Law school admission questions, answered with real data

Straight answers to the questions law school applicants actually ask — using published ABA 509 numbers instead of impressions. No signup, no paywall.

Last updated: October 2026

What this page is. Every answer below is built on the 196 ABA-approved law schools in our database, using the data guide to keep the definitions straight. Where a question has a genuine answer and where it genuinely does not, we say which — several questions that sound answerable are not, and pretending otherwise is how applicants end up misled.

Getting in

What LSAT score do I need to get into law school?

It depends on which schools you are targeting, and the median LSAT across all 196 ABA-approved schools is 159. Scores above that median open far more doors, but they do not open all of them. Of the 196 schools we cover, 22 have a median LSAT of 170 or above, 26 fall between 165 and 169, and 43 fall between 160 and 164. So a 165 is at or above the median for 91 schools — which is a real advantage, but leaves more than half the country out of reach. A 160 sits at or above the median for 147 schools. What actually matters more than your raw score is your position relative to a specific school's middle 50%: if you are at or above their median, you are inside the range of the people they have historically enrolled. Check our LSAT percentiles page to convert a raw score into your percentile.

Is my LSAT or my GPA more important?

Neither one has a universal answer, because schools weight them differently and no school publishes its own weighting formula. What we can tell you is what the data shows: among the 196 schools we cover, the median LSAT is 159 and the median GPA is 3.70. Look at the gap between your own numbers and a school's, rather than treating the two as interchangeable currency. A 165 with a 3.4 and a 160 with a 3.8 can be equally competitive at different schools — some admit on academic strength, some lean toward record diversity, and a few admit largely on LSAT bands. Our law school comparison pages put both numbers next to each other for exactly this reason, because the answer is school-specific rather than universal.

What is a good GPA for law school?

Across all 196 ABA-approved schools the median undergraduate GPA of enrolled students is 3.70, so 3.70 is the midpoint of what schools actually enroll. Above that median you are in stronger territory; below it, you are looking at schools whose middle 50% still admits people with your range. The more useful number is each school's own 25th-to-75th percentile spread. If your GPA sits above a school's 75th percentile but below its median, you are in a strong position there — and possibly a weak one at a school where the same GPA falls below the median. Use our comparison pages to find schools whose enrolled range matches your record.

What does an acceptance rate actually tell me?

It tells you how many applicants a school let in, which is a measure of selectivity rather than of your personal odds. Across the 196 schools we cover the median acceptance rate is 35.5%, but only 7 schools admit 10% or fewer. A low acceptance rate is not a judgment about you — a school that admits 5% of 6,000 applicants still admits 300 people. What makes acceptance rates hard to interpret is that they do not adjust for who applied: a school's applicant pool changes every year. If you want a sharper read on your own chances, the yield rate is more informative. We publish it for every school.

How many law schools should I apply to?

There is no data-backed universal number, and anyone who gives you one is inventing it. What we can do is show you the shape of the decision. 196 ABA-approved schools span an enormous range: 22 have a median LSAT of 170 or above, while 49 sit below a median of 155. Choose a range that spans reach, likely, and safe, then apply across it. The number of applications that makes sense for you depends on your application fee budget and how much essay-writing each school requires — not on a rule of thumb. Our rankings pages let you sort by the metric you actually care about so you can see your range before committing.

When are law school application deadlines?

We do not publish a deadline table, and that is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. Deadlines are set by each school individually, they change from year to year, and they are published on each school's own admissions page — which is the only authoritative source. A copied table would go stale within a single admissions cycle, and a wrong deadline is not a minor error: it can mean a missed application for an entire entry term. Early Decision, Priority, and Regular Decision typically fall between October and February for the following fall, but the exact dates and the definition of each deadline vary by school. Check each school's official admissions page directly for the current cycle, and treat any third-party table, including archived ones, with suspicion.

Paying for it

How much does law school cost?

