Florida Law's numbers describe a genuinely selective public school: 3,887 applications produced 642 offers in the cycle reflected in this data, an acceptance rate of 16.52%, filling a class of 229 students. That volume-to-seat ratio means the school is turning away far more qualified applicants than it admits, and the LSAT/GPA bands it publishes are the clearest way to see where a given applicant's file sits.
The middle 50% of the entering class scored between 165 (25th percentile) and 170 (75th percentile) on the LSAT, with 169 as the median. A 169 LSAT places an applicant squarely at Florida Law's midpoint — not a predictor of admission, but a marker that half the enrolled class scored at or below that number and half scored above it. A 165 sits at the 25th percentile, meaning it's on the lower edge of the range the school actually enrolled; a 170 sits at the 75th percentile, among the stronger scores in the class. Anything meaningfully below 165 is off the published range entirely, and anything at or above 170 is competing at the top of it.
GPA tells a similarly tight story. The middle 50% ran from 3.7 (25th percentile) to 3.97 (75th percentile), with a 3.91 median. That's a narrow band — under three-tenths of a point separates the 25th from the 75th percentile — which suggests the admissions committee isn't seeing much room for a GPA that trails well behind 3.7 to be offset purely by other factors, at least not at the volume this data captures.
Context matters here: Florida Law is the flagship, oldest public law school in the state, and it draws a large in-state and regional applicant pool competing for a class of only 229 seats against nearly 3,900 applications. The school's 2026-27 U.S. News ranking of 34 (and its historical standing around 11th among public law schools) reinforces that this is a program pulling from a deep, motivated applicant pool rather than a regional back-up option.
What this means practically for a prospective applicant: use the 165/169/170 LSAT range and the 3.7/3.91/3.97 GPA range as planning anchors, not as a probability calculator. A file at or above both 75th-percentile marks (170 LSAT, 3.97 GPA) is positioned at the strongest end of what Florida Law enrolled; a file at or below both 25th-percentile marks (165 LSAT, 3.7 GPA) is at the weaker end of the enrolled range and would need other parts of the file — softs, writing, work experience — to carry more weight. Neither position guarantees or forecloses an outcome; the 16.52% overall acceptance rate applies across the whole pool, including applicants at every point on these bands.
Florida Law's in-state tuition of $19,139 a year — plus $2,665 in fees — puts its total estimated cost of attendance at $48,450, once the school's $26,646 off-campus living estimate is added in. That's a strikingly different starting point from the private-school sticker prices that dominate law school comparisons, and it reshapes what "worth it" means for anyone eligible for Florida residency or willing to establish it.
How much of that cost actually gets discounted? Most of it, for most students. 88% of the entering class receives some grant aid, and the median grant among recipients is $19,000 — an amount that, on its own, roughly cancels out a full year's tuition, though not the additional fees. Breaking down the distribution further: 13% of students receive a grant covering full tuition, another 19% receive between half and full tuition, and 34% receive a grant covering less than half of tuition. Put differently, roughly one in three funded students still carries meaningful tuition exposure, but nearly a third of the class is attending on a full or near-full tuition scholarship, and the large majority of students receive something.
What does that mean in borrowed dollars? For a resident student who lands at or near the median grant, the annual gap between the $48,450 total cost of attendance and a roughly $19,000 discount leaves a borrowing need well under $30,000 a year before living-expense choices — a fraction of what a similarly ranked private school would require even after scholarship. As of the 2025-26 cycle, federal Direct Unsubsidized loans are capped at $50,000 per year and $200,000 aggregate for law students (verify current figures before relying on this), so Florida Law is one of the rarer programs where the federal loan cap is not the binding constraint on most in-state students — the actual cost of attendance is simply lower than the cap. That matters because at expensive private schools, the elimination of Grad PLUS loans has forced many students into private lending to cover a shortfall; Florida Law's in-state pricing structurally reduces how often that gap needs to be filled at all.
