12,930 companies at Companies House identify themselves as solicitors' practices. 4,700 offices hold a legal aid contract. 3,097 distinct employers are named on the CILEx Regulation register, and there are 1,359 sets of chambers on the Bar Standards Board's. The SRA's own August 2026 statistics count 8,923 regulated firms.
Those four counts overlap and none of them is the others. A firm can be all of them at once, or on one register and not the next. We do not merge them into a single employer count, because merging them would state a claim that no register makes.
Employs, not hires
This is a stock measure and the wording matters. The registers say how many authorised people an employer has on them today. They say nothing about vacancies, training contracts, pupillages or offers, because no register records recruitment at all.
Nobody publishes an open dataset of legal vacancies, applications or offers in England and Wales. Not the regulators, not the Legal Aid Agency, not Companies House. So when this site says an employer employs forty authorised people, that is exactly what it says, and no more.
It is still the better question. An employer with forty chartered legal executives on the register has forty jobs of that kind now, whether or not it was advertising last Tuesday.
Legal aid is the part of the market nobody profiles
Some 1,279 distinct companies are matched to a legal aid office, against 12,930 law firms on Companies House. Roughly a tenth of registered law firms hold legal aid work at all, and 14.2% of their offices are in London postcodes.
What those offices are contracted to do is published, category by category, and it is the single most useful picture of publicly funded legal work that exists.
The numbers behind this chart
| Category of law | Offices contracted |
|---|---|
| Crime | 1,589 |
| Family | 1,514 |
| Family mediation | 1,307 |
| Modern slavery | 512 |
| Debt | 403 |
| Housing | 402 |
| Immigration or asylum | 247 |
| Housing Loss Prevention Advice Service | 212 |
| Mental health | 167 |
| Prison law | 152 |
| Public law | 142 |
| Community care | 117 |
| Claims against public authorities | 101 |
| Clinical negligence | 97 |
| Welfare benefits | 42 |
| Discrimination | 31 |
| Education | 23 |
Crime and family dominate, family mediation is the third largest category, and education law is carried by twenty-three offices in the whole of England and Wales. An office can hold contracts in several categories, so the columns do not add up to the number of offices.
If you want to do publicly funded work, that chart is a map of the employers that can give it to you. It is also a snapshot: the Legal Aid Agency's list is point-in-time, we hold one version of it, and no trend can be read off it. Whether criminal legal aid provision is shrinking is a question this data cannot answer, and we will not imply it can.
A registered office is not a workplace
The Companies House count is built from the register of companies, and the address on it is the registered office. That is frequently an accountant's or a formation agent's address: two single addresses in central London are each the registered office of more than 170 law firms, and MediaCityUK in Salford is the registered office of 44.
So a town count built from Companies House is a count of where firms are registered, not where anybody works. It is also live companies only, which makes any series built from it a survivorship curve rather than a formation rate. Both caveats travel with every town figure we publish from it, including on the geography page.
The employer data we do not publish, and why
The obvious page is missing from this site: the employers of solicitors, by name, with headcounts. That is the largest profession and the most commercially valuable table in this field.
We do not publish it. The SRA provides no bulk download and no documented interface for the person-level roll, which means any such table would rest on provenance we cannot show you and terms we have not been granted. Third parties sell scrapes of that register by the thousand records; that is evidence of demand, not of permission.
Until there is a written answer from the SRA, this site publishes firm-level counts from the SRA's own published statistics and nothing at person level. That is a worse product and the right call, and we would rather say so on the page than have you find out later.
The CILEX employer counts here come from a register that CILEx Regulation publishes under its own terms, not an open licence. We therefore publish counts and aggregates, we do not republish their tables, and the deeper employer view is built from what the register states about employers rather than about people.
Four more things the registers cannot tell you
- Whether an employer is good to work for. No register holds retention, hours, supervision or culture. We publish none of it and we do not rate employers.
- How many trainees or pupils an employer takes. Chambers size is a proxy for being big enough to run a pupillage and nothing more.
- Who pays what. The registers hold no pay. See what the open sources say about pay.
- In-house legal teams. A solicitor employed by a supermarket is on the roll; the supermarket is not a law firm and is on none of these employer registers as one.
Nobody pays to be on this site
No employer pays us to be listed, to be ranked or for your details. There is no jobs board, no referral fee and no advertising. The registers decide who appears, and an employer that has never advertised a vacancy appears on exactly the same terms as one that advertises every week.
Assize Careers is not a regulator, professional body, university, law school or official careers service, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. Nothing on this site is legal advice.
Assize Careers is not affiliated with, authorised by or endorsed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Bar Standards Board, CILEx Regulation, the Legal Aid Agency or Companies House.