Texas Law is unusual among the schools ranked in its tier because its published sticker price looks like a public in-state law school's, not a private T-16's. Annual tuition is reported at $38,236, and the school's own estimate of full cost of attendance — tuition plus an off-campus living estimate of $25,398 — comes to $63,634. That is materially below what most schools ranked in the U.S. News top 16 charge once you add cost of living, and it is the foundation of Texas Law's value case: comparable outcomes to elite private peers, without the elite private price tag.
The school layers scholarship money on top of that already-lower base. Ninety-four percent of students receive some grant aid, with a median grant of $23,375 among full-time recipients. Texas Law also reports how that aid is distributed across the class: 40% of students receive a grant covering less than half of tuition, 44% receive one covering half to the full amount, and 3% receive a full-tuition award. In practice that means most admitted students who receive aid are getting a discount in the meaningful middle range, not just a token award — and none of it comes in the form of conditional scholarships tied to maintaining a GPA threshold, since Texas Law reports that it does not award conditional scholarships at all. That matters because a conditional scholarship that can be revoked after 1L grades effectively shifts risk onto the student; Texas Law's model does not.
The payoff shows up on the employment side. Ninety-nine percent of the class is reported in full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar passage or a JD advantage, and 39.3% of the most recent graduating class (121 of 308 graduates) went into firms of 501 or more attorneys — the Big Law category tied to the six-figure salary bands. Texas Law also reports 44 federal clerkships and 12 state or local clerkships from a single graduating class, a placement volume the school describes as among the top ten nationally for federal clerkships. Combine a public-school cost structure, near-universal scholarship distribution, and outcomes that include a large Big Law share plus a heavy clerkship pipeline, and the arithmetic of law school as an investment looks different at Texas than it does at similarly ranked private schools. For a general framework on running that math for your own numbers, see the shared page on whether law school is worth it.
Texas Law admitted 881 applicants out of 6,297 for an acceptance rate of 13.99%, and enrolled a class of 373. Those raw numbers tell you the school is selective at scale — thousands of applicants competing for a class that ultimately seats fewer than 400 people — but the more useful planning tool is where your own LSAT and GPA sit against the school's published percentile bands, not the acceptance rate itself.
On the LSAT, Texas Law's 25th percentile is 166, its median is 172, and its 75th percentile is 173. A 172 places an applicant exactly at the school's midpoint for enrolled students; a 173 or above puts an applicant at or above the top quarter of the class; a 166 sits at the bottom quarter. Because the gap between the 25th and 75th percentiles is only seven points, Texas Law's enrolled LSAT distribution is unusually compressed for a class this size — most admitted students cluster tightly around the low-to-mid 170s rather than spreading widely.
GPA tells a similar story. The 25th percentile is 3.75, the median is 3.89, and the 75th percentile is 3.96. Combined with the LSAT bands, this means the standard applicant Texas Law enrolled last cycle presented both a near-3.9 GPA and a low-170s LSAT — a numbers profile with little room for a single soft spot to be offset by an unusually strong score elsewhere, at least based on where the bulk of the class actually lands.
None of this should be read as a probability statement about any individual applicant's chances — Texas Law does not publish, and this guide does not calculate, odds of admission. What the medians do give you is a planning anchor: if your numbers sit above the 172/3.89 median, you're in the range where the school's own enrolled class data suggests you compare favorably to typical admits; if you're below the 166/3.75 25th-percentile floor, you're outside the range where most of the class fell, which is useful context for how you build the rest of your application and how you think about scholarship negotiation once offers arrive. For the mechanics of using your LSAT score in that negotiation, see the shared guide on law school scholarship negotiation, and for how to think about the test itself, see the guide on how to study for the LSAT.
Texas Law is legally required by the state legislature to reserve 65% of seats in each entering class for Texas residents, and that mandate is a structural fact about the school that no applicant profile can change. With a class of 373, that rule means roughly two-thirds of every seat is set aside for in-state applicants before the remaining seats are opened to the rest of the country — a dynamic that makes non-resident admission meaningfully more competitive for the pool of applicants who don't already live in Texas, even though the school does not publish separate acceptance rates by residency.
