Five legal professions, no occupation code between them
Barristers have one. Solicitors have one. A notary is a "legal professional n.e.c."; a certificated enforcement agent is filed with debt and rent collectors; a trade mark attorney is not classified as legal at all.
By Rose Traviss · 28 September 2026
The Standard Occupational Classification is how the United Kingdom counts what people do for a living. Every job title in the country maps to a four-digit code, and those codes are what the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings pays out against, what the census counts by, and what any statement beginning “the average X earns” is ultimately derived from.
We looked up every profession on this site in the ONS coding index. Not one of them has a code of its own.
| Profession | As the SOC index lists it | SOC 2020 | Occupation group |
|---|---|---|---|
| Barristers | Barrister | 2411 | Barristers and judges |
| Solicitors | Solicitor, commercial | 2412 | Solicitors and lawyers |
| Notaries | Notary | 2419 | Legal professionals n.e.c. |
| Licensed conveyancers | Conveyancer, licensed | 2419 | Legal professionals n.e.c. |
| Patent attorneys | Agent, patent | 2419 | Legal professionals n.e.c. |
| Chartered legal executives | Executive, legal | 2419 | Legal professionals n.e.c. |
| Costs lawyers | Consultant, costs, law | 3520 | Legal associate professionals |
| Immigration advisers | Adviser, immigration | 3520 | Legal associate professionals |
| Trade mark attorneys | Agent, trademark | 3549 | Business associate professionals n.e.c. |
| Enforcement agents | Agent, enforcement | 7122 | Debt, rent and other cash collectors |
| Civil enforcement agents | Agent, enforcement, civil | 6312 | Parking and civil enforcement occupations |
| Claims management | not listed | — | not in the classification |
“n.e.c.” is the classification’s own abbreviation. It means not elsewhere classified — the residual box, for the things that did not warrant one.
The three that are not legal at all
A trade mark attorney is a business associate professional. A patent attorney is a legal professional n.e.c. They are the two halves of a single IPReg register, regulated by the same body under the same Act, and they sit in different major groups of the classification — 2 and 3, professionals and associate professionals.
A certificated enforcement agent is filed with debt and rent collectors. Not with lawyers. And a civil enforcement agent, which on the same register means somebody enforcing for a local authority, is under Parking and civil enforcement occupations — with traffic wardens. One register, two codes, neither of them legal.
Claims management is not in the classification anywhere. Every “claims” entry in the index — adjudicator, administrator, adviser, manager, processor — is insurance or financial administration, which is what those words meant when the classification was drawn up. Claims management became an FCA-regulated activity on 1 April 2019. The statistics have not noticed.
What the residual categories earn
ASHE 2025, annual gross pay for employees:
| Occupation | Employees | Median | Mean | 10th pct |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solicitors and lawyers | 127,000 | £53,314 | £68,462 | £26,807 |
| Business associate professionals n.e.c. | 99,000 | £33,035 | £40,225 | £19,397 |
| Legal professionals n.e.c. | 71,000 | £33,822 | £60,164 | £20,372 |
| Legal associate professionals | 41,000 | £32,438 | £38,423 | £17,581 |
| Barristers and judges | 28,000 | £34,253 | £43,732 | not published |
| Parking and civil enforcement | 14,000 | £27,766 | £30,105 | £20,021 |
| Debt, rent and other cash collectors | 10,000 | £27,454 | £29,884 | £16,700 |
112,000 people sit in the two residual legal categories — nearly as many as there are solicitors. They are not a rounding error in the profession; they are most of it by headcount outside the two named codes.
The 2419 figures also show the widest gap on the table between median and mean: £33,822 against £60,164. A category holding notaries, patent attorneys, licensed conveyancers and chartered legal executives together is not measuring one labour market, and the mean is being dragged by whichever part of it is paid best.
Three warnings, and they matter more than the figures
These are occupation codes, not registers. 71,000 people are coded 2419. There are about 800 notaries. The figure describes the box, not the people in this site’s tables.
ASHE covers employees. It is drawn from PAYE. A self-employed barrister, a sole-practitioner notary, a costs lawyer trading on their own account: none of them is in it. That is why barristers and judges show a median below Legal professionals n.e.c., and it is not a fact about the Bar — it is a fact about which barristers are on a payroll.
The upper tail of the small occupations is not published. ONS withholds cells where the estimate would be unreliable or disclose too few respondents. Legal professionals n.e.c. has no published 75th or 90th percentile at all. Where this site prints “suppressed” it means the coefficient of variation is above the 20% ONS says makes an estimate unreliable, and we will not print it either.
The full table, with every percentile and its reliability, is at what they earn.
The industry classification does the same thing
Occupations are classified one way and businesses another, by different teams, for different purposes. Here is how the Standard Industrial Classification counts legal businesses:
| SIC | Industry | Local units in England and Wales |
|---|---|---|
| 69101 | Barristers at law | 12,885 |
| 69102 | Solicitors | 14,420 |
| 69109 | Activities of patent and copyright agents; other legal activities n.e.c. | 7,680 |
A box for barristers, a box for solicitors, and a box called other legal activities not elsewhere classified for everything else — notaries, licensed conveyancers, costs lawyers, patent and trade mark attorneys, enforcement companies, all 7,680 local units of them.
Two classifications, built independently, reaching the same answer.
Two thirds of the Bar is not in the pay figures
The Annual Population Survey covers the self-employed, which ASHE does not. Set against each other they explain the one number on the pay table that looks like a finding and is not:
| Occupation | In work | Self-employed | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Barristers and judges | 35,200 | 22,900 | 65% |
| Solicitors and lawyers | 197,900 | 37,800 | 19% |
| Legal professionals n.e.c. | 74,700 | 9,900 | 13% |
| Legal associate professionals | 55,500 | 5,300 | 10% |
Sixty-five per cent of barristers and judges work for themselves, so two thirds of them are absent from any figure drawn from PAYE. The Bar’s apparent median of £34,253 is a fact about which barristers are on a payroll — the employed junior end and the judiciary — and about nobody else.
The residual legal categories are the opposite: 13% and 10% self-employed, so the pay figures for 2419 and 3520 cover most of the people in them. The category that is least well described by the earnings statistics is the one with a code of its own.
Why this is the same finding as the rest of the site
The premise here has been that these professions are not counted together because nobody counts them at all. That was meant as a remark about trade press and directories.
It turns out to be true of the official statistics in the strictest sense. The state classifies a notary as a legal professional not elsewhere classified, a bailiff as a cash collector, a trade mark attorney as a business associate, and a claims management company as nothing whatsoever. There is no table anywhere that adds them up, because there is no category that holds them.
Source: ONS, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings Table 14 (2025 provisional);
the SOC 2020 coding index, version 14; the Annual Population Survey and UK
Business Counts via Nomis. Contains public sector information
licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The mapping from profession to
occupation code is read from the ONS index, not assigned here; reproducible
from earnings.py.