CHICAGO, March 12, 2025 —The Managing Director’s Office of the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar released today a comprehensive set of data on bar admission outcomes for ABA-approved law schools.
Spreadsheets of the most recent data are available on the section’s webpage under Legal Education Statistics. Individual school reports for consumers are available at ABA Required Disclosures on a school-by-school basis and provide more detail. In addition to bar pass rates, the data incorporates those who become licensed to practice law by alternative pathways, a small but growing number. These graduates are admitted to the practice of law and are considered bar passers without sitting for a bar examination. Because alternative pathways are being recognized more frequently by the state courts, the ABA has updated the name of the bar admission questionnaire, as well as the ABA Required Disclosure page (starting with 2025 statistics), to refer to “admission” rather than “passage.”
The new data shows that in the aggregate, 90.41% of 2022 law graduates who sat for a bar exam passed it within two years of graduation (90.52% with alternative pathways). The two-year “ultimate” aggregate success rate is almost the same as the 90.53% comparable figure for 2021 graduates. The 2022 ultimate bar pass data also reveals that 95.85% of all graduates sat for a bar exam or were admitted by alternative pathways within two years of graduation and that schools were able to obtain bar passage information for 98.75% of 2021 graduates.
First-time takers in 2024 achieved an aggregate 82.79% pass rate (83.02% with alternative pathways), which is more than a 3-percentage point increase over the comparable 79.44% pass rate (with alternative pathways) for 2023.
For comparative purposes, the data released today includes new aggregate information on the demographics of bar exam passers from 2025 bar admission reports and reprints last year’s demographic information from the 2024 reports.
This information was reported to the ABA by law schools and is being made public as a matter of important consumer information under ABA Standard 509. “Prospective students, current students and others interested in the quality of legal education need reliable information on bar admissions, in the aggregate and by individual law schools, and we appreciate the law schools’ efforts to provide a comprehensive national picture,” said Jenn Rosato Perea, managing director of ABA accreditation and legal education. “Admission to the bar, as defined by the state supreme courts, is one measure that reflects how well law schools prepare their students for the legal profession — and this measure will continue to be shaped by changes in the bar exam, diverse pathways to licensure and other assessments of competency.”
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