It means every student at BYU Law has agreed, in writing, to live under the university's Honor Code and to hold a current ecclesiastical endorsement — and understanding what that endorsement does and does not require is one of the most important things an applicant can research before applying. BYU is a private university sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and BYU Law, founded in 1973 and named for J. Reuben Clark (a Columbia-trained lawyer, former U.S. Ambassador, Undersecretary of State, and LDS general authority), was built from its first class as an expression of that sponsorship. Its inaugural dean, Rex Lee, went on to become U.S. Solicitor General, and the school has since graduated more than 5,000 students under this same institutional identity.
The practical mechanics: admission is open to applicants of any faith and any sexual orientation, but the school's published policy restricts admission for former members of the LDS Church and for what it defines as 'homosexual behavior.' This is not a minor footnote — it is a defining, structural feature of attending BYU Law, and it should be weighed seriously by any applicant for whom it is personally relevant. The policy has not been static: an ABA review in 2016 led BYU to modify it, which signals that the school has adjusted its approach under external accreditation pressure at least once and could do so again. Because this is a live policy area rather than a fixed historical fact, prospective applicants should verify BYU's current, exact Honor Code and endorsement language directly with the law school before applying rather than relying on any secondhand summary, including this one.
What the endorsement requirement buys, for those who share or are comfortable with the community's norms, is a genuinely small and tightly bonded class. BYU Law enrolls just 122 students per entering class against a total J.D. enrollment of 348, and the school runs 16 co-curricular offerings alongside 150 clinic seats, 182 field placements, and 237 simulation-course seats each year — a density of experiential and community programming that a class this size can actually absorb without students competing hard for spots. The J. Reuben Clark Law Society, BYU Law's signature alumni and student network, extends that community well past graduation: it counts 65 professional chapters and 125 student chapters worldwide, giving graduates an unusually organized, values-aligned professional network in cities they may never have lived in as students. For a graduate heading into government service, a clerkship, or a firm in an unfamiliar market, that is a tangible, practical asset that has nothing to do with class rank or GPA — it is baked into the alumni structure itself.
The honor-code environment also shapes who tends to be teaching and mentoring at BYU Law. The faculty roster includes a number of scholars and public servants whose careers have run through LDS institutional life alongside conventional legal academia and government service. That is simply a description of the faculty the pack lists, not a claim about classroom content, but it is consistent with a law school whose culture is openly organized around a shared institutional identity rather than a purely secular, market-driven model.
For applicants outside the LDS tradition, the honest framing is this: BYU Law states that it admits students of any faith, and its community and cost structure (discussed in the next section) can make it a strong option even for those who do not share the sponsoring faith. But choosing BYU Law means choosing to live, for three years, inside a campus culture with an enforced Honor Code and an ecclesiastical-endorsement admissions gate — a genuinely different daily environment than a secular private or public law school. Anyone weighing an offer should read BYU's current Honor Code text in full, talk to current students representing a range of backgrounds, and confirm the endorsement policy as it stands today, since the 2016 modification shows this is an area where the rules can change.
Finally, it's worth naming plainly what this section is not: it is not a judgment about whether the policy is right or wrong, and it is not a claim that BYU Law's community is uniform or closed. It is a description, drawn from the school's own reported policies, of a structural admissions and conduct requirement that is unusual among ABA-accredited law schools and that materially shapes daily life on campus — information every applicant deserves before deciding whether to apply.
BYU Law has been ranked #1 on National Jurist's 'Best Value Law Schools' list in multiple years (2022, 2021, and 2016), and the reason is arithmetic as much as reputation: full-time annual tuition is $15,992, with no separate fees reported, against a total estimated cost of attendance of $38,428 once living expenses (estimated at $22,436 off-campus) are added in. That sticker price is a small fraction of what most private law schools charge, and it sits underneath a law school that U.S. News ranks tied for 24th nationally — a combination of national ranking and low cost that is genuinely rare.
The value case gets stronger once scholarships are factored in. Ninety-eight percent of BYU Law students receive some grant aid, with a median grant of $11,646 among full-time students. Layered onto tuition that is already low, that median grant means a large share of the class is paying a cost of attendance well under the $38,428 estimate before even counting outside scholarships or aid. Looking at the distribution of aid bands the school reports: 39% of students receive a grant covering less than half of tuition, 14% receive between half and full tuition, and 21% receive a grant covering full tuition — meaning roughly a fifth of the class attends on what amounts to a full-tuition scholarship, on top of tuition that was already a fraction of peer-school pricing.