Does the low cost come with a weaker outcome? No — and that's the part that makes the value proposition unusual rather than just "cheap." Florida Law's first-time bar passage rate is 90.2%, well above the state's overall first-time average of 77.07%, and its ultimate (two-year) pass rate is 92.56%. On employment, 94% of graduates land in jobs that are bar-passage-required or JD-advantage within nine months, and of 215 total graduates, 46 (21.4%) went to firms of 501+ attorneys — the Big Law tier that anchors the high end of the national salary distribution. Another 27 graduates went to firms sized 251-500, 18 entered government work (8.4%), 14 went into public interest (6.5%), and 15 federal and state/local clerkships combined rounded out a substantial early-career judicial pipeline. None of that is guaranteed to any individual student, but as a school-wide pattern it means the discount isn't coming at the expense of the outcomes that justify the degree in the first place.
So what's the actual calculus? At most law schools, the worth-it question turns heavily on debt service against starting salary, because six-figure private-school tuition forces large borrowing regardless of scholarship. At Florida Law, the sticker price itself is low enough that even a partial scholarship — the kind roughly a third of the class receives (less than half of tuition covered) — can produce a total borrowing figure that's manageable against Big Law, government, or clerkship starting compensation, or against the more modest public-interest and government salaries where federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness (available under the RAP income-driven plan, not the default Standard Plan) becomes the relevant long-term lever. For an applicant weighing Florida Law against a higher-ranked but far pricier private option, the honest question isn't just "which school ranks higher" — it's whether a marginal ranking difference is worth multiplying the debt load several times over, given that Florida Law's own bar-passage and employment numbers already sit at or near the top of Florida's legal market.
Illustrative: 3-year borrowing at the 2026-27 federal rate (8.07%) over 10 years; your figures depend on your offer and salary.
UF Levin graduates passed the Florida Bar on their first attempt at a 90.2% rate, compared with a 77.07% statewide average for that administration — a gap of roughly 13 percentage points that puts Levin at the top of Florida's law schools. Within two years of graduation, the school's ultimate pass rate climbs to 92.56%, meaning the small share who don't pass on the first try mostly clear the bar on a subsequent sitting rather than stalling out entirely.
This isn't a one-cycle fluke. Levin's own reporting states that its students posted the highest first-time passage rate of any Florida law school on the summer 2024 Florida Bar exam, and a separate 2023 data point shows the school's first-time Florida Bar passage rate at 80.6%, alongside the school's own overall (all-jurisdiction) first-time passage rate of 81.94% for that year's graduates — with an ultimate pass rate of 92.83% for the class of 2021. Read together, these numbers describe a school whose first-time pass rate has sat well above the statewide average in the cycles reported in this guide; exact rankings shift slightly by cycle, so applicants should confirm the most recent Florida Board of Bar Examiners release before treating any single year's gap as fixed.
The pack doesn't disclose a formal academic-support curriculum, but it does show a deep bench of practice-based coursework that plausibly reinforces bar-tested skills well before third year. Levin fills 131 of 181 available clinic slots and 155 field placements, and — more strikingly — logs 1,241 completed simulation-course enrollments, a volume that suggests simulation-based, skills-focused training is a routine part of the JD experience rather than a boutique offering. Students also have 15 co-curricular offerings and four moot court teams plus a mock trial team, giving repeated, structured practice at the kind of applied legal reasoning the bar exam rewards.
There's also a long institutional relationship with the Florida bench and bar that shapes the school's culture around licensure. Seventeen Levin graduates have sat on the Florida Supreme Court, fifteen of them as chief justice, and since 1950 more than 60% of Florida Bar Association presidents have been Levin alumni. Four graduates have led the American Bar Association in the past forty years. None of that guarantees any individual student passes the bar, but it does mean the school's faculty, alumni network, and institutional identity are unusually bar- and bench-oriented compared to a school without that lineage.
The practical payoff shows up in employment. Per the school's own summary of its 2024 ABA disclosures, graduates obtained employment in bar-passage-required or JD-advantage roles, and specifically in bar-passage-required jobs, at rates described as the highest of any Florida law school; the guide elsewhere reports a separate 94% FT/LT bar-passage-required or JD-advantage figure from the ABA employment summary. A high, consistent bar-passage rate is what makes that employment outcome possible in the first place: Florida employers hiring from Levin can be confident that an offer extended before results post is unlikely to be undone by a failed exam.
