In the 2024/25 academic year 27,080 people started a full-time undergraduate law degree at a provider registered with the Office for Students, and 57,130 started a law course of any kind: full-time and part-time, undergraduate and postgraduate, degree and apprenticeship, home and international. Both of those are the publisher's own England row. Neither is our sum of the provider rows, and the difference matters later on this page.
- 27,080
Full-time undergraduate law entrants in England, 2024/25
- 57,130
All law entrants in England, 2024/25, every level and mode
- 19,890
Of those, full-time postgraduate entrants
- 122
Providers with a law entrant row in 2024/25
An entrant is somebody in the first year of a course at that provider. It is a flow, counted once a year, not a headcount of everyone currently studying law: a three-year degree puts the same person in this count once and then not again.
Six populations, and the postgraduate number people get wrong
The numbers behind this chart
| Level and mode | Law entrants |
|---|---|
| Undergraduate, full-time | 27,080 |
| Postgraduate, full-time | 19,890 |
| Postgraduate, part-time | 4,960 |
| Undergraduate, part-time | 3,130 |
| Undergraduate apprenticeship | 1,360 |
| Postgraduate apprenticeship | 710 |
19,890 full-time postgraduate law entrants against 27,080 full-time undergraduates is not a sign that most law students are doing masters degrees. Because an entrant is a first-year, a one-year course produces an entrant every single year: a law conversion course, an LLM, an SQE preparation course and a Bar course each put a person into that column twelve months after they were last counted somewhere else. The undergraduate column counts a cohort that will take three or four years to come out the other end. The two are not comparable as a measure of how many law students exist, and the routes page is where the difference bites.
The small columns are the ones worth knowing in full, because each is a whole market. There are 3,130 part-time undergraduate law entrants in England in a year, and 1,360 on undergraduate apprenticeships. Treat that apprenticeship figure as a floor rather than a count: the regulator only sees apprentices registered with providers on its own register and coded to law, while the Department for Education sees every training provider in England and counts more of them. Those larger figures, and what the solicitor apprenticeship actually commits you to, are on the apprenticeship route page.
The whole intake has barely moved. The full-time degree has grown.
The numbers behind this chart
| Academic year | Law entrants |
|---|---|
| 2021/22 | 56,690 |
| 2022/23 | 59,260 |
| 2023/24 | 56,010 |
| 2024/25 | 57,130 |
Across the four years in this release the all-levels total goes up, down and back up again and ends close to where it started. Underneath it, full-time undergraduate law entrants rose 14.3% between 2021/22 and 2024/25. If you are seventeen, that second number is your market, and it says there are more people starting a full-time law degree than there were three years ago.
One warning travels with that rise, and it is the most important thing to understand about this file. About a third of the latest year's share of it is a single provider's return. The file counts students at the lead provider — the provider that registers them, which is not always the provider that teaches them. Where teaching is delivered by a partner college under a franchise or validation agreement, those students appear against the lead provider's name. A university that takes on a large partnership and a university that opened a popular new law programme on its own campus produce exactly the same shape in this data, and the file cannot tell them apart, so neither can we. Before you use any figure here to compare two places, check where the teaching actually happens.
Is this place big or small?
122 providers have a law entrant row in 2024/25 — a row, not necessarily a published number, since one of them has every law cell withheld. Among the providers that did publish the cell, the median full-time undergraduate law intake is 180 people a year.
The numbers behind this chart
| Size of intake | Providers |
|---|---|
| Fewer than 100 a year | 33 |
| 100 to 199 a year | 27 |
| 200 to 299 a year | 17 |
| 300 to 499 a year | 25 |
| 500 or more a year | 12 |
That chart is the honest answer to “is this a big law school”. A year group the size of that median is normal; a provider in the top band takes 500 a year or more; and more providers sit in the under-100 band than in any other. Nothing in the data makes either end better. A large cohort means more classmates, more optional modules and a bigger alumni network; a small one means the staff know your name. What it does change is what a published percentage means: a provider in the smallest band and one in the largest are not measuring the same thing when they report the same continuation rate or the same graduate outcome.
The ten largest full-time undergraduate law intakes take 27.0% of all the published full-time undergraduate law entrants between them, which leaves roughly three-quarters of the intake spread across everybody else. There is no handful of providers through which most law students pass, so the shortlist worth building is wider than the one the league tables imply.
