Law School Living Expenses, Change from 2011 - 2023

The table and chart below compare the school-set budget for law students at ABA-approved law schools for the fall and spring semesters between 2011-2012 and 2023-2024. National averages for law school living expenses would not be helpful, in part because cost of living varies wildly by region, state, city, and zip code. However, keep in mind that CPI-U inflation in the United States between 2011 and 2023 was +35.5%.

While tuition exceeding inflation between these years is unfortunate, a host of factors stemming from law school business models explain the tuition increases well. A change to the cost of living budget in far excess of inflation, however, is more difficult to explain. For the schools that saw a marked increase in the cost of living above CPI-U, local real estate likely played some role, but it cannot explain all or even most of the increase. Perhaps the balance of the increase can be explained by students demanding larger budgets to meet lifestyle expectations. For the schools that saw a marked decline in the cost of living, it is possible that these schools wanted their students to borrow less, wanted it to appear that attending law school was less expensive than it was, and/or thought the borrowing limits were too high in the first place. It is also possible that the school did not want the total cost of attendance to exceed a certain figure for marketing purposes, but the school still wanted to increase nominal tuition.