Among the 164 schools that report an annual tuition figure, the median is $49,910 per year. Living expenses add a median of $27,064. That is roughly $77,000 per year before books, a laptop, travel home, and professional clothing — costs that appear in no school's disclosure and are easy to forget. The 32 schools that report tuition per credit hour instead are not included in that median, because converting them to an annual figure would require guessing how many credits you take. We publish those schools separately with their per-credit rates. Our cost page breaks down the full calculation, and our data guide explains why the two reporting systems cannot be combined.

What is the median grant amount, and is that what I will get?

No — this is the most misread number in law school financial aid data. The median grant amount is a median computed over students who received aid, so it says nothing about what happens if you are not one of them, which is nothing. Across our schools the median reported grant coverage rate is 85%, meaning 85% of full-time students receive some form of grant aid. That is a genuinely high figure, but coverage and size are different questions. Look at the four-band distribution instead: the median school has only 1% of aid recipients receiving a full-tuition grant, while 41% receive half tuition or less. Full tuition scholarships are the exception, not the norm, and reading the median grant as a quote is the single most expensive misreading in this data.

Do all law schools offer full tuition scholarships?

No, and the distinction between full-tuition grants and partial grants matters a great deal. 60 of our 196 schools report offering conditional scholarships, which carry retention requirements. For need-based grants, the useful signal is the four-band distribution we publish for every school: it shows what share of aid recipients receive full tuition, what share receive partial amounts, and what share get half or less. When comparing two schools, check whether they are both high on the full-grant band or whether one is simply generous on partial aid. Two schools can both aid 90% of their students and mean completely different things by it.

What is a conditional scholarship, and should I be careful of one?

A conditional scholarship is financial aid whose retention depends on maintaining a minimum GPA or class standing, rather than merely staying in good academic standing. You should read them carefully, because the terms are usually straightforward but the consequences of falling below them are not. Only 7 of the schools we cover report fewer than 15 students in the conditional-scholarship cohort in a given year. For those schools, a single student's outcome moves the retention rate between 0% and 100%, so we publish those figures separately and keep them out of our retention ranking. If a school advertises a conditional retention rate, check how many students it was based on before treating it as a promise.

What is net tuition, and is it a realistic number?

Net tuition is what remains after subtracting a reported median grant from tuition, and it is an optimistic floor rather than a realistic figure. Two things make it optimistic: the median grant is calculated only over students who received aid, so it is not what a non-recipient would get, and it assumes that median award stays constant across all three years of your degree. Actual awards depend on your circumstances and the school's policy, and tuition can change while you are enrolled. We publish net figures because they are useful for comparing schools to each other, but read them as a best case, not a quote. Our scholarship-adjusted ranking explains the method in full.

Choosing between schools

What is the difference between first-time and ultimate bar passage rates?

First-time pass rate is the share of students who passed on their first attempt, and its median across our 196 schools is 84.7%. The ultimate, or two-year, rate counts students who passed within two years including after re-taking, and its median is 92.1%. The roughly 7-point gap is students who eventually passed after more than one attempt. Neither figure is wrong; they answer different questions. First-time rate reflects how well the school prepares you for the exam as written. Ultimate rate reflects the eventual outcome for its entire entering class, and is generally the better measure of a school's overall result. We publish both side by side on every school page and never average them. Ten schools report an ultimate rate below their first-time rate, which happens because these are different cohorts — we keep those values exactly as filed rather than adjusting either one.

Is a higher bar passage rate more important than ranking?

That framing sets up a comparison the data cannot support, because the two are not comparable units. Bar passage tells you about an outcome that happens after you graduate. Ranking reflects reputation and selectivity, which affect your job search before you ever sit for the exam. Our advice is to read them separately and notice when they disagree. A school with a very high first-time rate is preparing students well for the exam as written. A school with a high ultimate rate but a wide gap between the two rates is getting its students through eventually, with more of them needing multiple attempts. Which pattern suits you depends on your finances and timeline. Our outcomes pages show both figures for every school so you can see which pattern each school actually shows.

What is offer yield, and is a low yield a bad sign?

