Every regulated legal profession, side by side

Twelve legal professions are in our register work. Ten of them have a person-level register we hold, across eight registers: IPReg's covers patent attorneys and trade mark attorneys, and CILEx Regulation's covers both chartered legal executives and paralegals. The remaining two are further down this page, and they have no people in our data at all.

The first thing to notice is the shape. The solicitors' bar is more than ten times the next one, and the five smallest bars added together come to about a twenty-fifth of it. The second thing is that these bars are not the same unit as each other, which is the part careers talks skip.

Two honest counts of the same register disagree

225,107 people are on the roll of solicitors of England and Wales by our count of the register, of whom 181,654 carry the register's status wording for an SRA-regulated solicitor. The SRA's own published statistics for August 2026 give 214,773 on the roll and 179,054 practising. Those are smaller than our numbers.

We publish both and we are not going to pretend the gap away. The SRA's figure is the one to quote as the size of the profession, because the SRA defines it; ours is a count of the rows on the register as it was served to us, on the date it was served. Counting is a choice and two reasonable counts of the same register differ. Any site showing you one number with no method behind it has made that choice for you without saying so.

Neither number is a headcount of people working as solicitors. Someone admitted in 1988 who left practice in 1995 stays on the roll until they ask to come off. A paralegal doing legal work every day is on no register at all and appears in none of these bars.

The Bar is mostly not a job

18,852 barristers are on the Bar Standards Board's register. 15,104 of them are in self-employed practice, which means a tenancy in one of 1,359 sets of chambers and an income that is fee income, not salary. Only 3,748 are employed by an organisation, and that count includes people practising in both capacities. 2,313 are King's Counsel.

The BSB's own report counted 19,093 practitioners at 1 December 2025, of whom 602 were pupils. That is a different date and a different basis from our count of the register above, so the two are not interchangeable and we do not subtract one from the other — the barrister page sets out why they differ. In the same year 1,959 people were called to the Bar against about 581 registered pupillages and 395 tenancies obtained. That is the ratio to think about before the one about advocacy, and the Bar Standards Board publishes it itself.

If you want to be employed, read the 3,748 again. Choosing the Bar is mostly choosing to run a business.

CILEX is the register that answers a different question

11,603 people are on CILEx Regulation's register, of whom 7,498 are chartered legal executives and the rest are CILEX paralegals. The route does not require a law degree and is usually taken while employed, which is why it appears in far more high-street and regional employers than the Bar does.

Scale it honestly: CILEx Regulation approved 1,120 authorisations in 2024, against 9,384 admissions to the roll of solicitors in the twelve months to August 2026. Those are decision counts, not cohorts, and they are not directly comparable — but the order of magnitude is the point.

What a chartered legal executive may actually do is the most misunderstood thing on this page. It depends on which practice rights the individual holds, and most hold only the base qualification.

CILEx Regulation publishes its register under its own terms and not under an open licence, which is why this page shows you counts and never a person. If you need to check an individual, their register is the place to do it.

Five smaller professions, and one of them is bigger than you think

9,169 people are on the five smaller registers: 3,924 patent and trade mark attorneys with IPReg, 2,428 licensed conveyancers with the Council for Licensed Conveyancers, 1,211 certificated enforcement agents, 817 notaries public on the Faculty Office's roll and 789 costs lawyers with the Costs Lawyer Standards Board.

Patent and trade mark attorney is a regulated legal profession of nearly four thousand people that almost no school careers talk mentions. It is the fourth largest profession on this page, after solicitors, the Bar and CILEX, and comfortably the largest of the five smaller registers.

Three cautions on these five. The enforcement agent figure is a floor and not a total, because the certificated bailiff register limits sustained collection. The notaries figure includes 41 notaries in the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, who are not in England and Wales and are counted anyway. And four of these five registers either publish no re-use terms or are closed; only the HMCTS certificated bailiff register is under the Open Government Licence, which is why you get totals here and no downloadable list.

What each of them may lawfully do

The thing that makes these professions professions is section 12 of the Legal Services Act 2007. It lists six reserved legal activities: exercising a right of audience, conducting litigation, reserved instrument activities, probate activities, notarial activities and the administration of oaths. Everything else legal — advising, drafting, negotiating, most paralegal work — is not reserved, and anyone may do it.

So each register answers one question: which of those six its people are authorised for, and on what terms. Solicitors and barristers can be authorised for most. A notary's authorisation is built around notarial activities. A licensed conveyancer's is built around reserved instrument activities. A costs lawyer's is narrow and specific. An enforcement agent's certificate is not an authorisation to practise law at all.

We are not going to summarise the route into the five smaller professions from memory. Each regulator sets and publishes its own, the detail changes, and a wrong sentence here would cost somebody a year. The regulator's own page is linked in the sources below and it is the only place to read it.

Two of the twelve have no people in our data

Claims management companies, regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, and regulated immigration advisers, regulated by the Immigration Advice Authority, are in our professions dataset for their legislation, their parliamentary history, their freedom of information responses and their regulators' reports. The practitioners are not, because we have not collected them: the FCA's register sits behind an API key we have not taken, and the immigration advisers' list has not been collected at all.

So this page is incomplete, and saying so is more use to you than a page that quietly isn't. If you are considering immigration advice as a career, the Immigration Advice Authority's own adviser finder is the register, not us.

The profession as a whole is growing

The Legal Services Board puts the regulated legal sector at 147,000 people in 2011 and 203,143 in 2025, a rise of 38.2% over fourteen years with 2020 the only year it fell. That is a growing industry being entered through a bottleneck that has barely widened: 9,384 admissions to the roll in the year to August 2026, and 581 registered pupillages.

Which also means the growth is not evenly distributed between the professions on this page, and the smaller registers are where the proportions have moved most.

None of this is Scotland or Northern Ireland

Every register here is England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own professions, their own regulators and their own routes in, and we hold no data on either. If you are applying there, nothing on this page describes your market.

Hourly refresh describes our copy, not the registers

The numbers on this page are refreshed hourly from our own database, and the registers behind them are not. A regulator publishes when it publishes. Each figure below carries the date it describes, and that date is the one that matters.

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 Council for Licensed Conveyancers, IPReg, the Costs Lawyer Standards Board, the Faculty Office, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Immigration Advice Authority or the Legal Services Board.