These four professions are 3.4% of the regulated legal profession. Solicitors are 83.6%
The oversight regulator publishes the one number none of these regulators can: how big the whole profession is. It also computes its own growth rates against the wrong denominator, and has restated the total for a date that has already passed.
By Rose Traviss · 29 September 2026
Every register on this site is a count of something small. The question none of these regulators can answer is what they are small against — because no regulator publishes the size of the whole regulated legal profession.
The Legal Services Board does. As at April 2023:
| Profession | Individuals | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Solicitors | 160,442 | 83.6% |
| Barristers | 17,225 | 9.0% |
| Chartered legal executives | 7,321 | 3.8% |
| Patent and trade mark attorneys | 3,306 | 1.7% |
| Licensed conveyancers | 1,733 | 0.9% |
| Notaries | 743 | 0.4% |
| Costs lawyers | 694 | 0.4% |
| Chartered accountants (probate) | 562 | 0.3% |
| Total | 192,026 |
The four professions this site covers that are regulated in their own right — conveyancers, patent and trade mark attorneys, costs lawyers and notaries — come to 6,476 people, 3.4% of the total. Solicitors alone are more than five-sixths of it.
That is the context for everything else here. A notary pays £861 a year to a regulator with 3.4 staff because there are 743 notaries to spread it across. A solicitor’s regulator has 160,442.
The profession has grown 38% in fourteen years
The same annual reports give the total back to 2011, which is the only long run of it anywhere:
| Year | Regulated | Year | Regulated | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 147,000 | 2019 | 177,000 | |
| 2012 | 148,000 | 2020 | 174,000 | |
| 2013 | 163,000 | 2021 | 184,569 | |
| 2014 | 166,000 | 2022 | 185,000 | |
| 2015 | 170,000 | 2023 | 192,026 | |
| 2016 | 173,000 | 2024 | 197,000 | |
| 2017 | 177,000 | 2025 | 203,143 | |
| 2018 | 177,000 |
147,000 to 203,143 — up 38%. Most years are given rounded: “almost 177,000”, “over 192,000”. Three years running the LSB reported “almost 177,000”, and 2020 is the only fall in the series.
The 10% jump between 2012 and 2013 is too large to be growth and neither report explains it. It is recorded as it is printed.
Who is growing
The LSB’s previous summary gives the same table for two years running:
| Regulator | 2022 | 2023 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solicitors Regulation Authority | 154,988 | 159,578 | +4,590 |
| Bar Standards Board | 16,990 | 17,226 | +236 |
| CILEx Regulation | 7,111 | 7,321 | +210 |
| IPReg — patent attorneys | 2,352 | 2,436 | +84 |
| IPReg — trade mark attorneys | 840 | 869 | +29 |
| Council for Licensed Conveyancers | 1,520 | 1,733 | +213 |
| Faculty Office | 725 | 743 | +18 |
| Costs Lawyer Standards Board | 689 | 694 | +5 |
| ICAEW (probate) | 577 | 562 | −15 |
| Total | 185,792 | 191,162 | +5,370 |
Licensed conveyancers grew by 14% in a year — five times the rate of the profession as a whole, and by some way the fastest of the nine. Costs lawyers grew by five people. Probate accountants are the only group that shrank.
The percentages are computed the other way round
The LSB’s table prints a percentage against each change. For licensed conveyancers it prints 12.3%.
213 more people on a base of 1,520 is 14.0%. 213 as a share of the end figure, 1,733, is 12.3%.
Every row in the table matches the second calculation, and seven of the nine differ enough to tell the two apart. The LSB computes its percentage change against the later figure rather than the earlier one throughout — which understates every increase and overstates every decrease. Its headline for the year, “2.8% more than 1 April 2022”, is 2.9% on the conventional basis.
The differences are small at sector scale and not small for a small profession: the fastest-growing regulated profession in England and Wales grew by 14% and is reported as growing by 12.3%.
And the total has already been restated
The summary annual report for 2022/23 gives 191,162 lawyers as at 1 April 2023. The summary for 2023/24 gives 192,026 for the same date — and solicitors as 160,442 rather than 159,578.
Both totals add up to their own rows exactly, so neither is an arithmetic slip. The later report describes the increase from the previous year as 3.4%; the earlier one described the same year’s increase as 2.8%. Nothing in either document mentions a revision.
This site uses the later figure, marks the year restated, and shows both — the same treatment it gives the immigration regulator’s revisions, which turned out to be a habit rather than an accident.
Where the LSB and the regulator disagree
The LSB’s figures come from the regulators, so they ought to match what those regulators publish themselves. For notaries they effectively do: the LSB gives 743 at April 2023 and the Faculty Office’s own core metrics give 742 on the Roll at 1 April 2023 — a difference of one.
For patent and trade mark attorneys they do not. The LSB gives 3,306 at April 2023. IPReg’s own annual reports give 3,430 on its registers at 31 December 2022 and 3,589 at 31 December 2023. A figure for April 2023 ought to sit between them; 3,306 is below both.
The likeliest explanation is that the two are counting different things — IPReg counts a person on both registers once, and a sum of the two register totals would run higher, not lower. Neither document says. It is recorded here as an unexplained difference rather than resolved with a guess.
The figures
Read from the Legal Services Board’s Summary Annual Report 2022/23 and Summary annual report and accounts 2023 to 2024. Both tables are extracted by machine and both reproduce the LSB’s own printed totals to the unit, which is the check that the columns were read the way the LSB laid them out.
The full table, this site’s share of it, and the restatement are on the reports page.