Law firms in Texas: 13,833 offices, 118,430 active lawyers, what they charge and where they are

If you need to find, compare or sell to law firms in Texas, this report is for you: a person or business hiring a lawyer, a law student or lateral choosing a city, an analyst sizing the market, or a vendor building a territory. It combines Census counts of law offices with the State Bar of Texas's own research on its members, their locations and what they charge.

Texas law offices by the numbers

County Business Patterns 2023, offices of lawyers (NAICS 541110), Texas:

That's 13,008 offices below 20 employees, 740 in the 20-to-99 band and 85 at 100 or more: a long tail of small practices and a short list of big offices. The Census Bureau doesn't publish the 500 to 999 and 1,000-or-more cells for Texas, so the two largest offices can't be placed more precisely.

These are establishments, not firms: a firm with offices in Houston, Dallas and Austin counts three times. Employees are all staff, not just lawyers, and partners who own the firm aren't employees. Practices with no staff are left out; the Census Bureau's Nonemployer Statistics count 24,813 legal services businesses in Texas with no employees, with $2.11 billion in receipts, about $85,100 each (a broader code, NAICS 5411, that includes paralegal and title businesses).

Where the law offices are

The Census county files (which leave out 78 offices recorded only at state level) show where the offices are:

Average pay is our calculation from each county's payroll and employees. Dallas County pays the most; Harris County has the most offices and jobs.

Where the lawyers are

The State Bar of Texas's Department of Research and Analysis counts active in-state attorneys by metro area. As of 31 December 2025:

The four largest metros hold 85% of active in-state attorneys. Statewide there's one attorney for every 313 residents, but the State Bar finds that 44% of Texas counties, home to 3.4 million people, have more than 1,000 residents per attorney (the ABA's definition of a legal desert), and nine counties have no attorney at all.

How Texas lawyers practice

The State Bar had 118,430 active attorneys at the end of 2025, up 20% from 98,671 in 2015; 101,162 were in Texas. Of the 72,017 in-state attorneys who reported a primary occupation:

Private practice accounts for 45,686, or 63%. Solo practitioners and lawyers in firms of two to five together outnumber lawyers in all firms of more than ten (26,264 against 15,751).

What Texas lawyers charge

The State Bar's 2025 Income and Hourly Rate Report, from a 2026 survey of 6,363 attorneys (a 7.8% response rate, margin of error plus or minus 1.2%), found a median hourly rate of $368 for full-time private practitioners, up $43 since 2023. Medians were highest in the largest metros: $398 in Austin, $388 in Dallas-Fort Worth and $377 in Houston. Median income for full-time attorneys was $164,705. Use these as a check on a quote, not a price list: rates vary by experience and practice area.

Finding a Texas lawyer

1. Search the State Bar's Find a Lawyer directory. It filters by legal need, county, board certification, language and fee options (contingency, flat fee, hourly, payment plans, sliding scale).
2. Use a referral service if you don't have a name. The State Bar's Lawyer Referral and Information Service serves more than 246 counties, at (800) 252-9690 on weekdays. A referred lawyer gives up to a 30-minute consultation for no more than $20. In Bexar, Dallas, Harris, Jefferson, Travis and Tarrant counties it points you to the local certified referral services instead.
3. Check eligibility. The State Bar publishes an ineligible attorney list and a disciplinary process overview alongside the directory.
4. Compare the quote with the median rates above for your metro.

Selling to Texas law firms

Texas is a territory problem: 85% of in-state lawyers sit in four metros, and pay and rates differ sharply between Dallas and San Antonio. Most vendors split the state by metro and by office size; the 13,008 offices with fewer than 20 employees buy owner by owner, the 85 large offices through IT, finance and committees.

Illustrative example. The company, percentages and prices are invented; the rate is the State Bar's 2025 median.

Bluebonnet Time (bluebonnet-time.example) sells automatic time capture for lawyers at an illustrative $45 per lawyer a month. Its pitch rests on the State Bar's $368 median hourly rate: if the tool recovers just 30 minutes of unbilled time per lawyer a week, that's about $184 a week, or roughly $9,500 a year per lawyer against $540 in cost. It targets the 1,578 offices with 10 to 49 employees statewide (1,020 + 558), starting with Harris, Dallas and Travis counties, and writes to the managing partner and the firm administrator.

Building that list, with practice areas and the right contacts for each office, is where the time goes; Bebop finds firms that match a description and researches each account. The guide to selling to law firms covers how firms of each size decide.

Subject: 30 minutes a week at [firm]

Hi [first name],

The State Bar's latest survey put the median Texas hourly rate at $368. At that rate, 30 minutes of time a week that never makes it onto a bill is worth about $9,500 a year per lawyer.

[Product] records time automatically from email, calls and documents, so lawyers review entries instead of reconstructing them on Friday.

Would a two-week trial with [one practice group] be worth a look?

[Your name]

Texas sources

Next step: see how Texas compares with other industries in companies in Texas.