BYU Law's conditional-scholarship data is also worth naming because it is unusually reassuring: in the entering classes tracked, conditional scholarships (aid that can shrink if a student doesn't hit a GPA or class-rank benchmark) applied to only a handful of students each year — three entering in 2024-25 with zero reductions, two entering in 2023-24 with one reduction (50% of that tiny group), and three entering in 2022-23 with zero reductions. In other words, conditional scholarships are not the dominant financial-aid model at BYU Law the way they are at many schools; most aid appears to be awarded without a strings-attached retention condition, which removes a source of financial anxiety that shadows students at schools relying heavily on stepped or tiered scholarships.
Does the low cost translate into low debt? The school's own distinctive-features data points to yes: BYU Law reported the lowest median federal student debt of any law school in the country according to 2020 Department of Education data, at $51,250. That figure is older and debt levels shift with tuition and cost-of-living changes, so it should be treated as a historical marker rather than a live number — but directionally, it is consistent with a school whose sticker tuition is roughly a third to a quarter of many private-school peers.
Low cost only qualifies as 'value' if outcomes hold up, and BYU Law's numbers suggest they do. Of the 127 graduates counted, 94.5% were employed in full-time, long-term, bar-required or J.D.-advantage roles. Twenty-nine graduates — 22.8% of the class — went into large firms of 501 or more attorneys, the segment of the market associated with the highest reported starting salaries nationally. Another sizable share went into government (12 graduates, 9.4%) and public interest (8 graduates, 6.3%), and the class produced 9 federal and 9 state/local clerkships. Bar passage reinforces the picture: BYU Law's first-time bar pass rate was 96.85%, against a state average of 84.77%, with an ultimate two-year pass rate of 99.13%. A class this small producing that combination of employment, Big Law placement, and bar passage, on tuition under $16,000, is precisely the math that produces a 'best value' ranking rather than just a marketing label.
One genuinely useful, school-specific way to think about the federal loan changes taking effect for new borrowers in 2026 is through BYU's own cost structure. With total cost of attendance estimated at $38,428, a BYU Law student borrowing federally would sit well inside the $50,000-per-year Direct Unsubsidized loan cap for graduate/professional students — a cap that creates real shortfalls at schools whose all-in costs run two or three times higher. That doesn't eliminate the need to plan repayment carefully (see the loans and PSLF mechanics), but it does mean BYU Law is one of the few law schools where the newly capped federal loan program is unlikely to be the binding constraint on financing a degree.
Illustrative: 3-year borrowing at the 2026-27 federal rate (8.07%) over 10 years; your figures depend on your offer and salary.
BYU Law admits fewer than one in four applicants, and its enrolled class clusters tightly around some of the strongest numerical credentials of any law school outside the very top of the rankings. In the most recent cycle, 649 people applied, 148 received offers, and the school enrolled a class of 122 — an acceptance rate of 22.8%. That is a selective posture by any standard, and it lines up with BYU Law's current U.S. News tie for 24th nationally.
The class's LSAT profile is the clearest signal of where BYU Law sits competitively. The 25th percentile LSAT is 168, the median is 170, and the 75th percentile is 172. In practical terms: an applicant with a 168 is landing at the bottom quarter of BYU Law's admitted range, someone at 170 sits squarely at the school's midpoint, and a 172 places in the top quarter of the enrolled class. These are planning anchors, not predictions — BYU Law's file review clearly weighs more than the numeric band, but any applicant sizing up their own LSAT against this school should measure it against 168/170/172, not against a generic "good score" benchmark.
GPA tells a similarly compressed story. The 25th percentile undergraduate GPA is 3.82, the median is 3.95, and the 75th percentile is 3.98. That is an unusually narrow spread — a six-hundredths-of-a-point gap between median and 75th percentile — which suggests BYU Law's admitted pool is heavily concentrated among applicants with GPAs at or above the high 3.8s and into the upper 3.9s. An applicant well below 3.82 is competing outside where most of BYU Law's enrolled class actually sits, regardless of LSAT strength.
