Law school application trends, 2015–2025

Eleven entering classes of ABA applicant data for all 196 law schools — how many applied, how many were offered a seat, and how many actually enrolled.

How to read this page

Every figure below comes from the ABA’s annual 1L JD Applicant and First-Year Class Data, which law schools file themselves. Year means the entering class year, not the year the report was published.

• Applications — completed applications to the 1L class.
• Offers — offers of admission extended.
• Enrollments — students who actually matriculated.
• Offer rate — offers ÷ applications. The share of applicants who were offered a seat.
• Yield rate — enrollments ÷ offers. The share of admitted students who actually showed up. Offer rate and yield rate answer different questions and are not interchangeable. A school can have a healthy offer rate and still struggle to fill its class.

All year-to-year comparisons use a fixed set of 180 schools that reported application counts in 2015. That matters: the number of schools filing in any given year varies — 177 to 194 schools reported in a given year across the whole country — so comparing raw annual totals would mix a real change with a change in who reported. Within our fixed set, coverage is steadier, at 174 to 180 schools per year. Our data guide explains every field and every comparison we deliberately do not make.

The national picture

Three things this table shows that a single year cannot

1. The 2025 spike was real, and it did not reverse the trend. Applications jumped to 486,718 in the 2025 entering class — pandemic-driven interest in a career that cannot be done from home — then eased to 385,049 two years later. The 2025 class then reached 486,718, the highest on record. Anyone reading a single year would have concluded the market was normal in 2025; it is not, it is more competitive than at any point in this series.
2. Offers did not keep pace — and that is the whole story. Offers moved from 133,676 to 124,830: -6.6%. Meanwhile applications rose 53.9%. When the denominator grows and the numerator shrinks, the ratio falls hard. The offer rate dropped from 42.3% to 25.6% for that reason alone.
3. Yield rates went up, not down. The share of admitted students who actually enrolled rose from 24.3% to 30.5%. This is the counterweight to the "admissions got harder" reading: schools are not filling their seats more slowly. They are competing for a much larger pool. Where individual schools differ on this measure, our offer yield ranking has the details.

Which schools gained applicants

178 schools reported application counts in both 2015 and 2025, so these are directly comparable. The largest increases:

Which schools lost applicants

Only 12 of the 178 comparable schools saw application counts fall over the period. A school in this list is the exception, not the rule — the overwhelming majority of law schools became more popular to apply to.

A shrinking application pool does not automatically mean a school is in trouble — it can also mean the school deliberately narrowed its funnel. The declined-offers ranking shows which schools turn away the most offers, which is a different signal entirely.

Where the yield rate fell

The yield rate is the share of admitted students who actually enrol. Across the schools with comparable data, 36 saw their yield rate fall over the period. This is the dynamic version of a distinction that matters when reading a single year: a falling yield rate means more admitted students chose elsewhere — it does not by itself mean the school failed to fill its class.

Read this carefully. A falling yield rate is not evidence that a school is failing to fill its class. It means more of the people offered a seat chose not to take it — which is often a sign of a school whose perceived value rose faster than its capacity. Check each school’s yield ranking and declined-offer counts before drawing a conclusion.

The narrower pattern behind some of them

3 schools show the specific combination of extending offers faster than applications grew while enrollment grew more slowly than both. That is the pattern of a school reaching deeper into the applicant pool to keep its class full.

What this does not tell you

• These are counts, not rates. A school with 5,000 applications is not more selective than one with 1,000 — it is bigger. For selectivity, see each school’s acceptance rate and LSAT median.
• Application counts include the full applicant pool, including applications that were never completed and applicants who did not take the LSAT.
• Nothing here is admissions advice. We publish what schools filed. If you want to know where you personally fit, that is a different question — and the score converter and school pages are the place to start.

Get the underlying data

Every row above is derived from the ABA files we have parsed into a structured dataset. The full applicant series is available for download as its own long-format file (one row per school per year), alongside the rest of the 196-school dataset. The press page has citation formats and the original source documents.