Home › Professions › Costs lawyers
How to become a costs lawyer
Taken while employed in costs work, so it is a route into a legal profession that does not require leaving work to study.
Legal basis. The Association of Costs Lawyers is the approved regulator under schedule 4 to the Legal Services Act 2007; the Costs Lawyer Standards Board is its independent regulatory arm.
The route
- Take the Costs Lawyer Qualification, a three-year course taken while working in costs. — not verified against the regulator’s own page
- Complete the qualifying experience the CLSB requires.
- Apply for a practising certificate, renewed annually. — not verified against the regulator’s own page
How many actually get in
789 people on the current register have a date for when they qualified as a costs lawyer, the earliest in 2007. No regulator publishes this; it is counted from the register itself.
| Year | Joined | |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 39 | |
| 2016 | 12 | |
| 2017 | 77 | |
| 2018 | 57 | |
| 2019 | 24 | |
| 2020 | 16 | |
| 2021 | 13 | |
| 2022 | 13 | |
| 2023 | 25 | |
| 2024 | 27 | |
| 2025 | 52 | |
| 2026 | 40 |
The CLSB's qualification year.
What the regulator reports
The regulator publishes its own admissions figure, which is not the same measurement as the one above: it counts everyone admitted in the year, while the count above can only see those still on the register today. The regulator’s is therefore the larger of the two, and the gap between them is the attrition since.
New entrants to the costs lawyer profession
| Year | people | Read from |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 52 | annual report 2025 “New entrants to the Renewal rate for 2025 on 31 December 2025 Costs Law profession 763 96% 52” |
Read from the regulator’s own published reports — see what the regulators report about themselves.
What the work pays
By occupation code, not by profession — for most of these professions those are not the same thing. See what they earn for why.
| Occupation | Median |
|---|---|
| Legal associate professionals | £32,438 |
Where to apply
CLSB’s own page. This site is not the regulator and cannot admit anybody to anything; everything above is a summary of what they publish, and where the two differ they are right.
Where these facts come from
- primary — read from the regulator's own page on the date shown
- statute — the Act or regulations named, which can be checked against legislation.gov.uk
- measured — computed from the register snapshots this site holds
- secondary — recorded from a source other than the regulator's own page and not verified against it
Read from the regulators’ pages on 2026-09-28.