The assessment fees, which are not the course fees
SQE1 costs £2,006 and SQE2 £3,086, so £5,092 for one attempt at each, up from £1,934 and £2,974 for 2025/26. The rise took effect at the start of the 2026/27 academic year and applies to anyone booking from October 2026. The total is our arithmetic: the SRA publishes the two fees and not the sum.
Those two numbers are the floor. They are what you pay the assessment organisation to sit the papers, with no teaching, no materials and no second attempt included — and a resit is the whole assessment fee again, so a plan with no resit money in it is a plan with a hole in it.
The resits, with the cohort stated
In the January 2026 SQE1 sitting, 58 per cent of the 6,760 first-attempt candidates passed. Among the 873 first-attempt SQE2 candidates in the same window, 79 per cent passed. A resit costs the assessment fee again, in full, so budget for one.
Those are published pass rates, not a prediction about you: they are first-attempt rates for one sitting, and the SRA suppresses any group of fewer than 10 candidates in its breakdowns. What they do establish is that the realistic budget for the assessments alone is not one fee each, and that a plan with no resit money in it is a plan with a hole in it.
The Bar course, where the fees and the outcomes are both published
The Bar Standards Board publishes course fees by provider alongside pass rates and progression to pupillage. For 2025/26, inclusive of the Board’s own fee, published fees for the three-step pathway ran from £12,900 at Nottingham Law School to £20,200, with the Inns of Court College of Advocacy at £16,081. Overseas fees run higher still: Cardiff published £23,700. The Board took those fees from provider websites in June 2025, so treat them as a June 2025 snapshot rather than today’s price.
The useful part is what sits beside them. Among the 2023 enrolment cohort, the highest first-attempt pass rate for candidates holding a first was 92.0 per cent and the lowest provider figures were in the mid-twenties — conditioned on degree classification, because the Board publishes it that way and the unconditioned figures mostly describe who was admitted. Cells with fewer than 15 students are suppressed, so smaller providers are largely blank. The Inns of Court College of Advocacy recorded the highest first-attempt pass rates in the cohort at a below-median fee, which is the single most useful fact in the document: the cheapest provider is not the worst performer.
This is the only provider-level outcome data any regulator publishes for professional legal training in England and Wales. The Office for Students publishes provider-level outcomes for law degrees; nobody publishes anything equivalent for the SQE. The document carries no licence statement of any kind, and we have not obtained the Bar Standards Board’s written consent to republish or re-chart its tables, so this page cites it in prose and does not reproduce it. If that consent arrives, the comparison tool gets built and this page will say so.
The one mandatory pay floor in legal training
The minimum pupillage award is mandatory: £25,863 a year in London and £23,504 outside London for twelve-month pupillages from 1 January 2026, up from £24,203 and £22,019 in 2025, and it applies from 1 January whatever date the pupillage started.
The equivalent figure for trainee solicitors — £28,090 in London and £24,916 outside — is the Law Society’s recommendation, which it describes as not a regulatory requirement but a matter of voluntary good practice. The SRA abolished the mandatory minimum trainee salary. So the higher number is advisory and the lower one is enforceable, which is the opposite of what most people assume.
The route with no tuition to borrow
On the solicitor apprenticeship you are an employee being paid, and the training is funded rather than borrowed. The published standard ST0246 sets a maximum funding band of £27,000 and a typical duration of 72 months, with SQE1 as the gateway and SQE2 as the end-point assessment. The funding band is the cap on what the training can be funded at, not a figure you receive.
Six years is the trade. The routes page has the published starts and pass rates.
What this page does not tell you, and why
- Undergraduate tuition fees and maintenance support. These are set in regulations and published by the Department for Education and the Student Loans Company. They are not yet in our own sourced figure set, so we print no number: a fee cap quoted from memory, a year out of date, is worse than no number at all. Use the Student Loans Company and your provider’s own fee schedule.
- Preparation course prices. Providers publish their own SQE, conversion and Bar course fees, and they change. We do not copy a price list off a provider’s website into a comparison table, because the moment it is stale it is misleading and because the provider, not us, is the authority on its own price. Ask each provider in writing what the total is, including resit and assessment-booking support.
- Graduate debt at the end of pupillage. The Bar Council surveys this and publishes figures. Its copyright notice prohibits reproducing or storing its material, and we have not obtained written permission, so the figures are not on this page. That is a licence position, not an absence of data, and we would rather say which it is.
- What a given provider’s graduates earn. That exists, per provider, for law — but it is stale by construction and has to be read with its graduation cohort attached. The methodology page explains how we use it.
What the job pays, as the open sources state it
The Office for National Statistics puts median gross annual pay for solicitors and lawyers at £53,314, on 127,000 jobs in April 2025, with the tenth percentile at £26,807 and the seventy-fifth at £74,190. The ninetieth percentile is suppressed as unreliable, so there is no top-ten-per-cent figure to quote and we do not quote one.
For legal associate professionals, the group that covers paralegals and legal executives, the median is £32,438. The barristers-and-judges median of £34,253 looks low because the survey is built from PAYE and so describes employed barristers and judges: on the same ONS labour market data, 65.1 per cent of barristers and judges in England and Wales are self-employed, 22,900 of 35,200, against 19.1 per cent of solicitors and lawyers.
Set against two assessment fees, a resit at the same price again and a six-figure tuition decision, those are the numbers that matter and the ones the glossy brochures leave for the last page. What the open sources say about pay goes through them properly.
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 or endorsed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Bar Standards Board, the Law Society, Skills England, the Office for National Statistics or any course provider. Nothing here is financial advice.