The Office for National Statistics publishes median gross annual pay by occupation in the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. For legal work it gives £53,314 for solicitors and lawyers, £34,253 for barristers and judges, and £32,438 for legal associate professionals, the group that holds paralegals and legal executives. Those describe April 2025, from the 2025 provisional edition.
The numbers behind this chart
| Occupation | Median gross annual pay (£) |
|---|---|
| Solicitors and lawyers | 53,314 |
| Barristers and judges | 34,253 |
| Legal professionals n.e.c. | 33,822 |
| Legal associate professionals | 32,438 |
For a reference point on the same basis, median gross annual pay across all UK employees was £32,890 in April 2025. That is the comparison that matches these figures, because all of them count part-time jobs too.
The number usually quoted in the press is £39,039, and it is the full-time median. Comparing an all-employee legal median against a full-time whole-economy one understates every legal occupation on this page, which is why we do not do it. Both numbers come from the same workbook — the ONS publishes them on separate sheets, and the sheet is the whole difference.
ASHE sees payrolls, and the Bar is not on one
ASHE is built from PAYE records, so it sees employee jobs. ONS labour market data puts 22,900 of the 35,200 barristers and judges in England and Wales in self-employment — 65.1% — against 19.1% of solicitors and lawyers and 9.5% of legal associate professionals.
That is why the barristers-and-judges median reads lower than the solicitors' one. It is not a finding about the Bar. It describes the employed barristers and the judiciary, which is a small and unrepresentative slice, and the 15,104 barristers in self-employed practice are absent from it entirely. Anyone who quotes that figure as "what barristers earn" has not read the dataset.
The same row carries the ONS's own caution flag, meaning its coefficient of variation is high enough that ONS tells you not to lean on it. We print the caution because ONS does.
The number that does not exist: the top of the profession
ONS suppresses the ninetieth percentile for solicitors and lawyers, because its coefficient of variation exceeds 20% and ONS treats that as unreliable for practical purposes. There is therefore no open, official answer to "what do the top ten per cent of solicitors earn", and we are not going to estimate one by interpolating between cells the publisher withheld on purpose.
The distribution we hold runs from the tenth percentile to the seventy-fifth, and the gap across it is the useful fact. For solicitors and lawyers, April 2025: £26,807 at the tenth percentile, £37,751 at the twenty-fifth and £74,190 at the seventy-fifth, with the ninetieth withheld. Those are the publisher’s own cells, quoted from ASHE Table 14, and they are not figures on this site that refresh. One occupation code has to hold a conveyancing solicitor in a market town and a salaried partner in the City, and a median cannot tell you which one a job offer resembles.
Two traps in the source itself
The occupation codes changed. Under the Standard Occupational Classification 2020, which the 2025 files use, 2411 is barristers and judges and 2412 is solicitors and lawyers. Under the 2010 classification it was the other way round, and the dataset's own page text still refers to the older scheme. Read the code and the label together or you will publish the Bar's median as the solicitors'.
And the barristers-and-judges median fell sharply against the previous year on a small sample with the change in the mean suppressed entirely. We are not reporting that as a fall in pay, because on that base it is a sample instability signal, not a finding. A source worth using is a source you are willing to argue with.
The only mandatory pay floor in legal training
Pupillage has one. From 1 January 2026 the minimum pupillage award is £25,863 a year in London and £23,504 outside it, up from £24,203 and £22,019, and it applies from that date whatever date the pupillage started. That is the Bar Standards Board's rule, announced on 7 November 2025.
Training contracts have none. The Law Society recommends £28,090 in London and £24,916 outside, and describes it as "not a regulatory requirement, but a matter of voluntary good practice". The SRA abolished the mandatory minimum trainee salary. If an advertised trainee salary is below the recommendation, nothing has been breached.
That asymmetry is worth knowing before you choose between the two routes, and it is not in any salary table.
What nobody publishes openly
- Trainee and newly-qualified salaries by firm. The tables you have seen are private surveys run by trade publishers. They own them, we do not copy them, and we link to them below.
- Self-employed Bar earnings. The Bar Council collects gross fee income by practice area and seniority, and its terms prohibit reproducing or storing it. We can tell you the report exists — the Pupillage Gateway report 2024/25, published on 31 October 2025, which carries mean pupillage awards by practice area — and that is as far as the licence goes. We have not written the numbers into our database, because we are not permitted to.
- Pay by region, firm size or practice area for solicitors. ASHE stops at the occupation. There is no official source below it.
- Post-qualification salary scales. No regulator publishes one. Firms publish their own when it suits them.
Where to read the private surveys
They are worth reading, as long as you read them as what they are: firms telling a publisher what they pay, in a year, with no published response rate and rarely a collection date on the table itself. Legal Cheek publishes a newly-qualified pay table covering more than a hundred commercial firms. LawCareers.Net publishes trainee pay in its firm directory. Prospects, which is publicly funded, publishes occupational pay ranges. None of them is an official statistic and none of them covers the high street, legal aid, in-house or the public sector at dataset level.
If a pay figure matters to a decision you are making, check when it was collected. An apparently current article in this market can be six years old.
What this page is dated to
April 2025, ASHE 2025 provisional edition. A revised 2025 edition and the 2026 edition are both expected in the October to November 2026 window, so these medians will move. Our copy of them refreshes hourly; the survey behind them is annual, and the annual date is the one to quote.
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.
Assize Careers is not affiliated with, authorised by or endorsed by the Office for National Statistics, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Bar Standards Board, the Bar Council or The Law Society.