LSAT and GPA medians: what a law school's numbers really tell you
Every accredited law school reports the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile of the class it enrolled. Here is how to read those three numbers, and where you actually sit.
The question we keep seeing
“My LSAT is above a school's median but my GPA is below its 25th. Am I in or out?”
The short answer
- Three numbers, not one: the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile of the enrolled class.
- The band between the 25th and 75th is narrower than people expect — six LSAT points at the typical school.
- The median is the number schools manage hardest, which is why being above it tends to move scholarship money.
Law school admissions is unusually numeric and unusually transparent. Every ABA-accredited school reports the LSAT and undergraduate GPA of the class it actually enrolled, at three points in the distribution, every year.Footnote 1Source 1American Bar Association — Standard 509 Required DisclosuresEvery ABA-accredited law school's annual filing, including 25th, 50th and 75th percentile LSAT and undergraduate GPA for the enrolled class, applicant and admit counts, employment outcomes and bar passage. Figures quoted here are from the 2025 reporting year across 196 schools.abarequireddisclosures.org
Read all three, not just the middle
The 50th percentile — the median — is the number that gets quoted. It is the least informative of the three on its own. The 25th and 75th tell you how wide the school's range really is, and therefore how much room there is for an application that is not a straight numbers case.
Across the 196 accredited schools in the most recent reporting year, the typical gap between the 25th and 75th percentile LSAT was six points, and the typical GPA gap was 0.43. The widest LSAT band was twelve points; the narrowest was three. A narrow band is a school with little appetite for exceptions.
Why the median specifically
Medians are what get published and compared, so schools manage to them. The practical consequence for you is about money rather than admission: an applicant who pulls a school's median up is worth more to that school than one who pulls it down, and scholarship offers tend to follow. That is also why the same numbers can produce very different offers at two schools twenty places apart.
Calibrating without a ranking
A useful exercise: take your LSAT and count how many accredited schools it sits at or above the median for. In the most recent year, a 155 was at or above the median at 65 of 196 schools; a 160 at 112; a 165 at 153; a 170 at 179. It is a blunt instrument, but it turns an abstract score into a list length — and it does it without deferring to anyone's ranking.
Two cautions. These are the numbers of students who enrolled, not who were admitted — the admitted pool sits higher. And admission is not only numbers: addenda exist precisely because a number sometimes needs explaining.
Katalyna reads these straight from the schools' own filings. The law school search shows all three percentiles per school and where your numbers land against them — and once you have offers, scholarship negotiation is where the medians start paying you back.
Try it in Katalyna
Law school search
All three percentiles for every accredited school, and where your numbers land.
Frequently asked
They describe the class a school enrolled: a quarter scored at or below the 25th, half at or below the median, three quarters at or below the 75th. The admitted pool sits higher than the enrolled one.
It varies by school, and that is the honest answer. Schools protect the two numbers differently, which is why splitters should apply more broadly — the outcome genuinely differs school to school.
In practice, yes. An applicant who raises a school's published median is worth more to that school, and offers tend to reflect it — which is also why the same numbers draw very different offers at different schools.