Business Data & Benchmarks · United States
Law Office Revenue Benchmark
Offices of lawyers providing legal services.
Average Law Office Revenue per Year 2022 Economic Census
Every law office with paid employees appears in the 2022 Economic Census. The average below divides their combined receipts by the number of offices counted.
≈$2,130,000 /year
Average annual gross revenue per employer establishment
167,174
Employer establishments in the United States, 2022
as published $356 billion
Combined annual gross revenue of employer establishments, 2022
How this is calculated: about $356 billion in combined annual revenue divided by 167,174 employer establishments works out to $2,130,000. This is an average per establishment, and averages get pulled up by large, busy operations, so a typical business may sit below it.
Scope: Offices of Lawyers (NAICS 541110). Covers offices of lawyers with paid employees; solo practitioners without employees are outside this population. Employer establishments only: owner-operated businesses with no paid employees are not in these figures.
One number covers a two-attorney practice in a small town and an office of a national firm, and the distance between them is larger than in almost any other category on this site. What they share is that revenue is created by billable time, so capacity is the number of licensed people multiplied by the hours they can charge.
Only practices with paid employees are counted, so solo attorneys working alone are outside this population entirely.
Source US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Summary Statistics (ECNBASIC): ESTAB, RCPTOT and PAYANN by NAICS · Vintage 2022 Economic Census · Calculation BusinessNES · Accessed July 2026
Where these figures come from
Data Source Notice
This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.
Figures above are from the 2022 Economic Census reference year, released by the Census Bureau in 2024 and 2025; markets have moved since.
Employer Establishments at Year Five Industry group
Legal Services, NAICS 5411, the 2018 starting count compared with the count of five-year-old establishments in 2023.
65.2%the year-five count as a share of the starting count
Across the 2014 to 2018 cohorts, five-year results ranged from 61.1 to 65.2 percent. This benchmark covers Legal Services, NAICS 5411, as a whole. It is not a survival rate for law offices on their own: they are 167,174 of the 182,081 employer establishments in that group, about 92 percent of it. How this is measured
Payroll as a Share of Revenue Official data
Payroll covers attorneys and staff, and it is the one cost the census measures in a practice that buys little else.
| Cost line | Share of receipts |
|---|---|
| Annual payroll share of receipts, United States | ≈36% |
Payroll share of receipts, Offices of Lawyers, United States, 2022 Economic Census.
Approximately 36.0 percent of every revenue dollar in this category goes to annual payroll. As the census defines it, payroll includes wages, salaries, reported tips, commissions and bonuses; it excludes employer-paid benefits, employer payroll taxes, contractor payments and owner compensation. Treat it as one verified anchor, not a full labor cost breakdown. Payroll is the one major cost the census measures here, covering attorneys, paralegals and support staff; occupancy, insurance and research subscriptions sit outside it.
This is not total labor cost or profit margin.
How to read this number
Position Within Its Comparison Group Computed from official data
Where this category sits among 7 legal and accounting practices in the same 2022 Economic Census release. Ranks and the group median are computed on exact values, before the rounding used above.
| Measure | This category | Group median | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue per employer establishment | $2,129,796 | $1,276,450 | 3 of 7 |
| Payroll share of receipts | 36.43% | 36.63% | 5 of 7 |
| Employer establishments | 167,174 | 27,812 | 1 of 7 |
Position among 7 legal and accounting practices, 2022 Economic Census, employer establishments only.
This category ranks 3rd of 7 by average annual revenue per employer establishment. It ranks 1st of 7 by employer establishment count and 5th of 7 by payroll share. Payroll equals 36.43 percent of receipts here, 0.20 percentage points below the group median of 36.63 percent. A higher or lower position is not a measure of profit or of business quality: the census reports receipts and payroll only.
