There are 225,107 solicitors on the roll of England and Wales, of whom 181,654 are recorded on the register as SRA-regulated solicitors. The Solicitors Regulation Authority admits, regulates and strikes off every one of them. Its register is the only place to check whether a named person is authorised today, and we link to it rather than copy it.
If you started a law degree in September 2022 or later you must qualify through the SQE, and there is no list of SRA-approved undergraduate law degrees for you. Any badge claiming one is wrong.
The stages, in order
-
A degree, or an apprenticeship instead of one
The SQE sits on top of a degree or equivalent qualification. It does not have to be a law degree. If you do not want to pay for one first, the solicitor apprenticeship reaches the same admission through employment, and solicitor apprentices have outperformed the general SQE cohort.
Degree class is the strongest thing the SRA publishes about who passes, and it is worth knowing before you book anything rather than after.
-
SQE1: £2,006, two parts, a passing score of 300
At the January 2026 sitting 7,918 candidates sat both parts and 53% passed. Of the 6,760 sitting for the first time, 58% passed. The passing score for each part is 300; the mean was 311.2 on FLK1 and 304.3 on FLK2.
First-attempt pass rates by undergraduate degree class at that sitting: 79% for candidates with a first, 57% with a 2:1, 27% with a third and 20% with a 2:2. Those are first-attempt candidates only, which is how the SRA publishes them, and groups of fewer than ten candidates are suppressed.
-
Qualifying work experience
Legal work experience that the SRA will accept, signed off by a solicitor or a compliance officer. How much is needed, what counts and how many placements you may use are the SRA’s rules and the SRA’s page is the one that binds, so read it before you count work you have already done. It is wider than a training contract, which is the single most useful thing to know about this stage.
Nobody publishes how many of these placements exist. The SRA counts periods of recognised training under the old route — 5,975 training contracts were registered in 2023/24, 88% of them for trainees aged 30 or under — but there is no equivalent public count of qualifying work experience under the SQE. As the LPC route closes, the only published measure of how much training capacity the profession has is disappearing with it.
-
SQE2: £3,086, sixteen stations
Twelve written and four oral stations, assessed on a total score against a pass mark of 300. At the January 2026 round, which ran from 27 January to 6 February 2026, 1,141 candidates were graded and 80% passed. Of the 873 sitting for the first time, 79% passed. By degree class, first attempt: 92% with a first, 81% with a 2:1 and 53% with a 2:2.
SQE2 is the easier of the two gates, and the figures say so plainly.
-
Admission, and the roll
The SRA admits you and enters your name on the roll. In the twelve months to August 2026 it admitted 9,384 solicitors, and the five largest routes were: 4,800 through the LPC and a period of recognised training, 4,050 through the SQE, 166 through CILEX or as justices’ clerks, 158 under the Republic of Ireland exemption and 134 by equivalent means.
What the assessment costs, and what it does not cover
SQE1 is £2,006 and SQE2 £3,086, so £5,092 for one attempt at each. Both rose at the start of the 2026/27 academic year, from £1,934 and £2,974, and the new fees apply to anyone booking from October 2026. The total is our arithmetic on the SRA’s two published fees; it publishes no total. Check the current fee before you book, because it has risen in each of the last two years.
These are assessment fees only. Preparation costs more than the assessment does, and it is the preparation that varies: we do not publish prep-course prices taken from providers’ websites, because they are the providers’ to publish and they change without notice.
Read the resit arithmetic against the real pass rates before you budget for one attempt. At a 53% overall pass rate on SQE1, a second attempt is a likely cost rather than a remote one, and the assessment fee is payable again.
Who passes, and the part nobody can sell you
The SRA has looked at what predicts SQE1 performance across four years of sittings. Prior education and attainment explains 23% of the variation, university ranking 11.9% and degree classification 10.6%. That leaves 67% of the variation unexplained by anything the SRA records.
Nobody can sell you the other 67%, and we will not pretend to. What the figures support is a decision about when to sit, not a promise about the outcome.
The SRA publishes no SQE pass rate by training provider or by university attended. Any such figure in circulation is self-reported by the provider and unverified, so Assize Careers publishes none. Provider-level outcome data exists for the Bar course, from the Bar Standards Board, and nowhere else in legal education in England and Wales.
The LPC route, and when it closes
The Legal Practice Course route survives only for people who met the SRA’s transitional conditions. As the SRA states them: a CPE or GDL completed before 1 September 2021; an offer of a qualifying or exempting law degree accepted by 21 September 2021 with the course started before 31 December 2021; or a deferred 2020/21 offer started by 31 August 2022 inclusive. Applications for admission under the LPC route close on 31 December 2032. Most LPC providers were phasing the course out in 2025/26.
The decline is not gradual. LPC enrolments fell to 8,085 from 12,227, the successful completion rate fell to 42% from 57%, and the number of providers enrolling new students fell to 17 from 25, with BPP and The University of Law accounting for about 82% of them. Those are the SRA’s monitoring figures for 2023/24, published in September 2025.
LawCAB, the central applications board, reports among its own member institutions that only seven higher education institutions offered the LPC for 2025/26 and 7% of the reduced places were taken, while SQE course enrolments through it rose from 217 in 2021/22 to 4,430 in 2025/26. LawCAB says those statistics do not capture the entire market and that some SQE providers do not use it, so read them as member figures and not as national totals.
What a trainee is paid, and what is actually required
Nothing is required. The SRA abolished the mandatory minimum trainee salary. The Law Society
recommends £28,090 in London and £24,916 outside it, and states that this is
not a regulatory requirement, but a matter of voluntary good practice
. If you are comparing
the solicitor route with the Bar on pay during training, note that the
minimum pupillage award is mandatory and this is not.
Once qualified, the median gross annual pay for solicitors and lawyers was £53,314 in April 2025, on 127,000 employee jobs, with the tenth percentile at £26,807 and the seventy-fifth at £74,190. That is the Office for National Statistics’s 2025 provisional Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, it covers employees only, and it spans everyone from a first-year assistant in a high street firm to a salaried partner in the City. The ninetieth percentile is suppressed as unreliable, so no claim about what the top tenth earn can be made from this source. A revised 2025 edition and a 2026 edition are both due in the October to November 2026 window.
Who employs solicitors
12,930 companies at Companies House identify themselves as solicitors’ practices. The profession is far less concentrated than the trade press suggests, so the set of employers worth applying to is much wider than the firms the trade press names. Nobody has measured what that does to anyone’s odds, and we do not claim it.
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.