ABA 509 Reports Explained

The 509 is not a single document. Each school files a set of tables that LSD.Law imports into separate data layers on the school profile:

• Admissions: applications, offers of admission, acceptance rate, yield rate, matriculants, and LSAT and GPA at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles. GRE scores are also reported for the small subset of schools that accept and disclose them.
• Enrollment: class size, racial and gender demographics, and non-resident-alien counts.
• Employment: graduate outcomes measured roughly ten months after graduation, broken out by employment status (full-time long-term, full-time short-term, part-time, unemployed seeking), by category (bar-passage-required, JD-advantage, professional, other), by employer type (law firm, government, public interest, business, academia, clerkship), by law-firm size bucket from solo through 501-plus, and by clerkship type (federal, state/local, tribal, international). School-funded positions are flagged separately.
• Bar passage: first-time pass rates by jurisdiction and the two-year ultimate pass rate for the relevant graduating cohort.
• Financial: resident and non-resident tuition, fees, cost-of-living estimates, percentage of students receiving grants, grant amount percentiles, conditional-scholarship retention, and average graduating debt.

You can browse the admissions and financial tables for all schools on the ABA 509 data table, or see national trends over time on the law school trends page.

LSD.Law imports ABA 509 data for every year the ABA has published:

• Admissions (LSAT, GPA, acceptance rate, class size): 2011 through the most recent matriculating class.
• Financial (tuition, grants, conditional scholarships): 2017 onward.
• Employment outcomes: 2018 onward. Because employment is measured ten months after graduation, the most recent employment data always lags the most recent admissions data by roughly four years.
• Bar passage: 2018 onward, covering both first-time and two-year ultimate pass rates.
• Graduating debt: imported where the ABA publishes it, which is sparser than the other financial fields.

Each ABA 509 year on LSD.Law corresponds to the class that matriculated in that fall — so the "2024" admissions data describes the class that started in August 2024, not a class that applied in the 2024–25 cycle.

ABA 509 reports describe the class that already enrolled, not the class that's currently applying. Admissions tables for a matriculating class are typically released in December of that same calendar year. Employment and bar-passage tables for graduates of a given spring follow on a longer lag, usually appearing the next spring.

During the current cycle, official 509 numbers for the incoming class don't exist yet. LSD.Law displays the most recent available 509 data on school profiles and overlays fresher figures from each school's own admissions website when they appear there first — always tagged with the source so you can see whether a given number came from the ABA or the school itself.

School profiles source their median and percentile statistics, acceptance and yield rates, employment breakdowns, bar-passage figures, and financial numbers from 509 reports. The admissions predictor uses 509 stats as features — a school's medians, acceptance rate, and class size all inform the model's probability estimates.

Importantly, 509 data does not feed the LSD ranking, which is computed solely from cross-admit decisions. The 509 is a display source for school pages and an input to the predictor, but the ranking stands independent of it.

For details on how LSD.Law cross-checks self-reported applicant data against official 509 figures, see the data accuracy methodology page.

The 509 is comprehensive but not exhaustive. A few things applicants commonly expect it to contain that it does not:

• Median starting salaries. Salary data on the 509 is reported in narrow categorical buckets for private and public employment and is often suppressed at schools with small response sets. The 509 is not a reliable source for point-estimate salary medians.
• Splitter-by-splitter breakdowns. The 509 reports marginal percentiles for LSAT and GPA separately; it does not publish the joint distribution, so you cannot tell from a 509 alone how many splitters or reverse-splitters a school admitted.
• Scholarship negotiability or merit criteria. Grant percentiles describe awarded amounts but say nothing about how schools decide who gets them.
• Waitlist dynamics. Waitlist size and waitlist-to-admit conversion are not part of the 509 schema.
• Applicant softs, work experience, or essays. The 509 is strictly numeric. Anything qualitative about the class profile has to come from elsewhere — often from the self-reported data of LSD.Law users.

For the metrics the 509 does not cover, LSD.Law's applicant-reported data fills in the gap. See applicant search and scholarship calculator for the other half of the picture.