There are 181,654 people on the roll recorded as SRA-regulated solicitors, 18,852 barristers on the Bar Standards Board register and 11,603 people on CILEx Regulation’s register. Those are three different professions with three different training routes, three different price tags and three different sets of published evidence. Picking a university is only the first of them, and for two of the three it is not the decision that matters most.
Four decisions, taken in this order
- Whether to read law at all. A law degree is not required to become a solicitor or a barrister. A non-law degree followed by a conversion course is a longer and usually dearer path to the same assessments. Which starting point performs better is a question nobody can answer from the published data: the SRA breaks SQE results down by highest level of education and by degree classification, not by whether the candidate read law.
- Which university, and on what evidence. This is the decision the commercial league tables claim to answer. What they actually measure is narrower than it looks, and a ranking of a university is not a ranking of its law school.
- Which route to qualification. The SQE, the closing legacy route, the solicitor apprenticeship, CILEX or the Bar. The routes, with the numbers on each.
- Which vocational provider, and whether you can afford it. This is where the money is and where the published evidence is thinnest. What the whole route costs.
Getting onto a law degree has got easier. Qualifying has not.
In the 2025 UCAS cycle there were 175,220 applications to law courses, 136,250 offers and 32,440 accepted applicants — a sector offer rate of 77.8 per cent. Accepted law applicants have risen from 26,280 in 2019 to 32,440 in 2025, a 23 per cent increase in six cycles, with an 8.8 per cent jump in 2025 alone. The offer rate across those seven cycles has moved between 71.1 and 78.8 per cent and ended a little above where it started.
The professional bottleneck has not moved with it. In the January 2026 SQE1 sitting, 7,918 candidates sat both parts and 53 per cent passed; of the 6,760 sitting for the first time, 58 per cent passed. The Solicitors Regulation Authority publishes that first-attempt pass rate broken down by undergraduate degree classification: 79 per cent for a first, 57 per cent for a 2:1 and 20 per cent for a 2:2. Those are the figures to hold in mind while reading a prospectus.
An offer rate is a cycle-level ratio for everyone who applied. It is not your chance of an offer, and nothing on this site will convert it into one.
There is no list of approved law degrees any more
If you started a law degree in September 2022 or later you must qualify through the SQE, and there is no list of SRA-approved undergraduate law degrees for you. Any badge claiming one is wrong. The qualifying law degree was a feature of the route that is closing: the SRA still publishes a list of qualifying law degree providers, but it applies only to people who meet the transitional requirements, and the page says so itself.
This matters when you read marketing. A course described as SRA-recognised, SRA-approved or a qualifying law degree is describing a status that cannot apply to anyone starting now. The transitional dates are on the routes page, with the SRA’s own wording and the date it was last updated.
What this section publishes, and what it refuses to
- Admissions facts, from UCAS. Applications, offers, offer rates and accepted applicants for law, per provider, for the 2019 to 2025 cycles. UCAS licenses its CSV data for commercial re-use under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 by clause 5.7 of its own terms, so we can publish it and credit it.
- Outcomes, from the regulator’s own files. Continuation, completion and progression for law at each English provider, each measured against an intake-adjusted benchmark published by the Office for Students, and median law graduate earnings per provider from the Department for Education’s longitudinal education outcomes release. Those are the inputs to our own index, and they are shown per provider with the cohort, the denominator and the publisher’s suppression code on the face of every figure.
- No commercial ranking, reproduced or re-ranked. We do not copy the Complete University Guide’s law table, the Times, the Guardian or QS, and we do not harvest them on any schedule. We name them, describe what they measure and link to them.
- No SQE pass rate by training provider. The SRA publishes none. Any figure in circulation is self-reported by the provider and unverified, so this site publishes none either.
- No ranking we have not computed. The Assize Careers law provider index, edition 2026-1, publishes 91 English law providers in 7 bands rather than 91 places, because providers whose published confidence intervals overlap are not in an order. The table is free to read, and its method, its metrics and its weights are published beside it so you can argue with them.
The four pages in this section
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The routes in
The SQE, the legacy route and its closing dates, the solicitor apprenticeship, CILEX and the Bar — each with how many people actually went that way last year.
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What it costs
Assessment fees, published Bar course fees, the only mandatory pay floor in legal training, and the resit arithmetic nobody puts next to the pass rates.
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How to read a ranking, and ours
What each major table measures, what it leaves out, who pays for the free advice you have been reading, why a university’s overall position tells you little about its law school — and then our own index, 91 providers in 7 bands.
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Our method
Every metric in the provider index, its source, its licence, its weight, how missing data is handled, and how to tell us it is wrong.
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.
Source: UCAS, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Assize Careers is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Department for Education, the Office for Students, UCAS, the Solicitors Regulation Authority or any university.