This mandate reflects Texas Law's public mission as part of the University of Texas at Austin, a school founded in 1883. That mission has also placed the school at the center of pivotal moments in American legal history: it was the defendant institution in Sweatt v. Painter (1950), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that a separate law school for Black students was not truly equal — a ruling that forced Heman Sweatt's admission and became a direct precursor to Brown v. Board of Education. The school later became the named party in Hopwood v. Texas (1996), a Fifth Circuit ruling against considering race in admissions that was effectively superseded by the Supreme Court's Grutter v. Bollinger decision in 2003. That history is part of why the residency framework — a legislative mandate rather than a purely institutional admissions policy — matters here specifically: it was set by lawmakers, not by the law school's own admissions committee.
The residency rule also connects directly to Texas Law's bar outcomes. The school reports a 96.39% first-time bar passage rate against a state average of 83.01%, and separately notes a Texas-specific first-time passage rate of 95.57% for the Class of 2024, with overall first-time passage rates of 96.52% (2024), 94.01% (2023), and 90.39% (2022). Because a large majority of the class is composed of Texas residents by legislative design, and because the school's largest reported employment destination is Texas itself, the 65% rule effectively means Texas Law functions as both a national-caliber program — drawing a national applicant pool for its remaining seats — and the primary pipeline school for the Texas bar and Texas legal market simultaneously. For applicants outside Texas, that combination is worth weighing directly: the school's national rank and outcomes are real, but the seats available to you are structurally fewer than the total class size suggests.
Texas Law's published annual tuition is $38,236, and the school's own estimated cost of attendance for a year — tuition plus an off-campus living allowance of $25,398 — comes to $63,634. That COA figure is the honest planning number: it's what a full-time student should expect to need per year before any grant aid is applied, not the sticker tuition alone.
Most admitted students don't pay full COA. Texas Law reports that 94% of students receive some form of grant aid, with a median grant among recipients of $23,375 — more than 60% of the tuition portion of the bill for a typical grant recipient. Looking at how that aid is distributed: 40% of students receive a grant covering less than half of tuition, 44% receive one covering between half and full tuition, and 3% receive a full-tuition grant. In other words, the bulk of aid recipients land in the "meaningful but partial" band rather than at either extreme — a small full-ride cohort exists, but it's a small one.
No — and this is worth understanding before you compare offers. A "conditional scholarship" at many law schools is awarded at 1L and then contingent on hitting a GPA benchmark after the mandatory grading curve, so a chunk of the incoming class predictably loses part or all of their award after first year regardless of effort. Texas Law does not structure its aid this way. The school's own reporting explicitly states it does not award conditional scholarships, and its retention data shows no entering cohort with reduced awards in the years reported. If Texas Law gives you a grant, the amount you're told at admission is the amount you should plan around for the duration of the degree — there's no hidden reset tied to your class rank after 1L grades post.
That matters more than it might sound. A conditional award that looks generous on an admission letter can function as a one-year discount if a student lands in the bottom of a mandatory curve; a non-conditional award removes that risk entirely from the financial planning equation. At Texas Law, the number on your offer letter is the number for all three years.
Texas Law is required by the Texas legislature to reserve 65% of each entering class for Texas residents, which typically means meaningfully different tuition rates for residents and non-residents at public law schools. The tuition figure in Texas Law's own data compilation is a single annual number; it does not break out a separate non-resident rate, so applicants who expect to pay out-of-state tuition should verify the current non-resident figure directly with the school rather than assume the $38,236 figure applies to them. Application fees and firm deadlines are similarly not specified in the school's public data and should be confirmed on the admissions site before applying.
For a broader walkthrough of how to read and negotiate a scholarship offer once you have one in hand, see the shared guide on law school scholarship negotiation — the mechanics there apply generally, but the absence of a conditional trapdoor is specific to how Texas Law structures its aid.
Illustrative: 3-year borrowing at the 2026-27 federal rate (8.07%) over 10 years; your figures depend on your offer and salary.