For an applicant comparing Levin to other Florida options, the 13-point gap over the state average (in the cycle where that comparison is reported) is the single most concrete, verifiable signal that the school's bar-preparation pipeline — clinics, simulations, and a curriculum built around Florida practice — is translating into licensure, not just admission and graduation.
Yes — 21.4% of Levin's graduating class, 46 of 215 graduates, went to firms of 501 or more attorneys, the category commonly called Big Law. That's roughly one in five graduates landing at the largest, highest-paying firms in the country, a notable outcome for a law school located in Gainesville rather than a traditional Big Law hub like Miami, New York, or D.C.
The 501+ category is also just the top of a broader concentration in large-firm practice. Add the 27 graduates (12.6%) who went to firms of 251-500 attorneys, and 73 of 215 graduates — about 34% of the class — landed at firms of 251 attorneys or more. That means roughly a third of each Levin class enters practice at a large-firm scale, not just the top-line 21.4% Big Law figure. Below that, the class spreads across a full range of firm sizes: 16 graduates (101-250 attorneys), 10 (51-100), 11 (26-50), 13 (11-25), and 17 at firms of 1-10 attorneys — a distribution that shows Levin placing graduates across essentially every tier of private practice, not just the extremes.
Beyond private firms, 18 graduates (8.4%) went into government roles and 14 (6.5%) into public interest work, while 15 graduates moved into business and industry positions. Clerkships accounted for 15 graduates total — 10 federal and 5 state/local — a meaningful number of judicial credentials for a class this size, and consistent with a school whose alumni network includes seventeen Florida Supreme Court justices.
Across all these paths, 94% of graduates in full-time, long-term positions were employed in bar-passage-required or JD-advantage jobs, underscoring that the employment outcomes aren't concentrated only in the Big Law headline number — the overwhelming majority of the class is working in roles that actually require or meaningfully use the JD.
The pack identifies Florida as Levin's single largest employment category, meaning the plurality of graduates who take jobs after graduation stay in-state. Combined with the school's standing as the highest-ranked and (per its own reporting) highest bar-passing law school in Florida, this suggests Levin functions as the dominant in-state pipeline for Florida's legal market — its judiciary, its major firms' Florida offices, and its state government — while still placing a substantial fifth of each class into the national Big Law tier. For an applicant whose goal is Big Law specifically, the 21.4% figure is the number to anchor expectations to; for an applicant whose goal is to build a career practicing law in Florida, the combination of in-state dominance, clerkship placement, and broad firm-size distribution is arguably the more relevant outcome.
One caveat worth naming plainly: the pack does not break down how many of the 46 Big Law placements were in Florida offices of national firms versus in New York, D.C., or other primary Big Law markets, so applicants specifically targeting a non-Florida Big Law market should treat the 21.4% figure as a floor on plausibility, not a guarantee of geography.
UF Law's Graduate Tax Program is ranked #1 in tax law among public law schools and third among all law schools nationally, and the program has held a top-three ranking for two decades. That is not a marketing gloss — it reflects a structural commitment: UF Law has more full-time tax faculty than any other law school in the country, which means students doing tax work here are taught by full-time specialists rather than adjunct practitioners parachuting in for a single seminar.
The degree offerings are built in layers. J.D. students can pursue an Estate Planning and Trusts concentration alongside coursework that feeds into the graduate program. Above the J.D., UF offers an LL.M. in Taxation and a separate LL.M. in International Taxation, plus an S.J.D. in Taxation for students pursuing doctoral-level scholarship in the field — a rare offering; most law schools stop at the LL.M. tier in tax.
Leadership matters here. The Graduate Tax Programs are directed by Lee-Ford Tritt, who holds the James J. Freeland Eminent Scholar Chair in Federal Taxation and serves as Associate Dean. The program's bench extends further: Neil H. Buchanan holds emeritus status in the same endowed chair line, giving the program continuity across generations of tax faculty rather than a single star hire.
