Law School Medians Jumped In 2026. Your 170 Is Now A 169

Law schools are publishing their incoming class numbers right now for the class starting this fall, and I've been reading them as they land. 23 law schools have reported so far, and 20 of them raised their median LSAT scores. Three of them held flat. None of them went down. Not one school in the group gave a point back. North Carolina went from a 168 to a 170. Texas A&M, 169 to 170. USC, the same. Berkeley went from 170 to 171. Tulane jumped three points from 161 to 164. Now, almost everybody reading these is gonna draw one conclusion, which is that law schools got more selective this year. And that's technically true, but it's not the biggest part of the story, because while the schools were moving up, LSAC quietly changed what your score is worth. They publish a table that turns your LSAT number into a percentile, and there are three of those from the past couple of years. I pulled all three of them, and I'll also get to a law school in this year's numbers that's giving out money to nine out of 10 of its students, while about one in eight pays a sticker. Now, one caveat on these 23 law schools, these are preliminary numbers. The official 509 reports don't land until December, and the schools that report early tend to be the ones with good news for them. So treat this as a leading indicator, not conclusive. Now, if you go back to the ABA filings, every accredited law school publishes its 25th percentile median and 70th percentile LSAT every single year. This is public data. Almost nobody reads it. Now, in the 509s published in 2016, five law schools in the country had a median LSAT of 170 or higher. Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, and Columbia, that was the whole list. In 2025, it was 22 schools with medians of 170 or higher. And even if you drop down a tier, you get the same picture. Schools with a median of 165 or better went from 21 to 48. There were 49 schools at 160 or better back in 2015. In 2025, it was 91 schools. So almost half the law schools in America now have a median at or above 160. In 2016, it was just a quarter of that. Now, of course, there's an obvious objection here. A bunch of law schools closed or lost accreditation between 2016 and 2025, and they were mostly the ones at the bottom. So if you drop the worst schools off the list, the middle of that list will go up naturally by itself. It's simple math. But if you look at only the schools that filed in both years it tells the same story. If you look at the same 165 law schools, the school in the middle of that list went from a 155 median to a 160. The 170 club still goes from five schools to 20. So same schools, both years, average increase of five points, everybody moved. Now, let's say you're aiming at a school that had a 163 median back when you first started thinking about law school. You studied hard, you got a 164, and you felt good about it. That school is now at a 166. You hit your number, but the school moved three points while you were studying. And schools buy their medians. They find applicants at or above their number, and they pay those people to enroll at their school. And so every point you're at above a school's median is giving you a discount. Every point below, your money is helping to fund somebody else's discount. And so when 37 more schools cross the 160 threshold, the price of a 158 goes up in tuition dollars. Now, back to this year's 23 schools. Let's look at the 25th percentile. Applicants have been telling me a theory about what these schools are doing for two years now, and it goes like this. Only the median counts for the ranking, so a school buys the top half with scholarship money, admits a handful of very low scorers at full price to pay for it, and lets the bottom of the class collapse. The median goes up, the school can balance their budget, and the bottom is where the lower scoring applicant sneaks in. I went and checked the numbers myself, because if that's true, that's where a lower score could still buy a seat. In this year's reporting group, 15 law schools published a 25th percentile, 12 of those schools raised their 25th. Now, these are self-reported, self-selected schools, of course, early on whole point scores. The 25th moved about 1.5 points on average, and the median moved about 1.3. I'm not gonna tell you a 1.5 beats a 1.3 on a sample that small. That gap is just one school. And eight of these 23 schools didn't publish a 25th percentile at all. And so under the theory I just described, that's where you would expect a collapsing bottom to hide. And so I went to the 509s. Across those same 165 law schools, the average 25th percentile went from a 152.3 in 2016 to a 156.8 in 2025. That's a difference of 4.5 points at the bottom of the class. And the distance between the median and the 25th percentile is almost exactly what it was a decade ago, a little bit under 3.5 points both times. So the bottom came up along with everything else. And that actually matters more than the median does, because the median tells you where the middle of a class is. The 25th percentile is the lowest score that still gets a real application read on a typical day. When it climbs 4.5 points, those who would have been admitted a decade ago are no longer in the conversation. Now everything so far is the schools moving. Now let's look at it from your perspective. LSAT publishes a table that converts your LSAT score into a percentile. On the current percentile table, a 170 is the 94.5th percentile. On LSAT's previous table, a 169 was 94.5th percentile. So your 170 is now a 169. Same LSAT, same 120 to 180 scale. You score what you scored and you rank lower for it relative to others. Let's say you're at a 165, because that's a number a lot of people are chasing after. A 165 only puts you in the 85th percentile. On LSAT's older table, a 164 was the 85th. And so your 165 is now a 164. Same score story at 160, same story at 172. You look across the entire band, 120 to 180, it holds everywhere in between. One point is gone across the exact range that decides where you get in and what they charge you. And there's no big announcement about this. LSAT's not publishing any headlines or blog posts or emails. They updated a buried table on a data page and the number attached to your score dropped. Let's look at this in terms of applicants. Under the older table, 4.4% of test takers