Together, the LSAT and GPA bands point to a class that is both quantitatively strong and unusually consistent — there isn't much room between the 25th and 75th percentiles on either metric, which is itself informative. Schools with wide 25th-75th spreads are telling you they weigh softer factors more heavily or draw from a more varied applicant pool; BYU Law's tight bands suggest the numeric profile does most of the initial sorting before other factors come into play.
What the pack does not include — and what this guide will not guess at — is BYU Law's specific weighting of letters, personal statements, work experience, or its widely known affiliation with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors the university and requires an ecclesiastical endorsement as part of the application file. That affiliation is a defining structural fact about BYU Law's applicant pool and campus culture, but this section is confined to the numerical selectivity data in hand: a 22.8% acceptance rate built on 649 applications for 122 seats, anchored by a 168/170/172 LSAT band and a 3.82/3.95/3.98 GPA band.
For context on how to weigh your own numbers against any school's medians — including how a 168 versus a 172 might affect scholarship leverage rather than admission odds — see the shared guide on law school scholarship negotiation and the LSAT prep mechanics at how to study for the LSAT.
BYU Law graduates land jobs at a high rate, split across three distinct tracks: a sizable Big Law contingent, an unusually strong clerkship pipeline, and deep roots in the Utah market. Of the 127 graduates in the reporting class, 94.5% were employed in full-time, long-term jobs that either require bar passage or make clear use of a JD — a strong outcome by national standards and the single most important employment number in the pack.
Big Law: nearly a quarter of the class. Twenty-nine graduates — 22.8% of the class — went into firms of 501 or more attorneys. That is a meaningful share for a school ranked 24th nationally, and it means Big Law is a realistic, not exceptional, outcome for BYU Law's upper cohort. The rest of the firm placements are spread across the full size spectrum: 15 graduates went to firms of 1-10 attorneys, 10 to firms of 11-25, 5 to firms of 26-50, 7 to firms of 51-100, 7 to firms of 101-250, and 8 to firms of 251-500. That spread — a real presence at every firm-size tier, not just the extremes — suggests BYU Law's placement isn't purely bimodal the way the national market often is; graduates land across small, midsize, and large firms in meaningful numbers.
Clerkships: a genuine strength. Nine graduates took federal clerkships and another nine took state or local clerkships — 18 clerkships total out of 127 graduates, or roughly 14% of the class. That is a high per-capita clerkship rate, and it's consistent with a separate fact in BYU Law's record: the school ranked 13th per capita in U.S. Supreme Court clerk placement from 2003 to 2013 per the Leiter rankings. The school's alumni list includes Jay S. Bybee, Ryan D. Nelson, N. Randy Smith, Dee Benson, Michael W. Mosman, David Nuffer, David Nye, and G. Murray Snow — names that both reflect and reinforce the school's clerkship pipeline.
Government and public interest. Twelve graduates (9.4%) went into government jobs and eight (6.3%) into public interest work. Five more went into business and industry roles. These numbers are worth noting for anyone weighing loan repayment strategy: graduates in government or 501(c)(3) public-interest jobs are the population for whom Public Service Loan Forgiveness is actually relevant, while the Big Law-bound 22.8% of the class will typically repay directly against a large-firm salary rather than pursue PSLF. (For how PSLF and the current federal loan rules interact, see law school loans and PSLF — federal rules here are time-sensitive and worth verifying against the current cycle.)
The Utah market. The pack identifies Utah as BYU Law's largest single employment destination by category, which given the school's Provo location is unsurprising but still notable: it means a substantial share of the class stays in-state rather than dispersing to national legal markets, a pattern that matters for anyone evaluating BYU Law specifically for a Utah or Intermountain West career rather than a coastal Big Law track.
Bar passage backs up the placement numbers. BYU Law's first-time bar passage rate was 96.85%, against a state average of 84.77% in the same reporting period — a gap of roughly 12 points. The two-year ultimate pass rate reached 99.13%, meaning almost every graduate who sits for the bar eventually passes it. That combination — strong first-time passage well above the jurisdiction's average, and near-universal ultimate passage — removes bar failure as a realistic obstacle between a BYU Law degree and the employment outcomes described above.
Taken together, the picture is a class that splits meaningfully three ways: close to a quarter heading into the largest national firms, a clerkship rate strong enough to be a defining institutional feature, and a durable core staying in Utah or moving into government and public-interest work. None of these paths is guaranteed to any individual student, and the pack does not break down which LSAT or GPA bands correlate with which outcome — but the aggregate numbers make clear that BYU Law's placement is broad rather than concentrated in a single track.