Yes — Texas Law sends a large share of each class into the largest law firms, and the number is unusually high for a school outside the traditional New York/DC corridor: 39.3% of the Class of 2024, or 121 of 308 graduates, took jobs at firms of 501 or more attorneys, the size band commonly called "Big Law." That single category is larger than every other employment outcome the school reports combined, and it's the number that should anchor any conversation about what a Texas Law degree is actually for.
Very. Texas Law's own firm-size breakdown for its graduating class shows a steep skew toward the largest firms: 121 graduates at firms of 501+ attorneys, compared with just 5 at firms of 251-500 attorneys, 9 at firms of 101-250, 10 at firms of 51-100, 5 at 26-50, 10 at 11-25, 16 at 1-10, and 3 who went solo. Add it up and roughly 60% of the class landed at a firm of some size, but the distribution isn't a smooth curve — it's a spike at 501+ and then a long, thin tail. That pattern is characteristic of a school with a genuine on-campus recruiting pipeline into the largest national and Texas-based firms, rather than one where big-firm hiring is scattered and opportunistic.
Three structural facts in the data point to the answer. First, Texas is home to some of the largest law firms in the country, headquartered or heavily staffed in Houston and Dallas, and Austin itself has grown as a satellite office market for national firms chasing the city's tech and energy sectors — Texas Law's data shows the largest single employment category for its graduates is Texas itself, meaning the school's Big Law placement is substantially a story about the Texas legal market, not just a handful of NY offices cherry-picking a few graduates. Second, Texas Law's academic reputation — a U.S. News rank of 16 for 2026-27, ten student-edited journals including the flagship Texas Law Review, and a class with a 172 median LSAT and 3.89 median GPA — gives recruiters a credible signal at both the top and middle of the class. Third, the school is explicitly called out as being among the top ten law schools nationally for federal clerkship placement, and its 2024 data shows 44 federal clerkships and 12 state/local clerkships secured by its graduates — a clerkship pipeline that itself often feeds directly into subsequent Big Law hiring, since many large firms recruit and pay bonuses for former clerks.
The remaining ~60% split across several tracks: 8.1% (25 graduates) went into government roles, 9.7% (30 graduates) went into public interest positions, and a smaller number (12 graduates) went into business and industry roles. Combined with the firm placements outside the 501+ band, this means Texas Law's graduating class is not a monolithic Big-Law-or-nothing outcome — there's a real government and public-interest cohort, aided by clinics like the Actual Innocence Clinic, Capital Punishment Clinic, and Civil Rights Clinic that channel students toward those paths before graduation. But numerically, the 501+ firm category dwarfs every other single outcome category the school reports.
It's worth noting these placement numbers sit on top of very strong baseline outcomes: 99% of the Class of 2024 was employed in a job either requiring bar passage or classified as JD-advantage nine months after graduation, and the school's first-time bar passage rate was 96.39% against a Texas state average of 83.01% — a gap of roughly 13 points. In practice, that means the Big Law placement figure isn't offsetting a shaky floor elsewhere; it's sitting on top of a class that is, by and large, passing the bar on the first attempt and finding law-related work of some kind.
A 39.3% Big Law placement rate is a strong, well-above-typical outcome for any law school, and the concentration of Texas-market employers plus a genuine clerkship pipeline suggests the pathway is structural rather than a fluke of one strong graduating class. That said, the pack reflects one class year's outcomes; year-to-year hiring at large firms fluctuates with the broader legal market, and general labor-market context is worth keeping in mind — new-associate compensation nationally is bimodal, with a large cluster at the biggest firms and a much lower, larger cluster everywhere else. Where any individual graduate lands within that distribution depends on factors — grades, journal membership, clerkship timing, personal networking — that this data doesn't capture at the individual level. For a general primer on how that bimodal salary distribution and the broader legal job market work, see the shared guide on whether law school is worth it.
