TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Azya Thornton on Mar 12, 2025

The Managing Director’s Office of the American Bar Association (ABA) Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar released a comprehensive set of data on bar admission outcomes for ABA-approved law schools, including bar pass rates and those admitted through alternative pathways, a growing trend in legal licensure. According to the data, 90.41% of 2022 law graduates who sat for a bar exam passed within two years, with the success rate for alternative pathways reaching 90.52%. The ABA has updated its terminology to refer to "admission" instead of "passage" due to the increasing recognition of alternative pathways by state courts, according to an ABA press release. First-time takers in 2024 had an 82.79% pass rate, more than a 3-percentage point increase over the comparable 79.44% pass rate. The data, which includes demographic information on bar exam passers, is being made publicly available under ABA Standard 509 to provide consumers with reliable information on bar admissions. Spreadsheets of the most recent data are available on the section’s webpage under Legal Education Statistics. Individual school reports for consumers are available at ABA Required Disclosures on a school-by-school basis.