BYU Law's first-time bar passage rate sits at 96.85%, compared with an 84.77% average across all first-time takers in Utah — a gap of roughly 12 percentage points. That figure comes from the ABA's 2025 compilation of law school outcomes, meaning nearly every BYU graduate who sat for the bar on the first attempt passed it outright, in a state where the typical test-taker's odds are noticeably lower.
The two-year ultimate pass rate — which captures graduates who needed a second attempt — climbs to 99.13%. In practical terms, almost the entire graduating class that sits for the bar eventually passes, and the overwhelming majority clear it on the first try. For a class of 127 JD graduates, that means only a handful of students nationwide from any given BYU cohort are still working toward a passing score after their first sitting.
Bar passage is the last hard gate between a J.D. and practicing law, and BYU's numbers indicate the school's curriculum, academic support, and admitted-student profile are converting into licensure at a rate well above the state benchmark. The school's entering class also carries a 25th-75th LSAT band of 168-172 and a GPA band of 3.82-3.98, which helps explain part of the gap — a class this credentialed on paper tends to test well. But the size of the margin over Utah's average — nearly 12 points — suggests the outcome isn't purely a function of admissions selectivity; it also reflects how the school prepares students for the exam itself.
Bar passage is a prerequisite, not a guarantee, but it dovetails with BYU's broader placement picture: 94.5% of the most recent graduating class was employed in a job that was full-time, long-term, and either bar-passage-required or J.D.-advantage. A near-universal bar pass rate removes one of the biggest sources of post-graduation uncertainty and lets that employment picture play out on schedule rather than being delayed by re-takes.
Bar rules and the exam format itself continue to shift nationally — Utah's and other states' exact score requirements, timing, and any transition toward the NCBE's newer exam format are worth confirming directly with the state bar and BYU's own reporting before relying on any specific year's numbers, since these compilations reflect a single reporting cycle (ABA 2025 compilations) and can move year to year.
BYU Law places graduates into clerkships at a level that stands out for a class its size: the most recent graduating class of 127 produced 9 federal clerkships and 9 state or local clerkships, meaning roughly one in seven graduates who found employment started their career on the bench rather than at a firm or agency. That's a substantial clerkship footprint for a single-campus program, and it sits alongside a broader employment picture in which 22.8% of the class went to firms of 501-plus attorneys — so BYU is simultaneously feeding Big Law and the judiciary in the same graduating year.
The judiciary connection isn't a recent development — it's built into the school's founding story. BYU Law's inaugural dean, Rex E. Lee, went on to serve as U.S. Solicitor General, arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the federal government after leading the law school through its earliest years (the school opened in 1973, initially holding classes in a building nicknamed "St. Reuben's," and graduated its first class in 1976). That early link between the law school's leadership and the nation's top appellate advocate set a tone the school has referenced ever since, including a National Jurist-era distinction noting BYU ranked 13th per capita in U.S. Supreme Court clerk placement over the 2003-2013 period according to Leiter rankings.
The school's own list of notable alumni includes Jay S. Bybee, N. Randy Smith, Ryan D. Nelson, Dee Benson, Michael W. Mosman, David Nuffer, David Nye, G. Murray Snow, and Gregory W. Moeller. BYU Law cites this roster alongside its clerkship pipeline, and judges hiring clerks often look to law schools whose graduates they know and trust — a relationship that keeps producing clerkship offers for BYU's current graduating classes.
Yes — BYU's faculty roster includes Thomas B. Griffith, Dee Benson, Dale A. Kimball, Aaron Nielson, and Howard C. Nielson Jr., all listed among the school's faculty.
BYU's judiciary placement sits inside a larger pattern of graduates moving into public service. In the most recent class, 12 graduates (9.4%) went into government roles and 8 (6.3%) into public interest work — smaller than the firm and clerkship numbers but still a meaningful share. The alumni list reinforces this at a much higher level of visibility than the raw percentages suggest: Mike Lee, Chris Cannon, Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Rex Lee, and Brett Tolman and Paul Warner trace back to BYU; Larry Echohawk is listed among the school's faculty. The J. Reuben Clark Law Society — a professional network the school cites as having 65 professional chapters and 125 student chapters worldwide — functions as an explicit extension of this network, connecting current students and graduates to alumni already embedded in courts, government offices, and public-sector legal roles.