Texas Law places graduates into federal clerkships at a rate the school itself identifies as among the top ten nationally, and the raw numbers back that up: of the 308 graduates in the reporting class, 44 landed federal clerkships and another 12 secured state or local clerkships, for 56 total judicial clerks out of a single graduating class.
That is not a byproduct of size alone — plenty of larger classes produce far fewer clerks. It reflects a faculty bench stacked with judges' favorite kind of teacher: people who have argued before the Supreme Court, run national security law programs, and written the treatises clerks are expected to have read. Tara Grove (Vinson & Elkins Chair), Richard Albert (Baker Chair), Dean Robert Chesney (a Lawfare co-founder), and emeritus scholars like Douglas Laycock and Sanford Levinson give students direct exposure to constitutional law, federal courts, and appellate practice at a depth that clerkship-hiring judges specifically screen for. The school's own alumni network includes graduates now arguing before the Supreme Court, such as Alejandra Ávila (Class of 2014), who clerked at the Court itself before becoming an appellate litigator — a pipeline effect where clerkship alumni return to mentor and recommend current students.
The Supreme Court Litigation Clinic is one of sixteen clinics the school runs. Combined with ten student-edited journals — led by the flagship Texas Law Review — students have multiple credential-building tracks (journal, clinic, moot court) that judges use as shorthand for clerkship readiness.
What this means practically for an applicant: if a federal or state appellate clerkship is part of your long-term plan (a common stepping stone toward BigLaw litigation partnership, academia, or government service), Texas Law's clerkship output — 56 clerks from one class, spread across federal and state/local courts — is a legitimate, verifiable reason to weight the school heavily, distinct from and in addition to its overall employment numbers. The school does not publicly break out clerkships by circuit or by state supreme court in the data available here, so applicants targeting a specific court should confirm placement history directly with the career office.
Texas Law graduates pass the bar on their first attempt at a 96.39% rate, more than 13 percentage points above the reported state average of 83.01% — and that gap has held up, not spiked once. Looking back further, the school's first-time passage rate ran 90.39% in 2022, 94.01% in 2023, and 96.52% in 2024, a steady climb rather than a one-year anomaly, with 2025 reporting continuing at roughly 96%.
The ultimate pass rate — measured over two years, capturing anyone who needed a second attempt — reaches 96.47%, meaning the first-time number already captures nearly the entire graduating class's eventual bar success. In practical terms, a Texas Law graduate who does not pass on the first sitting is a rare exception, not a pattern the school needs to manage through retake support.
Because the vast majority of Texas Law's class stays in-state for practice — the pack identifies Texas itself as the largest single destination for graduates — most of this cohort is sitting for the Texas bar specifically, where the school also reports a 95.57% first-time rate for the Class of 2024.
For applicants, the takeaway is straightforward and quotable: a 96%+ first-time pass rate against an 83% state average means bar passage risk — a real financial and career risk at many law schools — is close to a non-issue at Texas Law. That said, bar rules and UBE/NextGen transition timelines are shifting nationally in the years ahead; anyone planning to practice outside Texas should verify how portable their intended-state's exam will be and confirm current pass-rate reporting directly with the school before relying on it as a multi-year guarantee.
Texas Law reports that 99% of its class of 308 graduates landed in jobs that are either bar-passage-required or JD-advantage roles, and a separate, stricter measure — full-time, long-term, bar-passage-required jobs only — still reached 93.0% nine months after graduation, with an overall employment rate of 98.80%. Read together, those numbers describe a class that is, functionally, fully employed, with only a thin margin working in unclassified or non-JD roles.
BigLaw (defined as firms of 501+ attorneys) is the single largest outcome, absorbing 121 graduates, or 39.3% of the class — a substantial share, but it is far from the whole story. The remaining firm-size distribution shows real depth across the market: 16 graduates went to firms of 1-10 attorneys, 10 to firms of 11-25, 5 to firms of 26-50, 10 to firms of 51-100, 9 to firms of 101-250, and 5 to firms of 251-500, plus 3 who went solo. That spread means Texas Law is not a school that only works for students aiming at the largest firms; mid-size and boutique firm placement is a genuine, populated track.
