Attorney hourly rates in the US

No government body collects what American lawyers charge. The figures that exist are surveys by bar associations, billing-software vendors and consultants, each with its own sample and method, and they disagree by tens of dollars an hour. This page carries only figures from public bodies, with the year and source beside each.

The State Bar of Texas is one of the few state bars that publishes a rate survey. Its 2025 median for full-time private practitioners was $368, up from an estimated $325 in 2023, ranging from $238 in Corpus Christi to $398 in Austin. A Texas administrative rule (1 Tex. Admin. Code § 81.134) caps some state reimbursements of legal fees at the rate in this report.

When a statute lets the winning side recover reasonable fees, the court multiplies reasonable hours by a reasonable rate. In Washington, DC the U.S. Attorney's Office publishes the Fitzpatrick Matrix for complex federal litigation: a lawyer with 10 years' experience is $774 an hour for 2026, and 35 years or more is $998.

Experience is counted from the year of law school graduation, and the new year's rate applies from 1 January. The matrix is not used where a statute caps the rate, and other districts set their own rates from local evidence, so a DC figure in a Texas fee petition will not get far.

A fee petition or a bill is rate times hours, and the hours are where it is usually cut: vague entries, block billing and time nobody can show was spent. Courts and clients expect contemporaneous records in tenths of an hour (see the billing increment chart). For the UK equivalent of these tables, see the solicitors' guideline hourly rates.