Paralegal salary in 2026, by industry and percentile

The median paralegal earned $62,890 a year - $30.24 an hour - in BLS's May 2025 estimate for paralegals and legal assistants. That is the middle of a range that runs from under $44,740 to over $101,500, and it sits inside five industries that pay the same job title very differently. The spread is the part worth your attention, so the industry breakdown is where this post spends most of its space.

What does a paralegal earn in 2026?

Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2025 estimates.

How to read this. These are wages paid to people already employed as paralegals in May 2025 - not salary ranges posted on job ads, and not offers. The median is a national figure with no adjustment for where you live, so a number that looks low against Boston rent and high against Tulsa rent is doing neither; it is describing the whole country at once. The top and bottom deciles are the useful pair. A gap of $56,760 between the tenth and ninetieth percentile, in an occupation whose usual entry credential is a two-year degree, tells you that something other than the credential is setting pay.

That something is largely who signs the check.

Which industry pays paralegals the most?

Median annual wage for paralegals by industry, May 2025

The five industries BLS lists for paralegals and legal assistants, with each industry's share of paralegal employment.

Federal government, excluding postal service		$81,4704% of paralegals
Finance and insurance		$80,1203% of paralegals
Local government, excluding education and hospitals		$63,3705% of paralegals
Legal services		$61,77075% of paralegals
State government, excluding education and hospitals		$59,3203% of paralegals

Three quarters of paralegals work in legal services - private law firms - and legal services is the second-lowest paying of the five industries BLS reports. The federal government pays a median of $81,470 and employs 4 percent of them. That is $19,700 a year between the industry almost nobody works in and the industry almost everybody does.

The largest single raise available to a working paralegal is not a promotion inside a firm; it is a change of employer type. I will defend that against the obvious objection, which is that seniority also pays. It does, but the published data gives you no way to price it, and it gives you a very clear price on the industry move: a Litigation Paralegal at a mid-size firm sits in the $61,770 column, and the same skills carried into a Paralegal Specialist posting at a federal agency sit in the $81,470 column. Nothing about the work changed by twenty thousand dollars. The industry did.

The finance and insurance number is the one people miss. Banks, insurers and title companies employ paralegals for contracts, claims, regulatory filings and closings, at a median of $80,120 - within $1,350 of the federal figure - and they hire 3 percent of the occupation. A Real Estate Paralegal is one of O*NET's sample job titles for this occupation, and one resume reads as a firm hire or a lender hire depending mostly on which posting it lands on.

Does the associate's degree still hold?

BLS lists an associate's degree as the typical entry-level education for paralegals, with no prior work experience in a related occupation and no on-the-job training. O*NET, which surveys people doing the job rather than describing the usual entry route, reports something looser: 37 percent of respondents said a bachelor's degree was required, 20 percent an associate's or other two-year degree, and 19 percent a high school diploma or equivalent. O*NET places the occupation in Job Zone Three, medium preparation.

Those two answers are not in conflict, and reading them as a contradiction is how people talk themselves out of applying. One says what the door usually is. The other says what the room currently holds. If you have a bachelor's degree in something unrelated and a certificate, you are inside the 37 percent, not outside the 20.

What the work is, and which parts a machine takes

O*NET lists fourteen tasks for 23-2011.00, and the first six carry most of the job: prepare affidavits and keep the filing system in order; draft and edit briefs, pleadings, appeals, wills, contracts and real estate closing statements; investigate the facts and the law of a case; organize exhibits for trial; meet with clients; and gather and analyze statutes, decisions and legal articles. The tools are Thomson Reuters Westlaw and LexisNexis for the research, and Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint for everything else. That second list is worth noticing. It is the same software everyone else in an office uses, which means the specialist skill here is legal judgment applied to documents rather than a proprietary system you can only learn on the job.

Now put that beside the sentence BLS uses when it explains the outlook. Demand is limited, it says, by advances in technology including artificial intelligence, which make research and document preparation more efficient. Research and drafting are two of those first six tasks. They are also the two an employer can most easily measure, which is why they are the ones being compressed first.

The rest are less compressible, and an Immigration Paralegal is the clean illustration. A model can find the controlling regulation and produce a serviceable first draft of a filing. It cannot sit with a client who has brought the wrong documents for the third time, decide which of two imperfect exhibits goes in the record, or absorb the consequence of a filing deadline that a court will not move. Those are the parts of the job that still require a person in a chair with the file open. What the published data will not do is price that difference. BLS names AI as a limit on demand but does not split the occupation into compressible and incompressible work, and no federal table says which employers are paying for which half. The $81,470 federal median and the $61,770 legal services median are the only prices on offer, and they are prices on an employer, not on a task.

BLS also notes that most paralegals work full time and describes the environment as fast-paced, with several projects running against tight deadlines at once. Read the industry chart with that in mind. The $61,770 legal services median is being paid for that pace as well as for the work.