Outside private practice, government employment absorbed 25 graduates (8.1%) and public interest work took another 30 (9.7%) — together nearly 18% of the class, a meaningful cohort for anyone weighing a public-service-oriented legal career. Judicial clerkships (44 federal, 12 state/local) pull another 56 graduates out of the private-practice count entirely, and business/industry roles accounted for 12 more. The school's own data identifies Texas itself as the largest single destination for its graduates overall, consistent with the state legislature's mandate that 65% of each entering class come from Texas residents and with the bar-passage patterns discussed elsewhere in this guide.
For an applicant thinking about the public-interest or government path specifically, note that Texas Law runs sixteen clinics — including the Immigration Clinic, Civil Rights Clinic, Domestic Violence Clinic, Disability Rights Clinic, and Capital Punishment Clinic — giving students supervised casework experience before graduation. Graduates who go this route and carry federal loans should also understand how Public Service Loan Forgiveness works in the current system, since qualifying for it requires enrolling in an income-driven repayment plan rather than the default standard plan — a distinction covered in this guide's loan and PSLF section (see /law-school-loans-and-pslf).
Yes — Texas Law runs 16 in-house clinics, and the numbers behind them show this isn't a boutique offering tacked onto the curriculum but a core part of how students spend their second and third years. Across the school's clinical program, 356 clinic seats are offered and 321 are filled in a given cycle, meaning the vast majority of students who want a clinic placement get one. That's on top of 81 filled field placements (externships with judges, agencies, or public-interest offices) and 1,042 filled simulation-course seats — the practice-based courses (trial advocacy, negotiation, drafting) that build litigation and transactional skills before students ever touch a live case.
The 16 clinics span a wide range of practice areas. On the criminal and wrongful-conviction side, students can work in the Actual Innocence Clinic, the Capital Punishment Clinic, the Criminal Defense Clinic, and the Juvenile Justice Clinic. On civil rights and access-to-justice, there's the Civil Rights Clinic, the Immigration Clinic, the Domestic Violence Clinic, the Disability Rights Clinic, the Children's Rights Clinic, the Employment Rights Clinic, the Housing Clinic, and the Housing Policy Clinic. Students interested in transactional or policy work can join the Entrepreneurship and Community Development Clinic, the Environmental Clinic, or the Law and Religion Clinic, while those drawn to appellate practice have the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.
Several dedicated centers give students a research and advocacy infrastructure beyond the classroom, including the Budd Innocence Center, the Capital Punishment Center, and the William Wayne Justice Center for Public Interest Law. This clinic-center pairing is a distinguishing feature: students aren't just taking a class, they're plugging into an ongoing institutional practice with real clients, real deadlines, and real consequences — the Actual Innocence Clinic and Capital Punishment Clinic in particular put students on cases where the stakes are as high as legal work gets.
For applicants weighing experiential learning as a decision factor, the combination of clinic seats, field placements, and simulation courses matters more than any single number: it signals that a Texas Law student who wants hands-on practice before graduation has multiple, overlapping ways to get it, not just one oversubscribed clinic competing for a handful of slots.
Texas Law's history is inseparable from two of the most consequential court cases on race and legal education in American history — one that forced the school open, and one that later tried to close a door on how it could consider race. Founded in 1883 as the University of Texas at Austin's Department of Law, the school spent much of its first six decades admitting only white students.
That changed because of Heman Marion Sweatt, who applied to Texas Law in 1946 and was denied admission solely because he was Black. Rather than admit him, the state attempted to create a separate law school for Black students. In 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Sweatt v. Painter that this separate institution was not equal to Texas Law, and ordered Sweatt admitted. The case is widely recognized as a direct precursor to Brown v. Board of Education four years later, and it makes Texas Law one of a small number of American law schools whose admissions history is itself a Supreme Court precedent. Sweatt is now listed among the school's notable alumni for that role. The first African American student to graduate followed a few years later: Virgil C. Lott in 1953, with Gloria Bradford becoming the first African-American woman to graduate from Texas Law in 1954.