The scholarly infrastructure matches the teaching strength. UF publishes the Florida Tax Review, a specialty journal that gives J.D. and LL.M. students a dedicated outlet for tax scholarship most law schools' students don't have access to. On the practice side, the Center on Estate Planning connects classroom tax and trusts work to applied practice, and students planning careers in wealth transfer or estate planning have a concentration and a center built specifically around that work, not a single elective bolted onto a general curriculum.
What this means for a prospective applicant depends on what you want from a J.D. If you're aiming at tax, trusts and estates, or a graduate tax credential after your J.D., UF Law is a program most peer schools cannot match on faculty depth or institutional focus — this is a rare case where a public law school's specialty program is genuinely regarded as best-in-class rather than merely respectable. If tax isn't your interest, the program's strength is largely irrelevant to your decision, and you shouldn't let a top-ranked specialty pull you toward a school whose broader profile doesn't otherwise fit your goals.
UF Law was founded in 1909 under its first dean, Albert J. Farrah, making it the oldest operating public law school in Florida and the second-oldest law school in the state overall. The school's earliest home was Thomas Hall, before it moved into Bryan Hall in 1914, where it remained for over five decades.
The most consequential chapter in the school's history is not architectural but legal and moral. In 1948, Virgil D. Hawkins, an African American applicant, was denied admission to UF Law because of his race. Hawkins did not simply walk away — he appealed his exclusion all the way to the Florida Supreme Court and then to the U.S. Supreme Court, turning his individual rejection into a decade-long legal battle over segregation in Florida's flagship public law school. The college did not desegregate until September 15, 1958, a full decade after Hawkins first sought admission and years after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision reshaped the legal landscape nationally.
The school has since built that history into its present-day institutional identity rather than treating it as a closed chapter. Its pro bono and public-interest legal clinics are named the Virgil D. Hawkins Civil Legal Clinics, directly attaching Hawkins's name to the school's ongoing access-to-justice work rather than confining his memory to a plaque. In 1988, faculty members Sharon Rush and Kenneth Nunn co-founded the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations, giving the desegregation history an ongoing academic home rather than leaving it as a historical footnote.
The physical campus kept evolving alongside the institution: the law school moved into Holland Hall in 1969, added Bruton-Geer Hall in 1984, and in 1999 was renamed the Fredric G. Levin College of Law after a $10 million gift from alumnus and prominent Pensacola trial lawyer Fredric G. Levin — a gift matched by an additional $10 million state grant. A major 2004-2005 renovation expanded the law library into what is now the Lawton Chiles Legal Information Center, and a dedicated courtroom facility, the Martin Levin Advocacy Center, was completed in 2009 with a second phase finished in 2011.
The school's relationship with its own history remains actively contested rather than settled. In 2024, the law school gave an award to a student paper that generated public controversy, and interim dean Merritt McAlister publicly defended the decision to give it. For an applicant, the throughline worth noting is this: UF Law's institutional identity is shaped as much by its history of exclusion and the slow, contested process of confronting it as by its rankings or bar passage numbers — and that history remains a live, debated part of campus life rather than a settled footnote.
UF Law's alumni network has produced seventeen justices of the Florida Supreme Court, fifteen of whom went on to serve as chief justice — a concentration of state judicial leadership that few law schools in any state can match from a single institution. Since 1950, over sixty percent of Florida Bar Association presidents have been UF Law graduates, and in the past forty years alone, four graduates have gone on to serve as president of the American Bar Association. For an applicant weighing whether a school's network translates into real influence within a state's legal establishment, this is about as direct a data point as exists: UF Law graduates don't just practice in Florida, they have repeatedly run its bar and sat atop its highest court.
The alumni roster beyond the judiciary reinforces the same pattern of political and civic reach. Spessard L. Holland (LL.B. '16) went on to serve as both Florida's governor and a U.S. senator. Lawton Chiles (LL.B. '55) likewise served as both governor and senator. B. Campbell Thornal (LL.B. 1930) became a justice of the Florida Supreme Court and served as chief justice from 1965 to 1967. On the practice side, Fredric G. Levin (J.D. '61) built a prominent trial practice in Pensacola before donating $10 million to the college — the gift that led to the school's renaming as the Levin College of Law — and his son Martin H. Levin (J.D. '88) later gave toward the Martin Levin Advocacy Center that bears the family name.
