Junior lawyer salaries jump 21% in Seattle, topping $200K median pay
Aug 25, 2025, 2:27 PM
View of the judge's bench from the audience inside a federal courtroom. (Photo: Jefferson Siegel-Pool, Getty Images)
(Photo: Jefferson Siegel-Pool, Getty Images)
If you’re fresh out of law school, Seattle might be the place to work.
New data from the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) revealed that starting salaries for law careers have jumped 21% since 2021. That puts the median pay for junior lawyers at more than $200,000.
Nationally, salaries for junior lawyers stayed flat, according to The Puget Sound Business Journal, hovering around $160,000. However, in Seattle, firms are spending more to attract top talent.
First-year associates generally have annual billing requirements of between 2,200 hours and 2,400 hours. NALP reported that 37,815 students graduated from law schools across the country last year with an overall employment rate of 93.4%, the highest recorded employment rate to date.
This can be seen as a move to compete with major law firms in high-profile markets within the industry, such as Washington, D.C. and New York. A majority of corporate law offices in D.C., New York, and San Francisco reportedly pay their first-year associates a base salary of approximately $225,000.
Only 14.3% of offices in Seattle pay that salary for first-year associates.
“Students in law school can understand what a big salary means,” NALP Executive Director Nikia Gray told The Puget Sound Business Journal. “They can think about and visualize what it’s going to mean to their life. It is absolutely a recruiting tool for the firms.”