Compared With Similar Business Types Computed from official data
The 4 categories closest to this one by average revenue inside the same comparison group.
| Census category | Revenue per establishment | Payroll share | Establishments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Offices of Lawyers (this page) | $2,129,796 | 36.43% | 167,174 |
| Offices of Certified Public Accountants | $2,660,025 | 36.63% | 54,409 |
| Title Abstract and Settlement Offices | $1,276,450 | 38.18% | 9,824 |
| All Other Legal Services | $1,177,695 | 32.84% | 5,083 |
| Other Accounting Services | $622,428 | 46.07% | 48,674 |
Nearest categories by average revenue, 2022 Economic Census, employer establishments only.
This category reports lower revenue per employer establishment than Offices of Certified Public Accountants, and higher revenue than Title Abstract and Settlement Offices, All Other Legal Services and Other Accounting Services. It contains more employer establishments than all four of them. Every figure in this table comes from the same 2022 Economic Census release and the same employer establishment population, so the columns are directly comparable.
Beyond the Benchmark BusinessNES analysis
What the census figures leave out about law offices, and what to look at instead.
What the numbers do not show
Receipts say nothing about how the work is priced, and in this profession that is most of the story. A practice billing by the hour, one working on contingency and one selling flat fee packages can report similar revenue while running on completely different cash cycles and completely different risk.
Client concentration is likewise invisible. A practice where a handful of clients supply most of the billing looks identical in the data to one with hundreds of small matters, and the two are not worth the same to a buyer or a lender.
Operator lens
- Revenue tells you nothing about the cash cycle. Hourly, contingency and fixed-fee practices can report similar receipts while collecting on completely different timelines, which is what actually strains a small firm.
- Payroll is the cost the census measures in a practice that carries little inventory and few fixed assets. In a practice with almost no inventory and little equipment, headcount decisions are strategy rather than administration.
Questions to ask before starting or buying
- How concentrated is the billing? Ask what share of revenue comes from the largest few clients or referral sources, and what happens to those relationships when the founding partner leaves.
- What is in the work in progress? Unbilled time and unfinished matters are an asset on paper and a liability in practice. Find out how old the oldest open matters are.
- Who owns the referral relationships? In most practices the pipeline is personal. Establish whether referrers are loyal to the firm, to an individual, or to a reciprocal arrangement that ends with a handshake.
- How is the trust accounting handled? Client funds carry regulatory obligations that survive a sale. The state of those records is a direct measure of how the practice has been run.
- What does the malpractice history look like? Ask about claims, near misses and the current premium. Premiums reflect risk the seller may not volunteer.
Models worth considering
- Package one repeatable matter Most practices have a matter type they handle well and price badly. Turning that one into a fixed-scope service with a fixed price makes it marketable and stops it competing with the hourly work for attention.
- Publish the answer, not the invitation In legal services, the searcher usually wants to understand their situation before they want a lawyer. Practices that explain a narrow area properly tend to attract the client who has already decided they need help.
- Build for the second matter The economics improve sharply when a client returns. A practice organized around a life stage or a business type sees the same people repeatedly; one organized around a single transaction does not.
Explore More on BusinessNES
More BusinessNES guides and rankings, plus neighboring benchmark pages built from the same verified data.
Sources and Methodology
Every figure on this page is bound to a published source, and each figure's own source line names that source precisely: the 2022 Economic Census for counts, receipts and payroll, and the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics for the industry continuation benchmark. Where a page shows a sector survival curve instead, that series comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
BusinessNES performs the arithmetic on those published figures and nothing else. Receipts are divided by establishments, and payroll by receipts. The age-five establishment count is divided by the age-zero establishment count for the same four-digit industry group, then repeated across five age-zero cohorts to give a reference and a range. This category's share of its industry group, along with the ranks, medians and nearest peers in the comparison sections, comes from the same published tables. Every one of them is recomputed from the sealed source files at each release and blocks publication if it does not match. Results are rounded and marked approximate. The reference year is 2022 for revenue and payroll; treat every figure as a baseline, not today's market.
Category scope matters: these figures cover Offices of Lawyers (NAICS 541110), employer establishments only. The scope note near the top of the page explains what that includes and excludes for this business type. Legal services other than lawyers' offices, such as title abstract offices, are separate Census categories.
Full method, sources and limits
Spotted an error? Corrections are logged and published. Business data and benchmarks by BusinessNES.