This kind of network shows up in current outcomes, not just historical rolls of honor. Among the most recent graduating class, 10 graduates secured federal clerkships and 5 secured state or local clerkships — a meaningful clerkship placement for a class of 215 graduates, and a pipeline that plausibly draws on the same judicial relationships built over decades of UF alumni sitting on the bench. Eighteen graduates (8.4% of the class) went into government positions, and the John Marshall Bar Association, founded in 1909, remains one of the oldest student organizations at the school, tying current students into a nearly identical institutional continuity as the judges and bar presidents in the alumni directory.
For an applicant thinking practically: this network matters most if your goal runs through Florida's state courts, state bar leadership, or Florida politics and public service. A pipeline of seventeen state supreme court justices and majority control of the state bar presidency for seventy-plus years is a Florida-specific asset — it says less about, say, breaking into a New York or California market, and everything about being embedded in the legal and political establishment of the state UF Law has served since 1909.
Yes — a UF Levin JD comes with a substantial menu of live-client and skills-based work, not just doctrinal lectures. UF Levin's clinics include the Virgil D. Hawkins Civil Legal Clinics, the Environmental and Community Development Clinic, the Gator TeamChild Juvenile Law Clinic, the Heirs' Property Clinic, the Immigration Clinic, the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic, the Mediation Clinic, and the Veterans and Servicemembers Legal Clinic.
Students who want courtroom-adjacent experience rather than transactional clinic work can choose field clinics instead, including the Prosecution Field Clinic, the Public Defender Field Clinic, and the Wrongful Convictions Field Clinic, which places students on actual innocence casework.
UF Levin reports 181 clinic enrollment slots available with 131 filled, alongside 155 filled field placements and 1,241 filled seats in simulation courses — the largest single category, reflecting heavy use of trial-advocacy, negotiation, and drafting courses that mimic practice without a live client. The school also lists 15 co-curricular offerings, which typically includes moot court, mock trial, and competition teams layered on top of the clinical and simulation curriculum.
Taken together, these numbers indicate that experiential learning at UF Levin is broad rather than a boutique add-on: most students have a real option to touch either a live case, a supervised field placement, or an intensive simulation course before graduation, and the wrongful-convictions and public-defense-side field clinics give students working in criminal justice a rare combination of both skills training and direct client stakes.
UF Levin admits selectively: of 3,887 applications, 642 offers went out, an acceptance rate of 16.52% for a class that landed at 229 students. That volume — nearly 4,000 files for fewer than 230 seats — means the school can hold firmly to its numeric bands, and where your LSAT and GPA sit relative to those bands is the most useful thing you can control before you apply.
UF's entering class showed an LSAT range of 165 at the 25th percentile, 169 at the median, and 170 at the 75th percentile, with GPAs of 3.70 / 3.91 / 3.97 across the same percentiles. A 169 LSAT with a 3.9 GPA sits almost exactly at UF's midpoint on both dimensions. A 165 LSAT places you at UF's 25th percentile, meaning roughly a quarter of the admitted class scored at or below that mark; a 170+ puts you at or above the 75th percentile, the top end of the enrolled range.
Because LSAT movement is the single biggest lever most applicants can pull before submitting, and because the current exam (two scored Logical Reasoning sections, one scored Reading Comprehension section, no Logic Games since August 2024) rewards focused, official-material prep over several months, a retake aimed at closing even a 3-4 point gap to UF's median is often worth the delay if your first score sits meaningfully below 169. Schools consider your highest score, so a retake carries no real downside beyond time and effort — for the mechanics of building an LSAT study plan, see /how-to-study-for-the-lsat.