The reckoning didn't end there. Four decades later, Texas Law became the subject of Hopwood v. Texas (1996), in which the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the school's consideration of race in admissions — a decision that, for a period, barred race-conscious admissions across the circuit. That ruling was effectively reversed by the Supreme Court's 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld race as one factor among many in holistic admissions review nationally. Together, Sweatt and Hopwood bookend a half-century arc in which Texas Law moved from state-mandated exclusion to a defendant in one of the pivotal affirmative-action cases of the modern era.
The school's own list of notable alumni reflects that arc as much as any other achievement: alongside U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark and Secretary of State James A. Baker sits Wallace B. Jefferson, who became the first African American Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, and Sarah Weddington, the litigator who represented Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade. For applicants who care about a school's civil-rights record as more than a historical footnote, Texas Law's history is not incidental — it is part of the case law itself.
The two names in that heading are real, and they capture how differently "faculty" can look at Texas Law. Robert M. Chesney, the current dean and holder of the Baker III Chair in the Rule of Law and World Affairs, co-founded Lawfare. On the other end of the spectrum, Ted Cruz taught as an adjunct professor of Constitutional Law at Texas Law before his current role as a U.S. Senator — and Elizabeth Warren taught at the school earlier in her career, before she, too, became a U.S. Senator. Between a sitting dean running one of the most-cited legal blogs in the country and two future senators who once graded exams here, the range of what "who teaches you" can mean at Texas Law is unusually wide.
The rest of the roster reads like a cross-section of major constitutional and public-law scholarship. Karen Engle founded and co-directs the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. Douglas Laycock and Sanford Levinson are both chaired professors (Laycock now emeritus). Philip Bobbitt teaches as a Distinguished Senior Lecturer. Newer additions extend that bench: Maria Ponomarenko joined in 2022, Tara Grove holds the Vinson & Elkins Chair, and Richard Albert holds the Baker Chair.
Texas Law has also functioned as a launching pad for scholars who went on to prominent chairs elsewhere — a fact worth knowing both for what it says about the school's hiring and about faculty turnover. Stephen Vladeck left for Georgetown Law, Brian Leiter (who founded the school's Law and Philosophy Program) moved to the University of Chicago, Jack Balkin is now the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale, and Mitchell Berman is now at Penn. Prospective students should treat any specific professor's current availability as something to verify directly with the school, since faculty rosters change year to year.
Beyond individual scholars, the faculty's specialties are institutionalized in a dense set of centers: the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, the Center for Women in Law, the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center, the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law, the Institute for Transnational Law, and — reflecting the state's economy — the Kay Bailey Hutchison Energy Center. For an applicant choosing a school partly on faculty fit, Texas Law's roster spans national-security law, constitutional theory, human rights, and energy law under one roof, with the added texture of a dean who helped build one of the field's most-read publications and alumni-faculty who now legislate the laws their former colleagues teach.
Texas Law publishes ten student-edited journals, anchored by the flagship Texas Law Review. Alongside it sit nine specialty journals that let students build a scholarly record in a specific field before they ever sit for the bar: the American Journal of Criminal Law, the Texas Environmental Law Journal, the Texas Hispanic Journal of Law and Policy, the Texas Intellectual Property Law Journal, the Texas International Law Journal, the Texas Journal of Oil, Gas & Energy Law, the Texas Journal on Civil Liberties & Civil Rights, the Texas Review of Law and Politics, and The Review of Litigation.
That breadth matters for how a student experiences scholarship at Texas: someone headed toward energy law can write and edit for the Oil, Gas & Energy journal while someone interested in constitutional litigation can do the same on the Review of Law and Politics, rather than competing for a single generalist slot. The journal roster also mirrors the school's research centers — the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, the Kay Bailey Hutchison Energy Center, and the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center, among others — which give faculty and students overlapping venues to publish and workshop ideas rather than a single, siloed law review track.
