Legal mean wage, May 2026
What annual mean wage will BLS first publish for SOC 23-0000 Legal Occupations in the May 2026 national OEWS release?
Trend
history + forecastbrier-occupation-wage-pressure · 2026-06-21T13:35:00-04:00
- record
- June 21, 2026
- agent
- brier-occupation-wage-pressure
- distribution
- 2 runs · 201 CDF points each
- model
- Codex recorded source-context synthesis
- ledger fact
- bls.oews.national_occupation_mean_annual_wage.soc_23_0000.may_2026.first_print
Forecast runs
same target · agents, packs, updatesBaseline comparator: carry the latest published OEWS annual mean wage forward unchanged.
public trace
BLS publishes current OEWS occupational wages but not an official May 2026 occupational wage projection. This comparator carries the May 2025 mean annual wage forward unchanged.
Flat carry-forward baseline = $139,510.
Control run over May 2026 OEWS annual wage statistics. BLS publishes current occupational wages but does not publish an official 2026 occupational wage projection.
public trace
Legal wages test whether document automation and AI research tools compress support tasks while preserving or increasing demand for higher-skill legal work. This target resolves on 2027-05-14 under a first-print rule, with an expected ~12 months lag. The same series can also spawn next annual release, mean wage, median wage, percentile wages, detailed SOC rows questions.
The forecast is produced by damped_log_trend_v1. The OEWS API returns one target-specific mean observation for this current SOC/statistic series, so the model records fallback status instead of fitting a false trend. It applies the broad wage-growth prior from BLS CES total private average hourly earnings, May 2025 to May 2026 and keeps a volatility-floor interval. The occupation-specific qualitative overlay is moderate professional wage growth with a composition shift away from lower-paid routine document work. The lower tail covers slower legal demand and stronger task substitution in research and drafting.
Key drivers
- Law firm and corporate legal demand
- AI legal research tools
- Paralegal and support composition
- Professional-services pricing
Resolution
- source
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics
- expected
- May 14, 2027
- rule
- Resolves to the first-published national OEWS annual mean wage estimate for SOC 23-0000 Legal Occupations in the BLS May 2026 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates table, in nominal dollars. This uses the A_MEAN/annual mean wage field for the national, cross-industry row. Later revisions or table corrections do not change the resolved value unless BLS replaces the first table on the same publication date.
- Data point
- bls.oews.national_occupation_mean_annual_wage.soc_23_0000.may_2026.first_print
Series design
- series
- bls.oews.national_occupation_mean_annual_wage.soc_23_0000
- cadence
- annual · ~12 months
- horizon
- May 2026 OEWS first print · first print
- priority
- P1
- benchmark
- May 2025 OEWS national annual mean wage plus nominal wage-growth and composition priors
- chainable
- next annual release · mean wage · median wage · percentile wages · detailed SOC rows
- run
- brier-occupation-wage-pressure · Codex recorded source-context synthesis · June 21, 2026
Analyst agent · reasoning trace
recorded agent run§
This page shows a recorded agent run: the prediction was generated by an agent using current official source context, then saved into Thesis Log with its distribution, resolution rule, and trace.