The LSAT and GPA also drive UF's aid picture: 88% of students receive some grant, with a median grant of $19,000 against a published cost of attendance around $48,450 and in-state tuition and fees near $21,800. Roughly a third of students get less-than-half-tuition awards, about a fifth get half-to-full, and 13% get full-tuition support — bands that generally track where an applicant's numbers land relative to the 165/169/170 spread. If your LSAT sits above UF's median, that is the leverage point for negotiating a stronger offer, particularly if a peer school's written offer already reflects your strength; see /law-school-scholarship-negotiation for how that conversation typically works. None of this is a guarantee of admission or aid — treat the medians as planning anchors for where your file will be read, not a probability of acceptance.
UF Levin does not publicly specify its application deadline or fee in the figures behind this guide, so verify both directly with the admissions office before you build a timeline — do not rely on a generic date. What is clear from the numbers is that UF receives a large volume of applications (3,887 for a class of 229) and admits at a low headline rate (16.52%), which argues strongly for applying as early in the cycle as your file allows rather than waiting until a late deadline.
Most law schools, UF very likely included given its volume, evaluate applications on a rolling basis within a cycle: seats and scholarship funds are finite and tend to fill as strong files arrive, so an application submitted in September or October is typically read against a fuller scholarship budget than the same file submitted in February. The general rule across law admissions is to have the LSAT finished (including any retake) before you start submitting, since schools consider your highest score and a pending retest can hold up a file's review — see /law-school-application-timeline for how the pieces (recommendations, personal statement, transcripts) typically sequence across a cycle.
For positioning purposes, UF is worth treating as a mission-driven pick rather than a generic strong regional program: it is the oldest operating public law school in Florida, founded in 1909, and it carries the state's highest bar-passage rates among law schools alongside a top-ranked tax law program. An applicant whose personal statement and letters can credibly connect to that identity — Florida practice, tax law, public service tied to the state's legal institutions — is speaking the same language the admissions committee already uses to describe the school. That does not change the numeric bar (a 165-170 LSAT band and a 3.70-3.97 GPA band remain the anchors), but it does mean generic "any T50 school" essays are a weaker fit here than at a school without that regional identity.
Finally, remember that admissions numbers describe where your file sits relative to the class that got in, not your odds of being one of them — there is no formula that converts a given LSAT/GPA combination into a probability at UF or anywhere else. Use the medians to decide whether UF belongs in your safety, target, or reach tier for your own list, and to plan whether a scholarship negotiation conversation (see /law-school-scholarship-negotiation) is realistic once offers arrive.
Most incoming students get help with tuition, but a meaningful share still pay close to full freight, and "getting a grant" covers a wide range of outcomes. UF Law reports that 88% of students receive some grant aid, yet its own award bands show only 34% get less than half of tuition covered, 19% get between half and full tuition, and 13% get full tuition covered — together about two-thirds of the class. The gap between that 66% and the 88% headline figure likely reflects a slice of students receiving small, partial awards that don't fit neatly into those bands; either way, a meaningful minority is paying at or near full sticker price with no institutional discount.
Start with the sticker itself. In-state tuition and fees run $21,804 a year ($19,139 tuition plus $2,665 in fees), and the school's own cost-of-attendance estimate, once you add $26,646 for off-campus living, comes to $48,450 a year. Over three years that's roughly $145,000 before any grant is applied — notably lower than many peer schools in the same U.S. News tier, largely because UF is a public university with in-state pricing. The pack doesn't report an out-of-state tuition figure, so nonresident applicants should confirm that number directly with admissions before assuming the same math applies.
The median grant among recipients is $19,000 — almost exactly equal to annual in-state tuition. That means a student who lands at the 50th percentile of UF's award distribution is effectively attending tuition-free and paying mainly for fees and living costs. Whether you land above or below that median is the real financing question, and it typically tracks where your LSAT and GPA sit against UF's 25th/50th/75th benchmarks (165/169/170 and 3.70/3.91/3.97) — the further above median your numbers, the stronger your negotiating position for a bigger award. The mechanics of using a competing offer to push a grant higher are the same everywhere; see the scholarship-negotiation playbook at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation.
