Paralegal Cost Benchmarks 2026: Salaries, Billing Rates, and Outsourcing Data

How much does a paralegal cost in 2026? The median employed paralegal earns $30.24 per hour ($62,890 per year) per the Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2025 data, but the fully loaded employer cost lands near $43 per hour (roughly $90,000 per year) once benefits are added. Law firms bill paralegal time to clients at an average of $187 per hour (Clio 2025 data), while the national survey average paralegal billing rate is $134 per hour (NALA, 2024). Every figure on this page is drawn from a named primary source with a link, so legal bloggers, consultants, and firms can verify and cite each number directly.

What an employed paralegal costs (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for paralegals and legal assistants, May 2025 release (BLS OEWS 23-2011):

• 392,880 paralegals and legal assistants employed in the United States
• Median wage: $30.24 per hour, $62,890 per year
• 25th to 75th percentile: $24.20 to $38.50 per hour ($50,340 to $80,080 per year)
• 90th percentile: $48.80 per hour, $101,500 per year

The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook projects 0 percent employment growth for paralegals from 2024 to 2034, "little or no change," roughly 600 added jobs in a decade.

The fully loaded cost of a paralegal hire

Wages are only 69.9 percent of what private employers actually pay for an employee; benefits average the remaining 30.1 percent, per the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release, March 2026. Applying that share to the median paralegal wage gives a derived fully loaded cost of about $43.26 per hour, roughly $90,000 per year at 2,080 hours, before recruiting, training, software seats, and office overhead. This derivation combines the two BLS series above; both are linked so you can recompute it.

What firms bill paralegal time at

• $187 per hour: the average United States non-lawyer billing rate (paralegals and other non-licensed staff), ranging from $118 to $237 by state and $116 to $314 by practice area. Source: Clio Legal Trends rate data, as of 2025. For comparison, the average lawyer rate in the same dataset is $349 per hour.
• $134 per hour: the national average paralegal billing rate in NALA's member survey, which also recorded a 15 percent compensation jump from 2022 to 2024, the largest since 2002. Source: NALA 2024 National Utilization and Compensation Report.
• $255 per hour: the 2025 paralegal rate in the Fitzpatrick Matrix used for fee awards in complex federal litigation in the District of Columbia, up from $130 in 2013. Source: United States Attorney's Office, District of Columbia. This is a fee-award benchmark for one federal market, not a national average.
• In The Florida Bar's 2018 economics survey, 53 percent of firms billed paralegal time at more than $120 per hour, and 51 percent of firms using paralegals reported over 1,000 billable paralegal hours per year. Source: The Florida Bar News.

The spread between the $43 fully loaded cost and the $134 to $187 billed rate is the economics that makes paralegal leverage profitable for firms, and it is the same spread that makes virtual and remote paralegal engagements viable: published provider price lists for virtual paralegals run roughly $25 to $95 per hour (provider-published pricing, not survey data), below the cost of a loaded full-time hire for firms without full-time volume.

Law firm staffing ratios are shrinking

• Law firms averaged 0.81 support staff per lawyer in 2023, down from 0.95 in 2017. Source: Thomson Reuters Institute Staffing Ratio Survey, 2024.
• Corporate legal departments run a median of three lawyers per paralegal; the representative department has four lawyers and one paralegal. Paralegals are 12 percent of in-house legal staff. Source: Association of Corporate Counsel 2023 Benchmarking Report.
• There were 1,322,649 active United States lawyers as of January 1, 2024. Source: American Bar Association National Lawyer Population Survey.
• In 2025, "the average law firm achieved 13 percent profit growth" while "smaller firms captured the lion's share of growth as clients moved demand from the most expensive firms to lower-cost alternatives." Source: Thomson Reuters 2026 State of the US Legal Market.

Falling staff ratios plus growing demand at smaller firms is precisely the gap that outside paralegal support for law firms fills: capacity without the loaded-cost commitment. For drafting-heavy matters, the same economics apply to flat-fee legal document drafting and outsourced litigation support workstreams.

The legal process outsourcing market

Analyst estimates diverge widely, which a careful reader should know before citing any single number:

• Mordor Intelligence (January 2026): $29.81 billion in 2025, estimated $36.63 billion in 2026, projected $102.77 billion by 2031 (22.91 percent compound annual growth). The same report states that 43 percent of chief legal officers intend to send more work outside their organizations in 2025, 17 percentage points above 2024.
• The Business Research Company (2026): $22.16 billion in 2025 growing to $28.24 billion in 2026, projected $75.42 billion by 2030.

The two fully verifiable 2025 estimates differ by about a third ($22.16 billion versus $29.81 billion), so treat the direction (strong double-digit growth) as more reliable than any single level.

How to cite this page

Each benchmark above links to the primary source that produced it. Cite the underlying source for a specific figure, or reference this compilation as: Legal Tank, "Paralegal Cost Benchmarks 2026," legaltank.org. Figures were verified against each source in July 2026; BLS figures carry their release vintage (May 2025 wage data, March 2026 benefits data) and survey figures carry their survey year.