scored a 170 or higher. On the current one, it's 5.5%. That's 25% more people aiming for exactly where you're trying to get to. So let's talk about what these tables are. LSAT doesn't actually publish a percentile table every single year. They pool together three years of test takers in aggregate and publish that. And so the current table covers the 2023 through the 2026 testing years. Their table before that covered 2021 through 2024. The one before that covers 2020 through 2023. And that actually cuts against me because polling smooths things out. Whatever shows up between these tables is milder than the year over year reality. So at the 170 mark, the first oldest table, 2020 to 2023, 95.58% of test takers were below 170. In 2021 to 2024, 95.69%, which is flat. And then 2023 to 2026, 94.48%. So in that last one, it's a full point drop. And that's not just at the 170 mark. At the 165 mark, same thing. So this happened fast. It's a significant drop concentrated in that third most recent chart. Now people will point at how often you can sit for the LSAT, and that did change. Used to be four times a year for decades, but now it's up to eight times a year. People also blame retakes. The old rule was three times in any two-year window. LSAC's policy now allows you to take it five times in the five-year period, seven times for life. Then there's score preview, where you get to see your score before deciding whether to cancel. Then there's accommodations. LSAC's policy on prior accommodations says if you were approved on your last registration, you're automatically approved again for the same or similar accommodation with no additional documentation. And this includes extra time. All of those factors are real, of course, but all of them was fully in place by 2020, which means all four of them are baked into the first table, and the second as well. Those alone can't explain a drop that only shows up in the most recent data. But there's a new thing, a new factor, which is in August 2024, LSAC removed Logic Games from the LSAT, replaced it with a second score of Logical Reasoning section. And so that falls in the most recent table, showing us a reason for that significant increase in score inflation, leading to more people getting higher scores. Because Logic Games punished people who took the LSAC cold without a whole lot of study, because it required a lot of familiarity, and that gave you a pretty quick boost. If you take out Logic Games, you're left with Reading Comprehension and Logical Reasoning, which a lot of people were already strong at before they even studied. And this is just a correlation, of course, nothing more. LSAC does equate these tests, so they adjust for difficulty. So a 170 is supposed to represent the same ability from year to year. If equating is working perfectly, that tells us that the pool of test takers got better. And they probably did get better because prep is better than it used to be. More people will take it more than once. Score preview means that the weak first attempts get thrown away before anybody sees those. And it's also possible that more people are aware of extra time accommodations, more people are aware of the ease with which you can retake the LSAT. But I think the format change is probably a pretty big factor. Then there's another variable as well, which is starting with the August LSAT. It's now in-person only at testing centers with rare exceptions, with a new on-screen user interface. The scoring doesn't change, of course, but whether that pushes scores back down or leads to more inflation or has no effect at all, we'll see in a couple of years when they publish a new table. Now, there is one score I said I would mention, the University of Florida. They're ranked in the 30s. Their median went from 169 to 170 this year, and their 25th percentile went from 165 to 167. Their GPA median jumped from a 391 to a 397 in a single year. Their 509 report says 87.7% of their students receive grant money. That's one in eight who pays full price. Now, in the class of 2024 filing, they sent 91 graduates to firms of 251 attorneys or more out of 264. So roughly a third of the class landed the jobs that pay a law degree back. Now, we don't know which of those students are writing the full check, who are paying full price. We don't know. The 509 doesn't publish that. Nobody does. What I can tell you is how the money gets determined because it's the same at every law school. A school pays for the numbers it needs and charges everybody else. If you come in below the 25th percentile, they don't have to discount for you. They have no reason to. And that's what the four and a half points at the 25th percentile is gonna cost you. Somebody is paying full tuition for a seat next to somebody else who gets the same seat for free. So every one of these LSAC policies is available to you on the same terms as available to everybody else right now. If eight test dates per year made people better alone, we wouldn't be having this conversation. If you just take the test, get a number, feel something's good or bad about it, take it again, nothing's really gonna change. But if you study properly, build a strong foundation in the different sections, the different question types, you get some support for your prep, you achieve a high LSAT score above the medians of the schools to which you're applying, you're in the real running to get significant scholarship money, maybe even a full ride. And of course, your GPA is probably finished at this point. If you're done with undergrad, you can't do a lot to change that. Nobody's rewriting your recommendation letters either, but your LSAT score is a number that you can still change. And with LSAT score inflation, getting a higher score matters even more than it did before. You want even higher than you would have otherwise. And so I want you to revise your targets, pull up the most recent ABA 509 reports for the law schools that you're considering, find the median LSAT score, add one or two points, and that's your real target if you're applying this cycle. I'm rounding up here on purpose because if you're applying one or two cycles out, one even higher score given the continuing of the LSAT score inflation, the medians are only gonna go one direction. And if you wanna get into better schools, get more scholarship money, this is the biggest needle mover available to you, getting a higher score.