How much do solicitors charge per hour in the UK?

Guideline hourly rates from January 2026

These are the guideline hourly rates used for summary assessment of court costs, in effect from 1 January 2026. They are published by the government and updated periodically.

Grade	Who that is	London 1	London 2	London 3	National 1	National 2
A	Solicitors and legal executives with over 8 years’ experience	£579	£422	£319	£295	£288
B	Solicitors and legal executives with over 4 years’ experience	£393	£327	£262	£247	£247
C	Other solicitors or legal executives and fee earners of equivalent experience	£305	£276	£209	£201	£200
D	Trainee solicitors, paralegals and other fee earners	£210	£157	£146	£142	£142

The bands are geographic. London 1 is very heavy commercial and corporate work by centrally based London firms, and is not tied to a postcode. London 2 is the City and central London. London 3 is outer London, meaning all other London boroughs plus Dartford and Gravesend.

National 1 covers the counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Dorset, Essex, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Kent, Middlesex, Oxfordshire, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex and Wiltshire, plus a list of city centres: Birkenhead, inner Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge city, inner Cardiff, inner Leeds within two kilometres of the City Art Gallery, Liverpool, central Manchester, Newcastle city within two miles of St Nicholas Cathedral, Norwich city, Nottingham city and Watford. National 2 is everywhere else.

That geography is worth reading twice if you live in one of the cities on this site. A solicitor in central Manchester sits in National 1 at £295 an hour for grade A work; the same grade of solicitor in Stockport sits in National 2 at £288. The difference between city and suburb is smaller than most people expect, and far smaller than the gap between grades.

What the guideline rates are used for

They are not a price list and they are not a cap. A firm can agree any rate with a client who accepts it, and specialist London practices charge well above the top band.

What the rates do is set the benchmark a court uses when it assesses costs. That matters in three situations:

• You win a case and the other side pays your costs. The paying party will argue your rates against the guidelines, and anything above them has to be justified.
• You lose and pay theirs. The same test protects you.
• You challenge your own solicitor’s bill. A rate far above the guideline for the work done is the first thing anyone assessing it will pick up.

Outside litigation, the guidelines are simply the closest thing to an independent yardstick. A conveyancing firm quoting a grade C rate of £320 an hour in Sheffield is charging above the National 2 guideline of £200, and is entitled to, but you now know by how much.

What firms charge in practice

Hourly rates in practice cluster by the type of work rather than by the firm’s size.

• High street private client work, meaning wills, probate and family, tends to sit close to the guideline for the region, often between £200 and £280 an hour outside London.
• Commercial and corporate work at a regional firm typically runs above the guideline, with partner rates in the £300 to £450 range in the big regional cities.
• Specialist family and litigation work in London runs highest, and the top London band exists because that work does.

The published figures on this site’s city lists show the same pattern from the other direction. Nelsons publishes its hourly rates by grade of lawyer and prices debt recovery at £150 plus VAT and seven percent of sums up to £25,000, which is the sort of detail that makes a quote comparable. That firm heads the Nottingham list partly for publishing it.

Work that should be a fixed fee

For six consumer services, the SRA Transparency Rules already require the firm to publish a price, and for most of them a fixed fee is normal:

• Residential conveyancing, including sales, purchases, mortgages and re-mortgages
• Collecting and distributing the assets of an estate where the estate is not contested
• Immigration applications and appeals, excluding asylum
• Summary-only motoring offences at the magistrates’ court, dealt with at a single hearing
• Bringing an unfair or wrongful dismissal claim to the Employment Tribunal
• For businesses, defending those claims, debt recovery up to £100,000, and licensing applications

Simple wills, lasting powers of attorney, settlement agreement advice and uncontested divorce applications are also routinely fixed. If a firm quotes an hourly rate for any of those, ask why.

Three questions that change the bill

Who does the work? The grade matters more than the rate. Two hours of grade A time costs more than five hours of grade D time in every region in the table, and plenty of legal work is grade D work.

How is time recorded? Most firms bill in six-minute units. A two-minute call is billed as six minutes, and forty short calls become four hours. Ask, and ask whether emails are billed per item.

What is the estimate, and what would change it? An hourly rate on its own is not a price. The number that matters is rate multiplied by hours, and the hours are the part the firm can estimate and you cannot.

Hourly rates in Scotland and Northern Ireland

The guideline rates are for England and Wales. Scotland has its own table of judicial expenses, set by Act of Sederunt and applied by the Auditor of Court, and Northern Ireland has separate court scales. In practice, Scottish and Northern Irish firms quote hourly rates in the same ranges as comparable English regional firms, but the benchmark a court would use is different, so the table above is not the yardstick for a firm on the Glasgow or Belfast lists. Ask for the rate and the estimate in writing, which is the same advice in all three jurisdictions.