If a judicial clerkship or a government-facing legal career is part of the plan, BYU's numbers say the pathway is real and currently active, not just a matter of alumni history: 18 clerkships in a single graduating year of 127 is a rate worth weighing directly against the numeric tables provided elsewhere in this guide. The caveat is that the per-capita Supreme Court clerk ranking cited above covers a 2003-2013 window — useful as evidence of a long-running pattern, but more than a decade old, so it shouldn't be read as a current-year placement statistic.
BYU Law is young by law-school standards but built with unusual intentionality: the BYU Board of Trustees announced its creation on March 9, 1971, and the school opened its doors on August 27, 1973 — initially holding classes in a former Catholic school building nicknamed 'St. Reuben's' before its own home, the J. Reuben Clark Building, was dedicated in 1975. The school is named for J. Reuben Clark, a Columbia-trained lawyer who served as U.S. Ambassador, Undersecretary of State, and an LDS Church general authority — a namesake that signals the school's founding aim of pairing elite legal training with religious mission. Its first dean, Rex E. Lee, later went on to become U.S. Solicitor General, and the school graduated its first class in 1976. In the five decades since, BYU Law has produced more than 5,000 graduates.
That history has translated into a genuinely global alumni infrastructure unusual for a school this size: the J. Reuben Clark Law Society, BYU Law's professional and student network, spans 65 professional chapters and 125 student chapters worldwide. Alumni include Jay S. Bybee, Ryan D. Nelson, N. Randy Smith, Dee Benson, Michael W. Mosman, David Nuffer, David Nye, and G. Murray Snow. BYU's notable-alumni list also includes Mike Lee, Celeste Maloy, Chris Cannon, and Mark Hutchison.
The faculty roster carries similar institutional weight: Cole Durham, Frederick Gedicks, and Brett Scharffs are listed among the faculty, alongside the International Center for Law and Religion Studies (ICLRS) and the World Family Policy Center. Thomas B. Griffith and RonNell Andersen Jones are also listed among the school's faculty, while the Howard W. Hunter Law Library — with more than 450,000 volumes and a top-25 ranking from National Jurist in 2014 — supports four student-edited journals: the BYU Law Review, BYU Journal of Public Law, BYU Education and Law Journal, and BYU International Law & Management Review.
BYU Law's academic reputation now sits at a tied-24th national ranking from U.S. News & World Report for 2026, and National Jurist has repeatedly named it the No. 1 Best Value law school (2022, 2021, 2016) — a reputation reinforced by Department of Education data showing BYU graduates carrying the lowest median federal student debt, $51,250, of any law school measured. Leiter's rankings also place BYU 13th nationally on a per-capita basis for U.S. Supreme Court clerkship placement between 2003 and 2013.
A distinctive institutional feature prospective applicants should understand up front: as a school sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, BYU Law operates under the university's Honor Code, which requires an ecclesiastical endorsement. Admission is open to applicants of any faith or sexual orientation, but the code restricts former LDS Church members and 'homosexual behavior'; the policy was reviewed and modified following ABA scrutiny in 2016. Applicants should weigh this as a real, binding condition of enrollment rather than a formality.
BYU Law reports substantial experiential capacity relative to its size: 150 clinic seats were available in the most recent reporting cycle, of which 110 were filled, alongside 182 filled field-placement slots and 237 filled simulation-course seats. Against a total JD enrollment of 348 students, those numbers mean a large share of the student body is getting supervised, practice-based work each year rather than doctrinal instruction alone.
The school also lists 16 co-curricular offerings — the moot court, trial advocacy, and competition-style programs that supplement clinics and field placements. BYU's public materials in this data set do not name individual clinics, so applicants who want to know exactly which subject-matter clinics (e.g., family law, immigration, criminal appeals) are currently running should confirm directly with the law school, since that level of detail isn't captured here.
Taken together, the filled-seat figures suggest experiential learning is a normalized, not marginal, part of the BYU JD — useful context for applicants comparing how many practice-ready hours a program actually builds in before graduation.
