Becoming a barrister

There are 18,852 barristers on the Bar Standards Board register, across 1,359 sets of chambers, of whom 2,313 are King’s Counsel. That is a profession roughly an eighth the size of the solicitors’ roll. The register is the place to check whether a named barrister is authorised today.

15,104 of them are in self-employed practice and only 3,748 are employed by an organisation. Across England and Wales, 65.1% of people in the barristers and judges occupation are self-employed — 22,900 of 35,200 — against 19.1% of solicitors and lawyers. Choosing the Bar is mostly choosing to run a business, and that is the fact to decide on first, before any of the figures below.

Two counts of the Bar, and why they differ

Our figure above is the BSB register as published on 12 October 2026. The BSB’s own Diversity at the Bar 2025 reports 19,093 practitioners at 1 December 2025: 602 pupils, 16,354 barristers who are not KCs and 2,137 KCs. Different date, different basis, so the two are not interchangeable. The Bar Council separately publishes a count of practising barristers on another date again; those two are not the same quantity either and should never appear in one chart. Pick a publisher per measure and keep the date on it, which is what this site does.

The stages, in order

1. A degree, then the vocational Bar course

   Enrolments on vocational Bar training reached 2,446 in 2024/25, up 45% on the 1,685 of 2019/20, while the number of pupillages available rose by under 2%. The BSB itself warns in its December 2025 report that this will push down the proportion of students who progress. More people are paying for the course each year and the number of places at the next stage is flat.

   Published course fees for 2025/26, inclusive of the BSB’s own fee, ran from £12,900 to £20,200 for the three-step pathway. The BSB took those from provider websites in June 2025, so treat them as a 2025 snapshot and check the provider.

2. The course results, which are published by provider

   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. Among the enrolments the BSB tracked, the highest first-attempt pass rate for candidates holding a first was 92.0% and the lowest provider figures were in the mid-twenties — and the cheapest provider is not the worst performer, which is the single most useful thing the report says.

   Cells with fewer than fifteen students are suppressed by the Bar Standards Board, so smaller providers are mostly blank, and pass rates are conditioned on degree class rather than reported for whole cohorts. We cite the report and link to it; we do not reproduce its tables or build a ranking from them, because the BSB reserves copyright and database rights and has not licensed commercial re-use. A provider comparison tool needs the BSB’s written permission before it can ship, so until that exists this page is prose.

3. Call to the Bar: 1,959 people in 2024/25

   Call makes you a barrister. It does not make you a practising one, and it is not pupillage. The BSB publishes call and tenancy figures by legal year, October to September, and says the next update is due in November 2026.

4. Pupillage, with a mandatory minimum award

   There were 602 pupils on the register at 1 December 2025, the highest in the BSB’s series since 2015. 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.

   Actual awards are far above the floor in some practice areas and close to it in others. For the 2024/25 round the Bar Council reported mean awards of £79,000 in commercial, £74,000 in Chancery, £63,000 in general civil, £40,000 in mixed practice, £33,000 in family and £32,000 in crime. Each of those is a mean, and where a chambers gave a range the lowest figure in the range was used, so they are not typical offers and they are not a salary scale. A 2.5-fold spread between commercial and crime is the thing to take from them.

   Those figures are quoted from the Bar Council’s report and stored nowhere on this site: its copyright notice prohibits reproducing or incorporating any part of the report in another publication, so the funnel it publishes — vacancies advertised, applicants, offers recorded — stays on its own page rather than being rebuilt here. If that changes, this page will say so and show the date.

5. Tenancy: 395 in 2024/25

   Pupillage does not guarantee a tenancy in the set that trained you. The BSB recorded 395 tenancies obtained in 2024/25.

The attrition, stated honestly

2,446 enrolments on the vocational course in 2024/25. 1,959 called to the Bar in 2024/25. 602 pupils on the register at 1 December 2025. 395 tenancies obtained in 2024/25.

Those four numbers are not one cohort followed through. They are four separate measures, on three different bases, in overlapping years, and anyone presenting them as a single survival curve is guessing. What they do establish is the direction and the order of magnitude, which is more than most guides to the Bar will tell you.

The nearest thing to a real progression rate is the BSB’s long-run analysis of the 2019/20 cohort of UK-domiciled course graduates: roughly 70% of those with a first eventually obtained pupillage, between 40% and 50% of those with a 2:1, and about one in five of those with a 2:2. That data is right-censored, because graduates have five years in which to obtain pupillage, so more recent cohorts necessarily look worse than they will turn out to be. It controls only for degree class and for the grouping of the degree institution.

What self-employed barristers actually practise

Practice area is self-declared on the register, a barrister may declare several, and the mix is nothing like the mix of work described in the commercial careers press.

The test you no longer have to sit

Pay, and the figure that is not what it looks like

The Office for National Statistics puts the median gross annual pay for the barristers and judges occupation at £34,253 in April 2025. Read that as employed barristers and the judiciary, because the survey covers employee jobs through PAYE and the self-employed Bar — the great majority of practising barristers — is not in it.

The same series fell 37.6% in a year on a base of 29,000 jobs, with the mean change suppressed entirely. That is a sample-instability signal rather than a pay cut, and we will not print it as one. For what pupils are paid, the mandatory minimum and the practice-area means above are the published figures; for what established barristers earn, the Bar Council publishes median gross fee income by practice area and years of practice, and that is its report to show you.

Who regulates this

The Bar Standards Board authorises, regulates and publishes the register. The Bar Council is the representative body and runs the Pupillage Gateway. The Inns of Court call people to the Bar and award scholarships. Four organisations, four different publications, and the figures do not reconcile across them — which is why every number on this page carries the publisher and the date.

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.