Readers’ questions: “How much do conveyancers make a year?”

Interesting question. There are long and short answers, but let’s start with the long one. We can see from page 11 of this Law Society research fact sheet (.pdf) that a solicitor specialising in residential conveyancing might make around £40,000 p.a. – making this the second worst paid area of law.

However, let’s not forget that most conveyancing fee earners are not solicitors but secretaries, paralegals and legal executives. Many solicitors expect their secretaries to do a lot of the conveyancing for them. Often these secretaries end up in fee earning positions themselves. Some may choose to qualify as legal executives, licensed conveyancers, or even solicitors – if they have the time and money to devote to further education. In the meantime they are, to the firms employing them, a source of cheap labour. In this area of the law, where cost-savings are key (due to incredibly low or even non-existent profit margins), unqualified conveyancers working for solicitors enable firms to keep going.

The average case worker may well be paid less than an experienced legal secretary, but in any case is unlikely to be paid more than £30,000 p.a. and may be paid as little as £16,000 p.a.

The general formula for calculating the pay of fee earning lawyers is to take the total annual costs they bring in and divide by three. Therefore our solicitor on £40K should be earning the firm £120K a year, or £10K a month on average. Now consider that fees for conveyancing increase according to the value of the property involved. Also consider that leasehold properties (i.e. flats) take about twice as long to deal with. Naturally, the partners and senior solicitors will nab all the high value work (usually freehold) and so be able to earn more per file than the junior conveyancer doing flats for a pittance. Our solicitor can make his or her target of £10K a month by cherry-picking the most profitable work. Our junior, however, is stuck doing more work for less money and will therefore find it very hard to get a raise when the time comes to review their salary.

Therefore, the short answer is:

Not enough!