How you fund whatever the grant doesn't cover has changed materially. As of the 2025-26 cycle, Grad PLUS loans are being phased out for new borrowers starting July 1, 2026, and law students will rely on the Direct Unsubsidized Loan, capped at $50,000 a year and $200,000 in aggregate. That cap is worth pausing on for UF specifically: because its in-state cost of attendance (~$48,450) sits under the $50,000 annual federal cap, a Florida resident without a grant could in principle still cover the full sticker price with federal loans alone — a rarer scenario at pricier private schools where students routinely need private loans to fill the gap. Verify current caps and the projected 8.07% rate (plus roughly a 1.057% origination fee) before relying on this, since these figures are time-sensitive.
Repayment choice matters just as much as the borrowing itself. New borrowers will choose between a Tiered Standard Plan and the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP); only RAP earns credit toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and the Standard Plan is the default if you don't affirmatively enroll in RAP. For UF graduates weighing a government or public-interest track against a firm job, that enrollment decision — not the loan itself — is what determines whether ten years of payments end in forgiveness. General loan and PSLF mechanics are covered at /law-school-loans-and-pslf.
If your career plan is practicing law in Florida, UF Levin's own outcomes data make a strong practical case, though "obvious" still depends on what kind of practice you want. The school's first-time bar passage rate of 90.2% runs well ahead of the state average of 77.07%, and its ultimate pass rate climbs to 92.56% — evidence that most students who start there eventually get licensed even if the first attempt doesn't go perfectly. Combine that with a 94% rate of graduates landing bar-passage-required or JD-advantage jobs within nine months, and the licensing-and-employment pipeline for a Florida-focused graduate looks solid on paper.
Where those jobs land is the more nuanced part. Of the graduating class, 46 graduates (21.4%) went into firms of 501-plus attorneys — the "Big Law" tier that anchors the high end of the profession's bimodal salary curve — while another 27 went to firms of 251-500 attorneys. That's a meaningful large-firm placement rate for a public school with in-state tuition well under $50,000 a year in cost of attendance. But the bulk of the class is spread across mid-size and small firms: 16 graduates in 101-250-attorney firms, 10 in 51-100, 11 in 26-50, and 13 in 11-25, plus 17 in firms of 10 or fewer. Government work absorbed 8.4% of graduates and public interest another 6.5%, with 10 landing federal clerkships and 5 state or local clerkships. The pack identifies Florida as the largest single employment destination for graduates, which tracks with UF's identity as the state's oldest public law school — a strong signal if your goal is a Florida bench, Florida agency, or Florida firm career, and a data gap you should investigate directly with admissions if your goal is a national or out-of-state market.
The alumni network reinforces that in-state orientation at an unusually deep level. Since 1950, over sixty percent of Florida Bar Association presidents have been UF Law graduates, seventeen alumni have served on the Florida Supreme Court (fifteen as chief justice), and four American Bar Association presidents in the past forty years came from the school. For anyone whose career vision runs through Florida's courts, agencies, or bar leadership, that is a genuinely distinctive asset that few other law schools in any state can match. The school's tax program adds a separate, narrower reason to consider it: UF's Graduate Tax Program is ranked among the top three in the country and first among public law schools, backed by more full-time tax faculty than any other law school in the pack's description — relevant specifically to students aiming at trusts-and-estates, tax controversy, or private wealth practice.
Set against a roughly $145,000 three-year sticker cost before aid (in-state) and a median grant nearly covering annual tuition, the cost side of the equation is favorable relative to many peer-ranked private schools. The honest caveat is the same one that applies to every law school: a 94% employment rate and strong bar numbers describe the class in aggregate, not any individual applicant's outcome, and roughly two-thirds of the graduating class is working outside the Big Law tier in firms, government, or public-interest roles with a different compensation profile than the widely publicized $215,000 large-firm salary. Whether Levin is the "obvious" choice comes down to whether your target market is Florida — where the bar-passage edge, employer mix, and alumni bench genuinely compound in your favor — or a market where the school's reach is less established by the data available here. For the general framework on weighing sticker cost against outcomes across schools, see /is-law-school-worth-it.