How Much Does Law School Cost?

The cost of law school is composed of several parts: (1) tuition; (2) room and board; (3) borrowing costs and (4) opportunity cost. Only after considering all four factors can you truly understand the cost of attendance at a law school. The total cost numbers provided to law students often neglect  to explain the true cost to go to law school. In this article, we’ll help you understand how much you’re likely to spend to obtain a legal education, including considering expenses during the summer and thinking about concepts like opportunity cost (since you’ll be giving up earning potential).

Let’s go through each factor one at a time.

Tuition

Law school tuition is mostly straightforward. Each year, your law school will set its tuition rates and publish law school costs for the academic year. You’ll find data for each ABA accredited law school in the table at the beginning of the article.

However, it’s important to remember that tuition is likely to increase each year. Over the past 20 years, even when you adjust for inflation, attendance at a private law school is 2.76 times as expensive. At public schools, it’s 5.92 times as expensive.

Since your tuition will be increasing, you can’t take this year’s tuition number and multiply it by the three years that it takes to attend law school with the expectation that the result is your “total tuition cost”.

To get an accurate number, I’d add a 4% annual increase to your tuition calculation. That means your first year of law school you’ll pay the advertised rate. Your second year of law school you can expect to pay an additional 4%. By your third year of law school, you can expect to pay an additional 4% on top of your second year tuition.

Ultimately, tuition isn’t something that is within your control (other than picking which law school to attend), so it’s probably the easiest piece to calculate when you’re figuring out the true cost of attendance.

Room and board

Each law school publishes their expectation for living expenses to cover the cost of a law student’s housing and food expenses for an academic year. Keep in mind that these are expectations for the average cost for such expenses and don’t include expenses if you have a special circumstance.

What might be a special circumstance? Well, things like having a family or needing to support another person aren’t going to be factored into your room and board.

The good news is that, unlike tuition, room and board is something that you have some ability to control. It’s a perfect time in your life to continue living like a student with roommates and sharing expenses. Even if you can’t live with roommates, you can continue to keep costs down by delaying expensive purchases like buying a home or “upgrading” to a larger living space.

Room and board expenses will also increase over the three years of law school, so plan for that as well. I’d estimate that your room and board expenses will increase by at least 3% each year to cover inflation.

Law schools do not include your summer expenses in their room and board calculations, which means you’ll have to figure out a way to fund rent and food during the summer months. When you’re calculating how much law school costs, you need to factor in that you’ll also have to cover these expenses, so the entire cost of your JD program might be $20,000 – $30,000 more than you expected when simply looking at the tuition and room and board numbers.

Borrowing costs

Accrued interest

Law students (myself included) forget that financial aid isn’t free. You begin incurring expenses immediately, even if you’re able to defer paying those expenses for years.

Graduate PLUS loans start at 7%+ interest rates and you’ll begin accruing interest as soon as the loan is disbursed. For a $100,000 loan that means you’ll owe $107,000 by the time you start your second year, $114,000 by the time you start your third year and $121,000 by the time you finish law school. That’s an extra 21% for each dollar you borrow during your first year.

It’s really worth spending a few minutes hammering this point home. Whether you’re attending the best law school according to U.S. News and World Report or you’re happy paying in-state tuition at a local school, if you’re borrowing from the federal government, you’re borrowing 21% more than you think you’re borrowing during your first year before you ever have a chance of beginning to repay it.

Many, many lawyers only borrow $200,000 and are surprised to have balanced at graduation of $240,000. This is how that happens. 

Origination fees

In addition to paying interest, you’ll also get charged an origination fee for each loan that is disbursed. Those fees range from 1% up to greater than 4% for Graduate PLUS loans. 

For every $100,000 you borrow, you’ll immediately forfeit up to $4,000 off the top. The loan fee is deducted from each disbursement, so you’ll never see the money but will be required to pay back the full amount of the student loan. 

If you borrow more than $200,000, you could easily pay over $10,000 in origination fees alone.

Opportunity cost

The final factor to consider is the opportunity cost of going to law school and obtaining a law degree. Whether you’re attending full-time or part-time, you would be working and receiving a salary if you weren’t attending law school.

If you take that annual salary and multiply it by three, you’ll have an understanding of the lost earnings had you continued to work instead of attending law school.

How Much Does Law School Cost?

Now that you’ve added everything up, you understand that the cost of attendance is likely to be significantly higher than the advertised rate. You also understand that you’re giving up a salary by attending law school, which means your total cost of attending law school is likely 80-100% higher than you were expecting.

Only you can decide if law school is worth the total costs. It has been for me, but with average tuition rising in the United States and many lawyers interested in pursuing public service work rather than working at law firms, you’ll need to make sure you fully understand the total price of law school before you make the decision. 

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