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Law School Cost of Attendance (3-Year Totals)

Tuition, mandatory fees and living costs added together — from ABA Standard 509 disclosures, 2025 cycle.164 of 196 schools have a computable 3-year total (152 complete, 12 without a separate fee figure).

Why tuition alone understates the bill

Most law school cost pages rank by published tuition. That is one of three components schools disclose separately in the ABA Standard 509, and at the expensive end it is not even the largest one.

At Stanford, housing alone ($49,719) exceeds the entire tuition of most schools on this site. At NYU, tuition is $83,952 while a year of living costs $36,094 — a comparison that tuition-only rankings erase entirely.

How the totals are calculated

Each year’s total is tuition + mandatory full-time fees + disclosed living costs. That figure is multiplied by 3 for a standard JD. Four disclosures combine to produce it, and schools fall into four groups depending on which they publish:

32 of 196 schools (16%) report tuition per credit hour rather than as an annual total. Converting them would mean guessing how many credits a student registers for, which would shift their rank for a reason that has nothing to do with what the school charges. They are listed with their per-credit rates at the bottom of this page and are not ranked.

3-year cost by state

Across the 164 of 196 law schools in this group that publish an annual tuition figure, a 3-year JD runs $100,695 at the low end and $388,278 at the high end, against a median of $237,120.

12 of those 164 do not publish a separate mandatory fee figure. Their totals above cover tuition and living costs only, so they are understated by an amount this dataset cannot quantify — they are ranked alongside the complete figures for continuity, and each row is labelled.

32 schools report tuition per credit hour rather than an annual total. No annual figure is estimated for them, so they are listed separately below and excluded from the ranking.

105 of these schools report the same figure for on-campus and off-campus living costs, so their disclosure does not distinguish between living in university housing and living off campus.

64 of 196 schools charge out-of-state students more than in-state students. The premium ranges from $100 to $31,042 per year.

Median 3-year total within each state, in-state tuition basis. The national median across states is $221,154.

What the disclosures do and do not tell you

Every figure above comes from a field the school published in its 509 disclosure. Four things that data cannot answer, stated plainly so the numbers are read correctly.

Net cost after grant aid

Sticker price is what everyone sees; what a family actually pays depends on grants. Subtracting each school’s median full-time grant from its 3-year total shows how much of the gap survives aid — and how much of it does not.

A median grant is not an offer. Actual awards depend on your circumstances, the school’s need-aware or merit-aware policy, and how much aid it has that year. Grants in the 509 are also reported for a single cohort, not guaranteed across your three years.

Cost per bar-passage point

Dividing the 3-year total by the first-time bar passage rate gives a single number that puts price and outcome on the same axis. Read it as a positioning tool, not a verdict: schools with lower selectivity pass fewer of their own students, which mechanically lowers this ratio.

Every school’s cost breakdown

164 schools with a computable 3-year total, cheapest first.

Schools reporting tuition per credit hour

These 32 schools disclose a per-credit rate instead of an annual total. No annual figure is estimated for them.

Source: ABA Standard 509 Required Disclosures, 2025 reporting cycle. Figures are for the 2025-26 academic year and in-state tuition unless a row states otherwise. Three-year totals multiply one year of disclosed costs by 3; the 509 does not disclose program length, so schools with extended or joint programs are not distinguished. Nothing here is financial advice.