Offer yield is the share of students offered a seat who actually enrolled. The median across our schools is 31.6%. A low yield is usually not a warning sign — it usually means a school offers admission broadly, then enrolls a smaller fraction of those offers. The number you want alongside it is class fill rate, which compares enrolled students to the target class size and has a median of 98.5%. A school can have a low yield and still fill its class easily. Both figures appear together on every admissions funnel page here, because reporting only one of them is genuinely misleading.

Does class size matter?

It depends on what you want from it, and the effect is not uniform across schools. The median first-year class at these schools is 196 students. Smaller classes can mean more individual attention and better access to professors; larger classes often come with more electives and a wider range of clinical programs. The 509 does not measure any of that, so we do not tell you which is better. What we can show you is the class size next to cost and outcomes, which is often more useful than class size alone — a small program at a very high price point and a small program at a moderate one are not comparable decisions.

Should I choose a school based on its LSAT score band?

Use it as a range, not a floor. If your score falls inside a school's middle 50%, you are within the band of students it has historically enrolled, which is meaningful but not a prediction. Schools have no obligation to admit from their own range — it is not a promise, and some schools will admit well outside it. Where the range helps most is identifying your realistic options: cross-reference your score against the 25th and 75th percentiles on our school pages, and treat schools where you sit above the 75th percentile as the ones worth spending the most effort on. Our LSAT percentile page and comparison pages are built for exactly that cross-referencing.

How do I compare two schools that look similar?

Compare them on the dimensions where being wrong is expensive: total cost, net cost after aid, bar passage, and how far your numbers sit from their middle 50%. Two schools can have nearly identical selectivity and differ by tens of thousands of dollars in cost, and the cost difference is the one that keeps affecting you for three years. Our comparison pages put the differences side by side and mark which school is stronger on each metric. We deliberately do not make recommendations and we do not bold median LSAT or GPA, because a higher median is not better for every applicant — it depends on whether you want to be a strong applicant there or a competitive one.

The data itself

Where does this data come from?

Every school-level figure comes from the American Bar Association Standard 509 Required Disclosures for the 2025 reporting cycle, supplemented by official LSAC score-conversion and percentile data. We do not use third-party estimates, rankings, or modeled numbers. If a figure is not in the official disclosure, it is not on this site. Our data guide documents what each field means, which year it describes, and which comparisons we deliberately do not make.

Why are some schools missing from cost rankings?

Because their reporting basis cannot support the comparison, not because we overlooked them. 32 schools report tuition per credit hour rather than an annual figure, and producing an annual number for them would require assuming how many credits a student takes. That assumption is a guess, and it distorts totals and reorders rankings without changing a single fact. Those schools are listed separately with their per-credit rates. A further 12 schools report no separate mandatory fees, so they appear in cost rankings as tuition plus living expenses only, with every such row marked as a partial total.

Why do some of your numbers disagree with each other?

Because they measure genuinely different things, and smoothing them over would hide that. The four-band aid distribution sometimes sums to a rate a few points above or below the reported coverage rate, because schools report each band separately and each is rounded. A handful of schools report an aid coverage rate above 100% for the same reason. Some schools report more enrolled students than offers, which is impossible and is caused by a blank field in the upstream source being read as zero. We publish these as filed and flag them at the point they appear on the school page, because a silent correction would make the data impossible to audit against the source.

Do I need an account to see this data?

No. There is no signup, no account, and no paywall on any page of this site. Applying to law school does not require handing your contact details to an admissions-marketing company, and we do not have lead forms. We are funded by advertising, which does not buy placement, ranking, or exclusion — every school appears whether or not anyone advertises. We also do not sell your data.

Where law schools actually sit

Several answers above reference how selective schools are across the country. Here is the full distribution of median LSAT scores across the 196 schools we cover — useful for calibrating what a given score means in practice.

In short, a score is not a ranking — it is a filter. What determines your outcome is where you sit inside a specific school’s enrolled range. Start with the rankings to see schools by the metric that matters to you, or the LSAT percentiles to see where your score actually falls.

Still deciding?

Found an answer that looks wrong? Tell us which question and we will check it against the source disclosure.