At BYU, conditional scholarships — aid tied to hitting a GPA benchmark to keep it — touch only a handful of students each year, and the record on renewal is mixed but small-sample. In the 2024-25 cycle, 3 students entered with conditional scholarships and none had their award reduced. In 2022-23, also 3 entering students, again zero reductions. But in 2023-24, only 2 students carried conditional scholarships and 1 of them — 50% — saw a reduction. Because the entering cohorts are only two or three students per year, a single reduction swings the percentage dramatically; applicants shouldn't read the 50% figure as a schoolwide trend so much as a reminder that conditional aid, however rare at BYU, is not automatically safe.
More broadly, scholarship money is the norm rather than the exception at BYU: 98% of students receive some grant aid, with a median grant of $11,646 among full-time students. Aid is distributed unevenly, though — 39% of students receive less than half-tuition in grants, 14% receive between half and full tuition, and 21% receive a full-tuition award. Given BYU's unusually low sticker tuition of $15,992 for full-time JD study against an estimated cost of attendance near $38,428, even partial grants meaningfully change a student's total borrowing picture, and conditional strings — where they exist — are worth reading closely in any offer letter.
At BYU Law, a 170 LSAT sits exactly at the median, a 168 marks the 25th percentile, and a 172 marks the 75th percentile — meaning the middle two quarters of BYU's entering class score between 168 and 172. GPA runs just as tight: 3.82 at the 25th percentile, 3.95 at the median, and 3.98 at the 75th. That combination — a median GPA near a 3.95 alongside a median LSAT of 170 — describes an applicant pool that is strong on both academic consistency and standardized testing, so a strategy built around only one number rarely tells the full story.
Because the LSAT (in its current post-2024 format of two scored Logical Reasoning sections, one scored Reading Comprehension section, and an unscored variable section) is engineered to be improvable with structured practice, most applicants aiming at BYU's median or 75th percentile benefit from a multi-month prep runway using official practice material rather than a single cram sitting — see the mechanics of building that timeline at /how-to-study-for-the-lsat. Schools consider an applicant's highest score, so a candidate whose diagnostic sits below 168 has real room to move before applying, and one who is already near 170-172 should weigh whether additional attempts are likely to produce a meaningfully higher score or just repeat the same result.
Where this matters concretely at BYU is money, not admission odds — this guide does not and cannot predict acceptance chances, only show where a number lands relative to medians. With 98% of BYU students receiving some grant and awards ranging from partial to full-tuition, an LSAT/GPA profile at or above the 75th percentile (172 / 3.98) is the kind of file most likely to be in the conversation for the largest awards, while a profile at the 25th percentile (168 / 3.82) is more likely to see partial aid or none. Because BYU's tuition is already unusually low relative to peer schools, even a partial scholarship stacked on that base tuition can produce a low total borrowing figure — but the scholarship itself is still negotiated file-by-file, a process outlined generally at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation.
Applicants should also build LSAT timing into the broader application calendar rather than treating it as a standalone step — test date, score release, and file completion all interact with when a law school can extend an offer or scholarship decision, a sequencing question covered at /law-school-application-timeline. And because federal loan rules changed materially for law students entering after mid-2026 — Grad PLUS eliminated, a $50,000 annual/$200,000 aggregate cap on Direct Unsubsidized loans, and a choice between a Standard Plan (no PSLF credit) and the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan — the size of any BYU scholarship offer interacts directly with how much a graduate will need to borrow privately to cover the gap. That financing landscape is explained in general terms at /law-school-loans-and-pslf and /is-law-school-worth-it, but the scholarship number BYU actually offers a given LSAT/GPA file is the number that determines how much of that federal cap gets used.
Budget for a total cost of attendance of roughly $38,428 at BYU Law — about $15,992 in tuition plus an estimated $22,436 for off-campus living. That sticker price is unusually low for an ABA-accredited law school, and it changes the financing math from the start: a full year's federal Direct Unsubsidized loan cap of $50,000 (effective for new borrowers starting July 2026, per current federal rules) would, on paper, cover BYU's entire published cost of attendance with room to spare. That's not true at most law schools, where tuition alone can exceed the annual federal cap and force students into private loans to fill the gap. Verify the current federal caps and BYU's current-year tuition before you build a final budget, since both are subject to change each cycle.
Grants add another layer of affordability on top of that already-modest sticker price. BYU reports that 98% of full-time students receive some grant aid, with a median award around $11,646 a year. Broken down by award size, BYU's own bands show 39% of students receiving less than half-tuition grants, 14% receiving half-to-full-tuition grants, and 21% receiving full tuition or more — meaning a meaningful share of the class is paying close to nothing in tuition, while others pay close to sticker. Where you land in that spread depends on how your LSAT and GPA compare to BYU's medians (170 LSAT / 3.95 GPA), which is the general mechanic behind every law school's scholarship model — see our guide on negotiating law school scholarships for how to use competing offers to move within that range.
