A notary pays £861 a year to be regulated. A patent attorney pays £249
Every legal regulator publishes its income. Every one publishes how many people it regulates. None of them divides the first by the second, and no two of the numbers are in the same document.
By Rose Traviss · 29 September 2026
The Faculty Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury took £654,325 in the year to 31 March 2025. On 1 April 2025 there were 760 notaries on its Roll. That is £861 per notary per year, and it is the highest cost of regulation per head of any of the small legal professions.
The Costs Lawyer Standards Board took £226,024 in 2025 and regulated 763 costs lawyers at 31 December — £296 a head. The Intellectual Property Regulation Board took £921,708 in attorneys’ practice fees in 2024 from 3,695 attorneys on its registers — £249 a head.
| Profession | Per person, per year | Income | People | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Notaries | £861 | £654,325 | 760 | 2025 |
| Costs lawyers | £296 | £226,024 | 763 | 2025 |
| Patent and trade mark attorneys | £249 | £921,708 | 3,695 | 2024 |
Both halves of each sum come from the same regulator’s own published report for the same year. None of the three regulators performs the division.
What is in each figure, and what is not
These are not like for like, and the differences run in both directions.
IPReg’s £249 is the low end of its own range. It charges firms as well as individuals: £340,091 from registered and licensed bodies in 2024, on top of the £921,708 from attorneys. Counting both against the same 3,695 attorneys gives £341 a head. IPReg also has income that is not a fee at all — £26,302 of bank interest and £47,533 recovered in costs from disciplinary cases in 2024.
The Faculty Office’s £861 excludes its complaints fund. Notaries pay a separate contribution to a Contingency Fund, accounted for outside the income figure above, which exists “to cover the cost of any complaints”. In 2019/20 that was a further £26,515 across the profession.
The CLSB’s £296 is almost purely the practising certificate. Its own footnote says “almost all income is received as Practising Certificate Fee income”.
A factor of three and a half between the dearest and the cheapest survives all of that.
Three and a bit people
The Faculty Office reports its staffing as a full-time equivalent. It was 3.5 in 2018, 2019 and 2020; 2.9 in 2022; 3.0 in 2023; 3.6 in 2024; and 3.4 at 31 March 2025.
Three and a bit people regulate an entire reserved legal profession: admission to it, the practising certificates, the inspections regime, the complaints, and the Court of Faculties that hears the disciplinary cases. Staff costs were £238,271 of the £589,655 spent in 2024/25.
The deficit, the levy, and the way out
The most interesting thing in eight years of the Faculty Office’s core metrics is not the level of the fee. It is that the regulator spent several years in deficit on its own reserves measure, and wrote the number down every time.
| At 31 March | Income | Expenditure | Reserve position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | £430,202 | £420,316 | −£198,857 |
| 2019 | £451,748 | £462,693 | −£209,802 |
| 2020 | £478,139 | £511,333 | −£242,996 |
| 2022 | £633,250 | £425,971 | +£90,072 |
| 2023 | £623,595 | £440,952 | +£272,716 |
| 2024 | £584,463 | £560,614 | +£296,565 |
| 2025 | £654,325 | £589,655 | +£361,234 |
The 2021 core metrics are not on the Faculty Office’s website, which is why that year is missing; the figures either side are from the reports that are.
What happened in between is stated plainly in the 2022/23 document: “A levy was charged in 2021/22 and in 2022/23 for the purpose of reducing the deficit and building a reserve, this produced £79,400 in 2022/23 (2021/22: £75,640).”
Expenditure fell by £85,362 between 2019/20 and 2021/22 while income rose by £155,111. The profession paid its regulator out of a £242,996 hole in two years. By the time of the 2026 Registrar’s report the operating reserve stood at £425,115, which that report describes as “now over the six months of the budgeted expenditure for the current year” — the target the Faculty Office had set itself.
And it has risen by half in seven years
The Faculty Office has published both halves of the sum since 2018, so the per-head cost can be tracked rather than stated once.
| Year | Income | Notaries on the Roll | Per head |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | £430,202 | 758 | £568 |
| 2019 | £451,748 | 751 | £602 |
| 2020 | £478,139 | 747 | £640 |
| 2022 | £633,250 | 725 | £873 |
| 2023 | £623,595 | 742 | £840 |
| 2024 | £584,463 | 755 | £774 |
| 2025 | £654,325 | 760 | £861 |
Up 52% between 2018 and 2025, over which the profession grew by two people. This is not a larger regulator spread over a bigger membership; it is the same number of notaries paying half as much again. The peak is 2022, the first of the two levy years, and the figure has not returned to its pre-deficit level since.
IPReg’s equivalent series runs the other way round. Its attorneys’ practice fee income rose 57% between 2017 and 2024, from £587,887 to £921,708 — but the register grew 26% over the same period, from 2,927 to 3,695. Per head that is £201 to £249, up 24%: half the Faculty Office’s increase, because most of the extra income came from there being more people to charge.
| Year | IPReg attorney fees | Attorneys | Per head |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | £587,887 | 2,927 | £201 |
| 2020 | £702,608 | 3,165 | £222 |
| 2022 | £755,813 | 3,430 | £220 |
| 2024 | £921,708 | 3,695 | £249 |
A profession that is not growing pays for its regulator by paying more each. A profession that is growing pays for it by there being more of them.
Why nobody has published this before
Because it takes two documents per regulator and the regulators do not cross- reference each other. The income is in a core metrics sheet or a financial summary; the headcount is in a different section, a different document, or in one case only inside a pie chart. Putting them together is arithmetic, not research — but somebody has to have both numbers in front of them, and until now nobody did.
Two professions get no figure here at all. The Council for Licensed Conveyancers publishes practice fee income up to 2024 and its licensed- individual count only from 2025, so the two series share no year; dividing a 2024 income by a 2026 register would produce a cost per head belonging to neither. The regulator of immigration advisers publishes expenditure for 2015/16 and 2016/17 and an adviser headcount that stops in 2008.
The figures
Read from: the Faculty Office’s Notaries: Core Metrics sheets for the years ended 31 March 2018, 2019, 2020, 2023 and 2025; the CLSB’s Annual Report 2025; and IPReg’s Annual Report 2024 and Annual Report 2025. Every figure is published on the reports page with the sentence it came from and a link to the document.
Nothing here is added across regulators. The Faculty Office counts a Roll at 1 April, the CLC a licence at 31 March and IPReg a registration at 31 December; a total of those would be a number nobody published and nobody could check.