Is the paralegal job disappearing?

No. It is flat, which is a different thing and reads worse than it is.

BLS projects paralegal and legal assistant employment at 404,900 in 2025 and 403,800 in 2035 - a change of -1,100 jobs, rounded to 0 percent - while projecting about 40,800 openings a year over the same decade, most of them from people transferring to other occupations or leaving the workforce. BLS also states plainly that demand "is expected to be limited by advances in technology, including artificial intelligence (AI)." So the ceiling on new positions is real and the agency has named the reason. The hiring is not the ceiling: 40,800 openings a year against 404,900 jobs is a tenth of the occupation changing hands annually.

Paralegals and legal assistants at a glance

$62,890Median annual pay, May 2025

404,900Jobs in 2025

40,800Projected openings a year, 2025–35

What these numbers do not tell you

More than usual, and it is worth being specific rather than waving at "context".

They do not give you a city. BLS's per-occupation wage pages by metro area no longer serve data - the old OEWS occupation pages redirect to a table index - so there is no published paralegal median for Chicago or Phoenix that I can put in front of you here. Anyone showing you one from a salary site is showing you self-reported figures, not the federal estimate.

They do not price a specialty. Immigration Paralegal, Litigation Paralegal and Real Estate Paralegal are all sample titles under the same code, 23-2011.00, and all five industry medians pool them together. The published data cannot tell you whether immigration work pays above or below litigation work.

They do not follow a person. The $81,470 federal median describes paralegals employed by federal agencies in May 2025 - a different group of people, with different tenure, from the ones in the $61,770 legal services figure. It is a photograph of two populations, not a before-and-after of one career.

And they use two calendars. The Occupational Outlook Handbook projects 2025–35; O*NET currently publishes the 2024–34 round, which shows about 39,300 openings for this occupation over its decade. Those are different vintages of the same programme. Do not subtract one from the other.

The other titles for this work

If you are searching job boards for one word, you are missing postings. O*NET lists the alternate titles employers actually use for this occupation - Litigation Paralegal, Immigration Paralegal, Real Estate Paralegal, Legal Analyst, Law Associate and Paralegal Specialist - and it names ten adjacent occupations. Three of them share real work with a paralegal: legal secretaries and administrative assistants (43-6012.00), title examiners, abstractors and searchers (23-2093.00), and court reporters and simultaneous captioners (27-3092.00). The other seven are general clerical codes - office clerks, correspondence clerks, eligibility interviewers - and they are adjacent on paper more than in a job search. The table below prices the two of the three that BLS publishes a handbook wage for, and adds the rest of the legal group for scale.

Sources: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook legal occupations page and secretaries and administrative assistants page, May 2025 estimates.

The last row is why the legal occupations group median of $102,500 is useless for a paralegal to plan around. Lawyers earn a median of $159,670 and numbered 863,700 in 2025; they drag the group figure $39,610 above the paralegal median. Compare yourself to 23-2011, not to the group.

The row above the paralegal line matters more day to day. Legal secretaries and administrative assistants sit at a median of $55,570, $7,320 below paralegals, and BLS projects that code - 43-6012 - to fall 5 percent between 2025 and 2035, from 157,600 jobs to 149,300. Paralegals are flat across the same decade. The two titles differ in direction, not only in level. They also overlap in a lot of small firms, where one person does intake, calendaring, drafting and filing under whichever title the firm printed on the offer letter. If that describes your job, the title on your next application is a $7,320 decision, and the tasks you list under it are what make the higher title credible: legal research, drafting, evidence organization, not calendar management.

Court reporters, at $72,420, are the other direction: BLS lists a postsecondary nondegree award as the way in, so that is a course to enroll in rather than a lateral move. Arbitrators, mediators and conciliators earn a median of $75,530, but that is a bachelor's-degree occupation people usually reach after years in law or a subject field, not a next step from a paralegal desk.

If you are applying for this role

Search the title variants, not the title. A search for "paralegal" alone will not return the Legal Analyst posting at an insurer or the Paralegal Specialist listing at a federal agency, and those are the two columns of the industry chart that pay above $80,000.

Without prior legal experience you are being priced against the bottom half of the distribution - the $44,740 tenth percentile up to the $62,890 median - and the $101,500 ninetieth percentile is a real destination rather than a rumour, because one paralegal in ten is there. If a firm offers below the legal services median of $61,770, that is a number you can name in the conversation, with its date and its source, which is a stronger position than "market rate".

Ask one question in the interview: which industry code the employer files under. A title company, a bank's in-house counsel and a litigation boutique all post "Paralegal", and BLS puts $18,350 between the finance and insurance median and the legal services median.

Then apply to more than one of them. If retyping the same employment history into a fourth agency portal is what stops you, HeroApply fills the application from your resume so the industry you target is a choice rather than a function of how much typing you can stand.