The legal industry, counted

There are 225,107 solicitors on the roll of England and Wales, 18,852 barristers on the Bar Standards Board's register, 11,603 people on CILEx Regulation's register and 9,169 on the five smaller registers that most careers advice never mentions. Those are four different things counted four different ways, and the differences matter more than the totals.

The professions, side by side

The solicitors' figure is the roll, not the number in practice: of those, 181,654 are recorded on the register as SRA-regulated solicitors. At the Bar, 15,104 are in self-employed practice — a tenancy in a set of chambers rather than a job with an employer — and only 3,748 are employed by an organisation. If you want to be employed, that single number should change how you read "becoming a barrister".

What the published sources say about pay

Read these carefully, because they are not what a careers talk tells you. The Office for National Statistics measures employees, through PAYE. Most barristers are self-employed, so the £34,253 median for "barristers and judges" describes employed barristers and judges and not the self-employed Bar at all. The £53,314 median for solicitors and lawyers covers everyone from a first-year assistant in a high-street firm to a City partner on a salaried contract.

What nobody publishes openly is a reliable trainee or newly-qualified pay table: those are private surveys, and we do not copy them. What the open sources do say about pay.

Who employs legal professionals

12,930 companies at Companies House identify themselves as solicitors' practices, 4,700 offices hold a legal aid contract, and 3,097 distinct employers are named on the CILEX register. Only 14.2% of legal aid offices are in a London postcode, which is the opposite of the impression the trade press gives.

Where a legal career can end up

Our record names 6,264 judicial office-holders, living and dead. The announcements state a route into law for 1,980 of them, all appointed since 2012, and every share here is a share of that 1,980: 55.4% were called to the Bar and 44.4% qualified as solicitors. The median gap between entering the profession and a first judicial appointment is 17 years. The whole route to the bench.

Every figure we publish

What these numbers are not

• Not a headcount of people working in law. A register counts authorisations, not jobs. Someone on the roll may have left the profession a decade ago; a paralegal doing legal work every day may be on no register at all.
• Not a ranking of employers. We publish how many authorised people an employer has on a register and what work it is contracted for. We do not rate firms, and nobody pays to appear.
• Not a substitute for the regulator's own register. If you need to check whether a named individual is authorised today, use the regulator's register. We link to each one.

Assize Careers is not a regulator, professional body, university, law school or official careers service, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. Nothing on this site is legal advice.