England and Wales has 225,107 solicitors on the roll, 18,852 barristers on the Bar Standards Board register, 11,603 people on the CILEx Regulation register and 9,169 on the five smaller registers. Those are four separate professions with four separate regulators, four separate sets of stages and four very different costs. Paralegal work, which is how a large number of people earn a living from law, has no register and no regulator at all.
The route most people take changed last year
In the twelve months to August 2026 the SRA admitted 9,384 solicitors. 4,800 of them, 51%, qualified through the Legal Practice Course and a period of recognised training. 4,050, 43%, qualified through the Solicitors Qualifying Examination. 166 came through CILEX or as justices’ clerks, 158 under the Republic of Ireland exemption and 134 by equivalent means, with the remainder through the other routes the SRA lists.
The year before, 9,582 were admitted and the split was 6,059 through the LPC (63%) against 3,042 through the SQE (32%). The SQE’s share rose eleven percentage points in a single year. If you are reading advice written before 2025, it is describing the route that is closing.
How big each profession is
The numbers behind this chart
| Profession | People on the register |
|---|---|
| Solicitors (on the roll) | 225,107 |
| Barristers | 18,852 |
| CILEX (all registers) | 11,603 |
| Patent and trade mark attorneys | 3,924 |
| Licensed conveyancers | 2,428 |
| Enforcement agents | 1,211 |
| Notaries public | 817 |
| Costs lawyers | 789 |
Size is not the same as opportunity, and a register counts authorisations rather than jobs. The solicitors’ figure above is the roll; 181,654 of those are recorded as SRA-regulated solicitors. Every figure we publish, with its source, is free to read.
The five routes
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Solicitor
The largest profession and the one with the newest set of stages. Two central assessments, a period of qualifying work experience, and admission by the SRA.
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Barrister
A vocational course, then pupillage, then tenancy. Mostly self-employed practice, with a mandatory minimum award during pupillage and the sharpest attrition of any route.
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Chartered legal executive (CILEX)
Qualification while employed, regulated by CILEx Regulation, with three authorisation routes and no requirement to stop earning.
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Solicitor apprenticeship
Six years, employed and funded by the employer, with SQE1 as the gateway and SQE2 as the end-point assessment. Nobody publishes a count of starts on the solicitor standard, so nobody can tell you how big or how fast-growing this route is.
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Paralegal
Legal work with no regulator, no register and no protected title. Often the first job, sometimes the whole career, and the least documented part of the sector.
If you started a law degree in September 2022 or later
You must qualify as a solicitor through the SQE, and there is no list of SRA-approved undergraduate law degrees for you. Any course badged as an SRA-approved or SRA-recognised qualifying law degree for your year of entry is wrong, whoever is printing it.
The LPC route is still open to people who met the SRA’s transitional conditions, and the solicitor page sets out those dates and the closing date for admission under it. Everybody else sits the SQE.
What each route costs before you earn anything from it
- Solicitor, through the SQE
- £2,006 for SQE1 and £3,086 for SQE2, so £5,092 for one attempt at each, up from £1,934 and £2,974 for 2025/26. Assessment fees only: preparation is extra and is the larger expense. SRA, 21 April 2026.
- Barrister
- Published Bar course fees for 2025/26, inclusive of the Bar Standards Board’s own fee, ran from £12,900 to £20,200 for the three-step pathway. The BSB took those from provider websites in June 2025, so they will have moved.
- Chartered legal executive
- Paid for alongside employment rather than before it. CILEX and CILEx Regulation publish their own fees; we do not restate them, because they change and theirs is the page that binds.
- Solicitor apprenticeship
- Nothing to the apprentice. The Solicitor standard ST0246 carries a maximum funding band of £27,000 and a typical duration of 72 months. Department for Education (Skills England).
- Paralegal
- No mandatory qualification, so no mandatory cost. That is the whole appeal and most of the problem.
What we do not publish here, and why
The bodies that publish the numbers an applicant most wants — the SRA, the Bar Standards Board and the Bar Council — each reserve copyright in their reports and none of them licenses commercial re-use. Individual facts are facts and we state them with the source and the date. Their tables, charts and datasets are theirs, so we cite and link rather than mirror, and a feature that needs more than that waits for written permission. Where a route page says a number is not here, that is usually why.
Nobody publishes a count of qualifying work experience placements, a count of paralegals, or a pass rate by SQE training provider. Those three gaps are real, not an omission on our part, and each route page says so where it 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.