A specialist law provider is a different proposition from a law department inside a multi-faculty university, and the file lets you tell them apart, because it publishes law as a share of each provider's own intake. At The University of Law, law is 79.9% of its full-time undergraduate intake. A university where that share is a few per cent is a university that mostly does other things, which is neither good nor bad and is simply not what the marketing implies.
If you are studying alongside a job
The part-time undergraduate route is a different market with a different shape, and it is small: 3,130 entrants in England in a year, against 27,080 full-time ones. It is also concentrated in one place. The Open University takes 69.3% of England's part-time undergraduate law entrants — both numbers are rounded to the nearest 10, so read that as about seven in ten rather than as a precise share. For a career-changer studying around a job, that is not one option among many; it is most of the market, and the choice of provider is correspondingly narrow.
Law's share of the English intake
Law accounts for 4.8% of all full-time undergraduate entrants in England — roughly one in twenty, and that is the publisher's own percentage rather than our ratio of two rounded numbers. It is worth holding on to when a prospectus calls law competitive. It is competitive, and it is also entirely mainstream: one full-time undergraduate in twenty in this country is starting it. The bottleneck in a legal career is not getting onto a law course, as the section introduction sets out. It is everything after it.
And how many come out
48,900 people gained a law qualification at an English provider in 2024/25, across the same six populations. That is not this year's entrants arriving at the far end: they are different people, counted in the same year, and most of the degree-level qualifiers started three or four years earlier. Nothing on this page is a completion rate, and this figure must not be read as one — a completion figure computed properly, per provider and against an intake-adjusted benchmark, is in the provider index.
What the rounding and the suppression hide
Every headcount in this file is rounded to the nearest 10 before publication, and small cells are withheld entirely. Both matter more than they sound, and they are the reason every national figure on this page is the publisher's own row rather than our arithmetic.
- A published zero is not zero. Rounding to the nearest 10 turns any count from 1 to 4 into “0”. A provider showing 0 law entrants may have four.
- Suppression is not absence. 8 providers with a law row have their full-time undergraduate entrant count withheld, and they sit in no band on the chart above, because a withheld cell is not a small one. Two of the codes in the law cut are the publisher's own documented ones: [DPL] — suppressed: too few students, low; [DPH] — suppressed: too few students, high. The file also uses [none], where the provider appears to have no provision of that kind, and [DQ], which appears to flag a data quality problem with the cell; neither is in the code list we hold, so our reading of those two is a reading and not a published definition. In every case the meaning is the same for you: a provider with no number is a provider too small to publish, not a provider with no law students. Nothing here has been estimated, modelled or interpolated to fill a withheld cell in.
- Adding the provider rows up is the wrong total, and adding it to the sector row is worse. This file carries both a row per provider and the publisher's own England sector row. Each provider cell is rounded on its own, so summing them gives a number that does not match the sector row — and because the sector row already covers the same students, a total built from both would count everybody twice. Where this page needs a national figure it uses the sector row, every time. Where it describes the providers — the median, the size bands, the share at the ten largest — it says so, and those are computed across the published provider cells only.
What this page is not
- Not applications. These are people who started, not people who applied. Law applications, offers and offer rates are in the section introduction and, per provider, in the provider index.
- England, not the United Kingdom. The Office for Students registers English providers. Law schools in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are in none of these numbers, we hold no equivalent file for them, and we are not going to imply a UK figure from an English one. Scotland and Northern Ireland also have separate legal professions with their own qualification routes, so an English intake figure would not describe your market even as an approximation.
- Not a measure of quality, and not a measure of difficulty. A big intake is a big intake. What the rankings measure, and what we measure instead is a separate question, and the method is published.
- Not a count of jobs. Starting a law course is not the same as entering a legal profession, and this file cannot tell you how many of these people ever will. How many practitioners there are on each register is a separate page, and what the whole route costs is another.
- Not current to this week. 2024/25 is the latest year in release 2026-1, published on 12 May 2026 and corrected on 17 June 2026. This is an annual statistic: unlike the register counts elsewhere on this site, nothing here refreshes hourly, and the next edition will move these numbers.
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.
Office for Students, size and shape of provision 2026-1. Headcounts are rounded to the nearest 10 and small numbers are suppressed by the publisher. Information from the Office for Students is acknowledged as the source; the Office for Students does not endorse Assize Careers or this analysis.