Self-employment method
Legal Services
283,944 people filed as a nonemployer business under this industry code in 2022 — no payroll, no employees, just them. These are gross receipts reported to the IRS, before any expense is taken out.
Median GROSS RECEIPTS for the year — money in, before rent, materials, fuel, insurance or tax. This is not take-home pay.
Share who grossed under $10,000 for the whole year — before expenses.
The middle half, in gross receipts. A quarter of filers took less than the lower figure.
Source: US Census Bureau, Nonemployer Statistics 2022 · view
How often it does not work out
Of the 283,944 people who filed under this code in 2022, 28.40% grossed under $10,000 for the entire year — before a single expense was deducted.
That is a floor, not an estimate. Census publishes GROSS RECEIPTS, not net income. Everyone inside that share earned less than the figure suggests once rent, materials, mileage, insurance and self-employment tax came out — and filers who grossed well above the threshold may still have netted nothing. The true share of people who earn nothing meaningful from this is higher than the number above, never lower.
Denominator: establishments_total = 283,944 · US Census Bureau, Nonemployer Statistics 2022 · view
Every filer, by what they grossed
The full distribution Census publishes. The median above is interpolated inside the band that holds the 50th percentile.
| Gross receipts for the year | Filers | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Under $5,000 | 47,020 | 16.6% |
| $5,000 to $9,999 | 33,627 | 11.8% |
| $10,000 to $24,999 | 52,837 | 18.6% |
| $25,000 to $49,999 | 43,166 | 15.2% |
| $50,000 to $99,999 | 43,362 | 15.3% |
| $100,000 to $249,999 | 43,061 | 15.2% |
| $250,000 to $499,999 | 14,280 | 5.0% |
| $500,000 to $999,999 | 5,027 | 1.8% |
| $1,000,000 to $2,499,999 | 1,564 | 0.6% |
Who this suits
The median filer grossed $29,916, or $2,493 a month before expenses. That is an operating business at part-time scale: enough revenue to be worth running properly, not enough to be the only thing in the household.
At 283,944 filers, Legal Services is crowded. Crowding is survivable — most of those filers are not serious competitors — but it does mean the floor on price is set by people who are not costing their own time.
22.5% of filers grossed $100,000 or more. At that share the upper band is not an exception, it is a large minority of the field — though gross receipts at this level usually carry proportionate costs.
Independent professional work suits people who can carry the whole business — delivery, sales, admin and collections — because with no employees all four are one person’s week.
Nothing stops anyone filing under this code, and 283,944 people did. Free entry is why the lower bands are as full as they are: the distribution below counts everyone who tried, not everyone who was ready.
Who should not do this
The top quarter of Legal Services earns 10.7x the bottom quarter — under $8,564 against over $91,866, a spread of $83,302. Distributions this stretched are usually two different jobs sharing one label, and any average across them means little.
The bottom quarter of Legal Services earns under $8,564 — $41,456 below the $50,020 a typical American job pays. Entering at the bottom and waiting is a live risk here, not a theoretical one, and some people never leave that quarter.
Do not start this pricing by the hour if you cannot fill the hours; the ceiling is arithmetic and it arrives sooner than you think.
Of 283,944 filers in 2022, 28.4% took under $10,000 across the whole year in gross receipts: 80,640 people. Whatever the working version of Legal Services looks like, a third or more never reach it.
That share is a floor, not an estimate: $10,000 is revenue, not earnings. Everyone counted inside it kept less than $10,000, and an unknown number of the filers above it also finished the year with nothing after costs.
What the spread tells you
From $8,564 to $91,866 is 10.7x — the shape of a field where a minority captures most of the money. The midpoint of $29,916 is arithmetic, not a forecast, and treating it as one is the standard mistake here.
Put in money rather than ratios: $8,564 at the 25th percentile, $29,916 at the midpoint, $91,866 at the 75th. $83,302 separates the quarter of Legal Services at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
The 75th percentile is $91,866. Reaching it from the $29,916 midpoint is $61,950 a year; reaching it from the $8,564 that the bottom quarter of Legal Services earn is $83,302.
$21,352 below the midpoint, $61,950 above it. That asymmetry is extreme even for this data, and it means every summary of Legal Services that is not a median — including any average you see quoted elsewhere — is describing the top of the range rather than the middle.
Per hour of a full-time year, the middle of Legal Services takes $14.38 in revenue — $4.11 at the bottom quarter and $44.16 at the top. Costs have not been deducted from any of those figures, so none of them is an hourly wage.
Straight from the Census bands for Legal Services: 47,020 filers under $5,000, 33,627 between $5,000 and $9,999, 52,837 between $10,000 and $24,999, 63,932 above $100,000 and 20,871 above $250,000.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Read every figure here as GROSS RECEIPTS rather than income. $29,916 is turnover — the money that passed through Legal Services before expenses. What is left after costs is a different and much smaller number that this dataset does not publish.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $29,916 because we have no verified record of unpaid hours or out-of-pocket costs for this work, and we would rather convert honestly than adjust invented ones.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else