Credential
Law licence (law degree and bar exam)
The most expensive credential on this site by a wide margin, leading to the best-paid occupation on it. Three years, six figures of debt, and a national exam that 37% of sittings fail.
What it costs to get — the middle half of the range.
Months of training, full time. Part time takes longer.
Months of the pay premium needed to cover that cost. Not months until you are ahead overall — the training time above comes first.
Source: US Department of Education, College Scorecard, Field of Study data, 2026 · view
What that cost figure is, and what it is not
Six figures, and this is only the borrowed part. That range is median cumulative FEDERAL LOAN DEBT at completion, not a tuition sticker price and not total cost. It is what completers actually borrowed, so it excludes grants, savings, family money, employer funding and living costs — which makes it a FLOOR on what the credential costs, never a ceiling. The low and high figures are the 25th and 75th percentiles across the institutions that report a figure for this programme, so a quarter of institutions sit below the low end. College Scorecard pools two award years into each figure; the release used here is dated 10 June 2026.
Three years full time for the degree, after a bachelor's, then a bar examination and a character-and-fitness review before admission. Part-time programmes run four years.
Admission is per state and each maintains its own continuing legal education requirement and annual fees.
How many people hold this, and how many are working in the field
How many earn this each year
42,496 bar examination sittings that resulted in a pass — 2025, February and July 2025 examinations combined.
We are not turning that into a percentage. This is an annual flow — the people who earned the credential in one year. Employment figures are a standing stock, everyone working in the occupation at one time. Dividing a flow into a stock produces a number that reads like a hiring rate and is not one. Where we hold a standing count of credential holders we publish the share employed; here we do not have one, so we publish the flow and stop.
What that count includes: 67,442 people sat a US bar examination in 2025 and 42,496 passed, a 63% pass rate. It counts SITTINGS rather than people: someone who failed in February and passed in July appears in both columns, and someone admitted in two states can appear twice. It is a one-year flow and not a count of anyone holding a licence to practise today.
The American Bar Association publishes a standing count of US lawyers — about 1.37 million in 2025 — but only rounded to two decimal places of a million, and its underlying survey PDF is not publicly retrievable. We use the exact bar-exam flow rather than a rounded stock, which means this page shows how many qualify each year and no percentage.
National Conference of Bar Examiners, 2025 Statistics — Persons Taking and Passing the Bar Examination (People newly credentialed during one year) · view
What happened to the people who finished the training
Four years after completing, from federal records
Of 40,840 people who completed Law (JD), first professional degree and were no longer studying four years later, 1,860 had no earnings on record at all — 4.6%. The ones who were working earned a median of $107,773, with the middle half between $75,568 and $176,111.
“No earnings on record” is not “unemployed”. The measure is the absence of any wage record and any positive self-employment income for the whole year. Nobody was asked whether they wanted work, so the count holds people who left the workforce by choice — raising children, caring, travelling, living on someone else's income, moving abroad — alongside everyone who wanted a job and had none. Nobody publishes the split and we will not guess it. What it does establish is how many people finished this training and were earning nothing from it or from anything else four years on, which is exactly what the pay figure above cannot tell you.
What that programme code covers: CIP 22.01 at first-professional level is the Juris Doctor. The figure is about law graduates, not admitted lawyers: it counts everyone who finished the degree, including those who never sat or never passed a bar examination. That is the right population for the question "was law school worth it" and the wrong one for "how many lawyers are out of work".
This measures law graduates, not admitted lawyers: everyone who finished the degree is in it, including those who never sat or never passed a bar examination.
Who is in the cohort: completers who received federal student aid — roughly half of US undergraduates, and the other half are not measured here. People who went on to further study are in neither column. The Department suppresses institutions with cohorts too small to publish and adds statistical noise to the rest, so this is a sum over the institutions large enough to report: 163 of them, recovering 97.0% of the Department's own national count for this programme. Dropping the smallest reporting programmes moves the rate by 0.0 percentage points.
Source: US Department of Education, College Scorecard, Field of Study data, 2026 — release of 10 June 2026; measured four years after completion · view · the same figure for every programme we can publish
What it lets you do
The pay belongs to the job, not to the credential. These are the occupations it qualifies you for.
| Job | Is it required? | Median | Employed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lawyers | Legally required to hold the job | $159,670 | 754,500 |
Median pay and employment: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025.
Does it pay for itself?
The job this unlocks pays a median of $159,670. The employment-weighted median across every occupation we publish is $50,020, so the premium for holding this is about $109,650 a year before tax.
Read that as a comparison to an average job, not to your job. What that baseline is, and what it leaves out
And it assumes you get the job. Every payback figure on this site is conditional on being hired into the work. That is the assumption the credential-holder count above exists to test, and it is the assumption every other pay site makes silently.
What you need before you start
- A bachelor's degree
- A place at an ABA-accredited law school
- A pass in the state bar examination
- A character and fitness review
Do not do this if
- you are borrowing the full amount without a clear route to the higher-paying half of the profession — the pay distribution here is famously bimodal and the median hides it
- you assume passing is routine — 37% of bar examination sittings in 2025 did not pass
All credentials, by payback period · How this is calculated · Look up something else