Francisco CA | 25,341 | $246,000 | 7.5 |
| Boston MA | 24,846 | $245,000 | 8.1 |
| Philadelphia DE/NJ/PA | 36,540 | $243,000 | 9.8 |
| Chicago IL | 46,205 | $243,000 | 7.9 |
| Seattle WA | 15,203 | $231,000 | 7.3 |
| Dallas TX | 32,751 | $218,000 | 7.3 |
| Houston TX | 33,681 | $214,000 | 8.0 |
| Milwaukee WI | 6,921 | $211,000 | 9.3 |
| Denver CO | 16,101 | $209,000 | 5.4 |
| Orlando FL | 14,468 | $209,000 | 6.7 |
| Miami FL | 51,469 | $208,000 | 5.0 |
| Los Angeles CA | 84,939 | $204,000 | 6.7 |
| Austin TX | 11,584 | $202,000 | 6.8 |
| Minneapolis MN | 14,459 | $199,000 | 9.2 |
| Jacksonville FL | 6,770 | $196,000 | 6.0 |
| Salt Lake City UT | 7,506 | $196,000 | 5.6 |
| Kansas City KS/MO | 9,221 | $186,000 | 6.5 |
| Urban Honolulu HI | 2,652 | $183,000 | 4.1 |
| Charleston SC | 4,173 | $183,000 | 5.7 |
| Madison WI | 2,120 | $178,000 | 7.5 |
| St. Louis IL/MO | 11,544 | $178,000 | 7.4 |
| Birmingham AL | 5,925 | $176,000 | 6.5 |
| Richmond VA | 6,130 | $176,000 | 9.1 |
| Albuquerque NM | 3,295 | $174,000 | 4.6 |
| Omaha NE | 3,377 | $173,000 | 7.9 |
| San Diego CA | 14,836 | $173,000 | 5.5 |
| Detroit MI | 17,323 | $170,000 | 7.4 |
| Albany NY | 3,446 | $170,000 | 7.4 |
| Phoenix AZ | 16,958 | $169,000 | 5.2 |
| Portland OR | 7,938 | $169,000 | 5.5 |
| Des Moines IA | 2,808 | $164,000 | 6.3 |
| Charlotte NC | 8,601 | $164,000 | 6.3 |
| Harrisburg PA | 2,234 | $163,000 | 8.0 |
| Pittsburgh PA | 10,656 | $163,000 | 9.4 |
| Greenville SC | 3,339 | $160,000 | 6.1 |
| Atlanta GA | 30,178 | $160,000 | 5.5 |
| Nashville TN | 6,894 | $158,000 | 5.5 |
| Portland ME | 2,484 | $158,000 | 5.4 |
| Baltimore MD | 10,175 | $157,000 | 6.3 |
| Raleigh NC | 6,424 | $152,000 | 6.3 |
| Cleveland OH | 9,815 | $152,000 | 8.0 |
| Tampa FL | 18,161 | $151,000 | 6.0 |
| New Orleans LA | 8,710 | $150,000 | 5.0 |
| Las Vegas NV | 11,190 | $149,000 | 5.7 |
| Indianapolis IN | 7,369 | $149,000 | 6.8 |
| North Port FL | 3,113 | $148,000 | 4.5 |
| Memphis TN | 2,719 | $142,000 | 6.6 |
| San Antonio TX | 8,207 | $142,000 | 6.3 |
| Grand Rapids MI | 2,784 | $141,000 | 7.6 |
| Oklahoma City OK | 6,365 | $140,000 | 4.4 |
| Virginia Beach VA | 4,356 | $138,000 | 6.5 |
| Columbia SC | 4,458 | $138,000 | 7.3 |
| Tulsa OK | 3,684 | $137,000 | 4.8 |
| Providence RI | 4,023 | $136,000 | 4.5 |
| Cincinnati OH | 5,008 | $135,000 | 6.7 |
| Tucson AZ | 2,124 | $129,000 | 3.8 |
| Little Rock AR | 2,672 | $127,000 | 4.2 |
| Boise City ID | 2,244 | $126,000 | 4.3 |
| Columbus OH | 7,301 | $125,000 | 6.8 |
| Lexington KY | 2,169 | $120,000 | 5.0 |
| Jackson MS | 2,693 | $117,000 | 5.1 |
| Baton Rouge LA | 3,636 | $116,000 | 4.9 |
| Lafayette LA | 2,062 | $115,000 | 3.6 |
| Knoxville TN | 2,284 | $112,000 | 5.0 |
| Syracuse NY | 2,122 | $110,000 | 6.4 |
| Louisville/Jefferson County KY | 3,858 | $110,000 | 4.9 |
| Riverside CA | 5,524 | $109,000 | 4.9 |
| Buffalo NY | 5,301 | $107,000 | 9.7 |
| Rochester NY | 3,249 | $97,000 | 8.5 |
| Wichita KS | 2,009 | $85,000 | 8.0 |
The top of the table holds no surprises for anyone who works in this industry. What is worth noticing is the spread. Legal payroll per worker in the highest-paying market is more than 3.4 times the lowest. That is a far wider gap than any published associate salary scale would suggest, and most of it is not explained by cost of living. It is explained by what kind of legal work each market contains.
