How much does a lawyer make in District of Columbia?

The median wage for lawyers in District of Columbia is $195,190 a year, or $93.84 an hour.

Half earn more than that and half earn less. The figure comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational wage survey for May 2025.

BLS’s mean (average) wage for lawyers in District of Columbia is $242,800 a year. The median is $195,190.

The mean sits higher when a smaller group of high earners pulls the average up. For a typical paycheck, the median is the better middle.

The median hourly wage is $93.84. At a full-time year that lines up with about $195,190 a year.

BLS May 2025; hourly and annual figures come from the same survey.

BLS does not publish starting pay. The closest figure it does publish is the low end of the range: in District of Columbia, the lowest-paid 10% of lawyers earn under $120,580 a year and a quarter earn under $172,060 ($57.97 and $82.72 an hour).

New hires often start somewhere in that band, but the May 2025 survey does not record experience, so read it as a floor to compare an offer against rather than a typical first salary.

The overall salary range for lawyers in District of Columbia spans from $120,580 for the bottom 10% to $392,750 for top earners.

The middle 50% earn between $172,060 and $360,310 a year, with the overall median at $195,190.

On the median wage of $195,190, a single filer taking the 2026 standard deduction keeps an estimated $131,625 a year, or roughly $10,969 a month.

That is after federal, state and FICA tax, an effective rate of 32.6%.

District of Columbia takes $13,716 of it in state income tax.

On the median annual salary of $195,190, estimated take-home pay is roughly $10,969 a month after federal, state, and FICA taxes.

For workers paid on a standard biweekly schedule (26 pay periods per year), each paycheck is approximately $5,063 net.

Yes. The median in District of Columbia is 22.2% above the national median of $159,670.

Nominal pay is only half the comparison: prices in District of Columbia sit at 109.9 against a national 100, so the gap in what the money buys is different from the gap in the salary.

It is 1.78 times the median household income of $109,870. A household often has more than one earner, so a single salary at this level goes further than the ratio alone suggests.

Prices in District of Columbia run at 109.9 against a national average of 100, with rents at 155, so $195,190 here buys about what $177,605 buys at national average prices.

The top tenth earn $392,750 a year or more. The 10th-percentile wage is $120,580.

Experience, specialty, employer and the part of District of Columbia someone works in all move a wage inside that range; the survey reports the spread, not the reason for it.

The survey counted 33,070 of these jobs in District of Columbia for May 2025.

That makes the occupation 871% more concentrated here than in the country as a whole. It counts wage and salary jobs, so the self-employed are outside it.