You decide who gets charged with a crime and then you have to prove it. Government pay, courtroom experience nobody else gets this early.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
All lawyers median
$159,670
Bottom tenth
$78,360
Top tenth
$351,600
The national median is $159,670 a year, and the bottom tenth start near $78,360. Read that carefully: the survey counts every lawyer under one title, and corporate firm partners pull the middle up. Prosecutors are government employees paid on published salary schedules, and most sit below that median for their whole career.
Roughly $60,000 to $80,000
A new assistant district attorney in a county office
Big city and state offices pay at the top of that, rural counties at the bottom. A classmate who goes to a large corporate firm can start at several times the number. You take this job for the courtroom, not the check.
$351,600
The top tenth across all lawyers in the survey
Very little of that is prosecutors. Government pay scales are public and they stop well short. Prosecutors who want that money usually leave after a few years for criminal defense work, where the trial experience they built is the product.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a community college transfer into a public university in your own state, then a public law school at in state rates, plus the Law School Admission Test, application fees, the bar exam and a preparation course. The high end is four full years of undergraduate study and a private law school at roughly double the public rate. Most law graduates who borrow leave with well over $100,000 owing, and interest builds while you study, which these figures do not include. Prosecutors work for the government, so ten years of qualifying payments can cancel the remaining federal balance under Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and that changes the real cost more than any tuition choice.
Most law graduates who borrow leave with well over $100,000 of federal loans. Prosecutors are the clearest case for PSLF (Public Service Loan Forgiveness): 10 years of payments in a government job and the rest of the balance is cancelled.
Loan forgiveness that actually applies
Government offices qualify for PSLF (Public Service Loan Forgiveness), and some states add their own repayment help for prosecutors.
A public pension
State and county retirement systems, which private firms do not offer.
Trial work in your first year
New prosecutors handle real cases in real courtrooms almost immediately. Lawyers at big firms can wait a decade.
Hours you can live with
Long, but not the billable-hour treadmill. Nobody is counting your day in six-minute blocks.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Seven years of school, then a hiring process that cares about whether you can stand up and talk.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Grades strong enough for a good college. Debate and writing matter more than any particular subject.
Bachelor's degree
4 years
Any major. Law schools care about your grade point average and your test score, not what you studied. Take the LSAT (Law School Admission Test) in your junior or senior year.
Law school
3 years
Three years for a Juris Doctor (JD) degree. Do the criminal clinic, do moot court, and intern at a prosecutor's office every summer.
Pass the bar exam
Summer after graduation, results in the fall
Your state's exam plus a separate ethics test, the MPRE (Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination). Then a character and fitness review before you are admitted.
Get hired and get trained
First 1 to 2 years on the job
Offices hire in classes and start you on traffic, misdemeanors and preliminary hearings before you touch a felony.
English and writing
Briefs, motions and charging documents. Sloppy writing loses cases.
Government or civics
You will spend your life inside the rules this class describes.
Debate or speech
The single most useful activity for this job. You argue in front of strangers who judge you.
History
Constitutional law is history with consequences.
Every state admits its own lawyers, and you must be admitted where you prosecute. Most states use the Uniform Bar Examination, whose legacy version runs through February 2028 before the NextGen bar exam replaces it, and a score on it can be transferred to other states that accept it. Louisiana and a few others write their own exam. Once admitted, your license can be suspended or taken away by the state supreme court, and prosecutors are held to extra ethical duties because they represent the public rather than a client.
In-state public law schools
Far cheaper if you are a resident, and their graduates fill the local prosecutor offices.
Private and national schools
Higher tuition, wider reach, and the usual route to federal prosecutor jobs later.
Schools with a criminal clinic
Some states let supervised law students appear in court. That is the experience hiring committees look for.
Evening programs
Four years instead of three, so you can keep working. Fewer schools offer them, but they exist.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Two summers interning at a prosecutor office
Offices hire people they already know. This is the closest thing to a guaranteed route.
Trial advocacy and moot court
Proof you can do the job, not just pass exams.
A judicial clerkship
A year working for a judge after law school. It teaches you what persuades the bench.
Willingness to move
Smaller counties hire faster and hand you felony trials years sooner.
A second language
Spanish in particular. Victims and witnesses do not all speak English.
Thick skin
Defense lawyers, families and local news will all say you got it wrong. Sometimes they are right.
Comfort with forensic evidence
DNA, phone records, digital forensics. You have to explain them to twelve people who have never seen them.
Organization
A career prosecutor carries dozens of open files at once.
An assistant United States attorney prosecutes federal crimes: drug conspiracies, fraud, firearms, public corruption. The pay is better than county work and the caseloads are smaller, but these offices almost never hire straight out of law school. The normal path is a clerkship or several years as a state prosecutor or at a firm first. Openings are posted publicly on USAJOBS (the official federal hiring site).
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Court at 9am with a stack of files: arraignments, motions, plea offers negotiated in a hallway. Back at the office by noon reviewing new arrests and deciding what to charge, which is the biggest decision you make all week. Afternoon is witness calls, police follow-ups and a victim who wants to know why this is taking a year. Trial weeks are different: twelve hour days, no other life, and a verdict that lands on somebody's whole future.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
A prosecutor can look at an arrest and drop it. No judge reviews that choice and no jury hears about it. It is the least visible and most important thing the job does.
The overwhelming majority of criminal cases in the United States end in a plea agreement. A prosecutor who tries a dozen cases in a year is busy, and most of the job is negotiation, paperwork and judgment calls.
Since the Supreme Court decided Brady v. Maryland in 1963, prosecutors must turn over evidence that could help the defense. Hiding it can overturn a conviction and end a career.
District attorneys across the country run for office and face voters, usually every four years. That makes the head of the office a politician as well as a lawyer, which shapes what the whole office prioritizes.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise.