Paralegals and Legal Assistants

Total Income to Compare:

$

Income Percentile Results

See Similar Occupations

• All Occupations
• Lawyers, and judges, magistrates, and other judicial workers
• Legal Support Workers, nec
• Paralegals and Legal Assistants

Income Percentile Stats

• To be in the top 1% for this age range, your household would need an income of $210,974 per year. This would include salary, investments, and any business income.
• To be in the top 5% for this age range, your household would need an income of $110,444 per year. This would include salary, investments, and any business income.

Income of Paralegals and Legal Assistants by Highest Education Level

Total Income of $55,000 ranks for education levels:

• Compared to Doctoral degree holders this ranks between the 48.5th and 57.1th percentiles.
• Compared to Professional degree beyond a Bachelor's degree holders this ranks between the 49.2th and 61.8th percentiles.
• Compared to Master's degree holders this ranks between the 51.3th and 63.2th percentiles.
• Compared to Bachelor's degree holders this ranks between the 60.7th and 71.8th percentiles.
• Compared to HS Diploma / GED degree holders this ranks between the 68.3th and 80.3th percentiles.

Income Percentile Distribution by Education Level

Highest Level of Education for Paralegals and Legal Assistants:

• Other (N/A or Less than HS): 1%
• HS Diploma / GED: 10.6%
• Associates Degree and Some College: 43.1%
• Bachelors Degree: 37.2%
• Masters Degree: 5.3%
• Professional Degree beyond a Bachelors: 2.3%
• Doctoral Degree (PHd) : 0.5%

Most Common Bachelors Degree Majors

• For Social Sciences undergraduate majors this income ranks between the 62.2th and 74.3th percentiles.
• For Business undergraduate majors this income ranks between the 51.8th and 63.1th percentiles.
• For Criminal Justice and Fire Protection undergraduate majors this income ranks between the 62.3th and 73.1th percentiles.
• For Law undergraduate majors this income ranks between the 63.7th and 76.2th percentiles.
• For Psychology undergraduate majors this income ranks between the 65.7th and 74.8th percentiles.
• For English Language, Literature, and Composition undergraduate majors this income ranks between the 60.9th and 74.5th percentiles.
• For Communications undergraduate majors this income ranks between the 65.5th and 77.1th percentiles.
• For History undergraduate majors this income ranks between the 63.2th and 72.3th percentiles.
• For Education Administration and Teaching undergraduate majors this income ranks between the 55.5th and 67.2th percentiles.
• For Fine Arts undergraduate majors this income ranks between the 65.5th and 74.4th percentiles.

Note: The source data only records undergraduate degree majors, even if a person continues to study.

Treemap of Undergraduate Majors

Methodology and Assumptions

This data was sourced from the person-level data recorded by the American Communities Survey. The version of the survey used was the most recent 5 year revision for data recorded from 2013-2017. These results represent 371,934 Paralegals and Legal Assistants. The occupation code that was used to generate these results e was 2140 to read more about the occupation codes that the ACS and Census use. These results were generated in R using raw data from the ACS and precalculated in a batch. This data includes all individual income for the survey respondent, so some of the people may have a wage job as well as other income sources. I did not limit to wage income, because many occupations have high portions of entrepreneurs (CEOs, doctors, tradespeople).

Exclusions and Filters Applied:

• Filtered for people who reported working at least 30 hours a week.
• High School Graduates and GED graduates were original 2 separate categories that I combined.
• Anything below High School Graduates is combined into a separate category. I did not include these on the page for space reason but I can.
The data has data for associate degree holders and some college and these values are mostly in between the high school and bachelors samples. There doesn't seem to be a significant difference between some college and an associates degree.
• All ages are included and not separated. I did some initial testing and there is a difference if the data is split out by age, but I wasn't able to consolidate the data into a way that would make it fast to interact with and avoid being too complicated.
• There may be some confusion around a masters degree vs a professional degree beyond a masters. This was a distinction made in the original raw data that I decided to keep. Because the data is collected by polling people individually, some of the respondents may have mixed up the difference depending on how they phrased their response.
  • Masters Degree : MBA, Masters in Something
  • Professional Degree beyond a Bachelors Degree: Law Degree, Medical School, generally these degrees are credentials for specific careers.
  • Doctoral Degree: PHd