Big-firm markets and boutique markets
This is the column I would look at hardest if you are considering a move, and it is the one nobody publishes. Divide legal employment by the number of legal establishments and you get the size of the average legal employer in that market. A high number means the work is concentrated in large firms. A low number means the market is mostly small shops, solo practices and boutiques.
It matters because it decides whether a lateral market exists for you at all. A market with 6,000 legal jobs spread across 1,600 tiny employers supports a very different career than one with 6,000 jobs inside a few dozen large firms, even though the two look identical on a jobs-count map.
- Most concentrated: Washington (9.9), New York (9.9), Philadelphia (9.8), Buffalo (9.7), Pittsburgh (9.4)
- Most fragmented: Lafayette (3.6), Tucson (3.8), Urban Honolulu (4.1), Little Rock (4.2), Boise City (4.3)
The instructive case is Buffalo. It is as concentrated as New York City, which means its legal work really does sit inside large firms, and it pays 58 percent less per worker than New York does. Concentration and pay are different axes. A market can be structurally attractive and still not pay, and plenty of attorneys discover that only after they move.
Where legal employment grew
Growth is the weakest of these measures and I want to be careful with it, for a reason I explain in the next section. Where the underlying data supports a year-over-year comparison, which is 61 of the 73 markets, this is how legal employment moved between the fourth quarters of 2024 and 2025.
- Las Vegas +8.3% employment, -0.1% average wage
- Austin +5.8% employment, +10.6% average wage
- Los Angeles +5.5% employment, +5.7% average wage
- Raleigh +5.5% employment, +5.5% average wage
- Madison +5.3% employment, +1.3% average wage
- Birmingham +5.1% employment, -3.9% average wage
And the markets that lost legal employment over the same year:
- Rochester -3.3% employment, +8.1% average wage
- Tucson -3.2% employment, +9.6% average wage
- Wichita -2.3% employment, -1.7% average wage
- Minneapolis -1.7% employment, +4.8% average wage
Wage growth is a separate signal from job growth and often points the other way. Greenville leads on pay growth at +17.6% while its headcount moved +3.5%. A market that is paying more for the same number of people is a market where employers are competing for staff, which is usually a better lateral signal than raw job growth.
Why 12 major markets have no growth figure
You will notice some conspicuous absences from the growth section: Washington, Houston, Detroit, Denver and 8 others. That is not an oversight, and it is worth explaining because it is the kind of thing most market reports quietly paper over.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics suppresses county-level employment data when too few employers report it, to avoid disclosing any single employer's payroll. Which counties get suppressed changes from year to year. When the set of reporting counties in a metro is not the same in 2024 as in 2025, the two years are not comparable, and any percentage you calculate from them is measuring the change in coverage rather than the change in the market.
We could have published those numbers anyway. Nobody would have checked. We would rather show you 61 figures that mean something than 73 where a dozen are quietly wrong. The size and pay columns are unaffected and cover all 73 markets.
Methodology
- Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, county files, private ownership, NAICS 5411 legal services. Fourth quarter 2025 levels, compared with fourth quarter 2024 for change figures.
- Coverage: NAICS 5411 is the whole legal services sector, not attorneys alone. Wages are employment-weighted and include bonuses and payrolled partner compensation.
- Annualization: QCEW reports an average weekly wage. The figures here are that weekly rate multiplied by 52, which makes it an annual run-rate for the fourth quarter rather than a calendar-year total, and they are rounded to the nearest thousand.
- Geography:metro areas are Census CBSAs. A metro that crosses state lines is summed back across its state portions here, so the New York row includes its New Jersey counties. Individual market pages are scoped to one state's side, so their figures are smaller by design.
- Inclusion: metros below a legal employment floor are excluded rather than published thin.
If you want to know what any single one of these markets looks like from the inside, which firms are hiring, what they are paying, and whether a move there makes sense for your practice, that is the conversation we have every day. The market pages linked in the table are the starting point, and a confidential conversation is the rest of it.