One detail worth budgeting around is conditional scholarships — awards that require maintaining a minimum GPA to keep the full amount. BYU's cohorts here are small: three entering students held conditional scholarships in 2024-25 (none reduced), two in 2023-24 (one reduced, a 50% rate that year), and three in 2022-23 (none reduced). The sample sizes are too small to read as a trend, but if you're offered a conditional award, ask the school directly what GPA threshold applies and how many students historically have kept versus lost it.
On the repayment side, the mechanics are the same ones every 2026-27 borrower faces: the old Grad PLUS loan is gone, so anything the federal Direct loan and your own resources don't cover has to come from savings, family support, or private loans at market rates. Once you're repaying, the default is the Tiered Standard Plan, which earns no credit toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) — if you think you might work toward PSLF in a government or nonprofit role, you'd need to affirmatively enroll in the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) instead. Given BYU's low total borrowing need relative to most law schools, students heading into higher-paying private practice may find they can repay comfortably on the Standard Plan without needing income-driven relief at all — but that calculation depends on your actual starting salary and debt load, not the sticker price alone. For the general framework on loans, RAP, and PSLF, see our companion page on law school loans and PSLF.
Whether BYU Law is worth it depends less on its U.S. News rank (tied for 24th in the 2026-27 rankings) and more on what you want from a law degree and how much you're willing to pay to get it — and on both counts, BYU's own numbers give you unusually concrete anchors to reason from.
Start with cost, because it's the least generic part of BYU's value proposition. A total estimated cost of attendance around $38,428 a year, combined with grant aid reaching 98% of the class, puts BYU's likely debt load well below what students at most peer-ranked schools carry. Historically, BYU has reported the lowest median federal law school debt in the country ($51,250, per 2020 Department of Education data) — that figure is dated and needs independent verification for your entering year, but it signals a pattern: BYU has long been built around keeping debt low relative to outcomes, not around chasing the highest possible sticker price. If your case for law school depends on not being crushed by debt afterward, that's a real, quantifiable advantage here, not marketing language.
Now weigh that against outcomes. BYU's first-time bar passage rate is 96.85%, well above the state average of 84.77% for the same administration, and its two-year ultimate bar passage rate is 99.13% — meaning the overwhelming majority of graduates who don't pass on the first try do pass within two years. On employment, 94.5% of the most recent graduating class was in jobs requiring bar passage or a JD advantage ten months out. Of the 127 graduates, 29 (22.8%) went to firms of 501+ attorneys — the Big Law tier where salaries cluster near the high end of the national bimodal distribution — while 12 (9.4%) went into government, 8 (6.3%) into public interest, and 18 combined into federal and state/local clerkships. BYU's own reporting identifies Utah as its largest single employment market, which tells you something important: if your goal is a national Big Law career centered on New York, D.C., or California, BYU's placement pipeline still reaches that tier for roughly a fifth of each class, but the broader gravitational pull of the school runs through the Mountain West and Utah legal market specifically. That's worth confirming against your own target market and current recruiting patterns before you assume national portability.
The honest way to use these numbers is to place your own LSAT and GPA against BYU's medians (170/3.95) not as a probability of admission but as a planning anchor for where you'd likely land on cost: scores at or above the median tend to correlate with stronger grant offers, given that 21% of the class already pays full tuition or more while another notable share pays a fraction of it. If your numbers sit near BYU's 25th percentile (168 LSAT / 3.82 GPA), budget for the higher end of that grant spectrum rather than assuming a discount.
Put plainly: BYU Law is a reasonable case for someone who wants a strong bar-passage track record, a meaningful (if not dominant) Big Law placement rate, unusually low sticker cost, and is comfortable with a religiously affiliated institution governed by an Honor Code with ecclesiastical endorsement requirements — a distinctive feature applicants should weigh directly rather than treat as incidental. It's a weaker case if your primary goal is a guaranteed national Big Law trajectory centered outside the Mountain West, since the data shows Utah as the school's center of gravity. For the general framework on weighing sticker price, debt, and career goals against each other, see our companion guide on whether law school is worth it.