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LSAT score percentiles rank you against three years of test takers, not against your test day, which is why a hard administration does not lower anyone's percentile. A 150 is the 38.06 percentile, a 160 is 72.92, a 170 is 95.07. The top of the scale is steeply compressed.
Find it in the table below, which reproduces LSAC's published percentile ranks (LSAC LSAT percentile ranks (https://www.lsac.org/data-research/data/lsat-percentiles)). The published table covers the testing years 2022-2023 through 2024-2025.
Two features of this table explain most of what people find strange about LSAT scoring. The steps are uneven, and they get dramatically steeper at the top.
ScorePercentileShare of test takers scoring higher18099.89 percent0.11 percent17598.91 percent1.09 percent17095.07 percent4.93 percent16790.56 percent9.44 percent16586.50 percent13.5 percent16072.92 percent27.08 percent15555.91 percent44.09 percent15452.33 percent47.67 percent15038.06 percent61.94 percent
From 150 to 160 you pass about 35 percent of the field. From 170 to 180 you pass about five percent of it. The same ten scaled points buy wildly different amounts of ground depending on where you start.
That is a fact about how test takers are distributed, not about how hard the questions are. Most people cluster in the middle, so a point in the middle moves you past more people than a point at the edge does.
The practical consequence is that a five-point gain from 152 is a much larger change in rank than a five-point gain from 172, and a much smaller change in which schools you reach. Rank and admissions value do not move together.
Not in the sense people mean. Your percentile is a rank against three years of test takers, per the LSAC table above, rather than against the people who sat your particular administration.
So a hard test day does not lower everyone's percentile and an easy one does not raise it. The score you receive is not competing against the room you sat in.
How LSAC converts raw answers to the 120 to 180 scale, and how it accounts for difficulty differences between test forms, is a psychometric process we do not hold a sourced LSAC description of. This page therefore describes what the published percentile table shows and does not describe the method behind the conversion.
It does not tell you which schools you reach, and this is the single most common misuse of the table above. Percentile is a rank among everyone who took the test, while admission is decided against the much narrower distribution of people who applied to a given school.
A concrete version: a 165 is the 86.50 percentile nationally and sits below the published 25th percentile at twenty of the 57 schools in our verified data set. Both of those are true at once.
So use percentiles to understand your standing among test takers and use published school bands to understand your standing among applicants. They answer different questions.
Four thresholds do real work in admissions, and they are not evenly spaced on the percentile scale.
Roughly: the low 160s, where the verified school tables begin; 165, where thirteen of our 57 verified schools come inside reach; 170, where sixteen of them sit at or below your score; and the mid 170s, which is the T14 median territory.
Everything between those thresholds is real improvement and does less to change your list than crossing one of them does. That is worth knowing before you decide whether a retake is worth a cycle.
Every school figure quoted on this page comes from that school's own ABA Standard 509 Required Disclosure Report for the 2025 reporting year, collected into our verified data sheet and last checked on July 26, 2026. Each school's 509 URL is recorded against its row in that sheet.
That sheet covers 57 law schools with published LSAT bands, spanning medians from 147 to 175. It is not all 196 ABA-approved schools, and this page does not pretend otherwise. If a school you care about is missing here, it means we have not verified it yet rather than that it does not qualify.
We do not name a school on a score page unless we hold its verified 509 numbers. That rule costs us some pages and it is the reason the tables here are shorter than the ones you will find elsewhere.
Every LSAC figure on this page was taken from LSAC's own pages and last checked on July 26, 2026. Prices, dates and policies move without notice, so the source link sits next to each number rather than in a bibliography at the bottom.
Where LSAC has not published something, this page says so in those words rather than filling the hole with a plausible number. That is the difference between a gap and a guess, and only one of them is safe to plan around.
Look it up on LSAC's published percentile ranks, reproduced in the table above. A 150 is 38.06, a 160 is 72.92, a 165 is 86.50, a 170 is 95.07 and a 175 is 98.91.
Not against your test day. LSAC's percentile ranks are computed across the 2022-2023 through 2024-2025 testing years, so your rank is against three years of test takers rather than the people who sat with you.
Because test takers cluster in the middle. Going from 150 to 160 passes about 35 percent of the field; going from 170 to 180 passes about five percent.
Not proportionally. A 165 is the 86.50 percentile nationally and still sits below the published 25th percentile at twenty of the 33 schools in our verified set.
We do not hold a sourced LSAC description of the conversion method, so this page does not describe it. What is published, and what the table above shows, is the percentile rank attached to each scaled score.
Written by Ali, Georgetown Law, founder of Lovare Institut.
August 5, 2026
August 5, 2026