Texas Law's alumni roll includes a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, two Cabinet secretaries, and one of the country's most recognized Supreme Court advocates — evidence that the school has long produced graduates who reach the top of both government and appellate practice. Tom C. Clark went on to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice and U.S. Attorney General; James A. Baker became U.S. Secretary of State; and Lloyd Bentsen served as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and a longtime U.S. Senator. On the advocacy side, Lisa Blatt is one of the most prominent Supreme Court advocates practicing today, and Wallace B. Jefferson became the first African American Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court.
That pipeline into elite appellate and government work is not just historical. The school reports 44 federal clerkships and 12 state and local clerkships from a recent graduating class, placing it among the top ten schools nationally for federal clerkship placement — the credential that most directly precedes Supreme Court and appellate practice. A more recent example is Alejandra Ávila (Class of 2014), who clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court and now practices as an appellate litigator. The school's history is also inseparable from civil rights law: Heman Marion Sweatt's exclusion and later admission produced Sweatt v. Painter (1950), a direct precursor to Brown v. Board of Education, and Virgil C. Lott and Gloria Bradford became, in 1953 and 1954, the first Black man and first Black woman to graduate from the school.
Texas Law admitted roughly 14% of applicants for its most recent entering class — 881 offers out of 6,297 applications for a class of 373 — which puts it firmly in the range where median numbers function as planning anchors, not predictors of your own outcome. The school's 25th/50th/75th percentile LSAT is 166/172/173, and its GPA percentiles are 3.75/3.89/3.96. A 172 LSAT and a 3.89 GPA sit at Texas's medians; a 173 LSAT or a 3.96 GPA sits at its 75th percentile band. An applicant below the 166/3.75 floor is competing from below the school's published 25th percentile on that metric, which is useful to know when building a realistic list rather than assuming a chance of admission either way.
One structural wrinkle is specific to Texas: state law requires the school to reserve 65% of each entering class for Texas residents. That doesn't change the LSAT or GPA bar itself, but it does mean the applicant pool and the seats available split along residency lines in a way most private schools' numbers don't reflect. A nonresident applicant is competing for a smaller pool of seats even though the school reports one blended set of LSAT/GPA percentiles, which is a reason to treat those percentiles as a floor for competitiveness rather than a guarantee of parity across residency status.
On the test itself, the LSAT has used its current format since August 2024: two scored Logical Reasoning sections, one scored Reading Comprehension section, and one unscored variable section, with Logic Games removed entirely. Argumentative Writing is now a separate, unscored, online-proctored writing sample submitted apart from the multiple-choice exam. Schools consider an applicant's highest score, so a disciplined retake strategy — built around official practice material over a period of months rather than a single cram sprint — is generally how applicants move meaningfully within the 166-173 band that matters at a school like Texas. For the mechanics of building that study plan, see our guide on how to study for the LSAT.
Because GPA is fixed by the time you apply, the LSAT is usually the more controllable lever for moving from below Texas's 25th percentile toward its median. A jump from a 166 to a 172, for instance, moves an applicant from Texas's 25th percentile to its 50th — a meaningful shift given how compressed the 166-173 range is at a school this selective. Details on sequencing your file are in our law school application timeline guide.
Texas Law's published cost of attendance estimate is $63,634, built from $38,236 in tuition and roughly $25,398 in estimated off-campus living costs. Against that number, the school's aid picture is unusually broad: 94% of students receive grant aid, with a median full-time grant of $23,375. Roughly 40% of students receive an award covering less than half of tuition, 44% receive an award covering between half and the full tuition amount, and about 3% have full tuition covered — meaning the large majority of the class is paying a meaningfully discounted rate relative to the sticker tuition figure, even though very few pay nothing at all.
One detail worth building into any financing decision: Texas Law does not award conditional scholarships, the kind tied to maintaining a GPA threshold that a meaningful share of students at some schools lose after 1L year. That removes a specific risk that shows up elsewhere — a scholarship recipient at Texas isn't gambling next year's aid on beating a mandatory curve. It doesn't mean every award is guaranteed for all three years regardless of circumstance, but it does mean the retention-cliff dynamic that drives some students to renegotiate or transfer isn't part of the Texas model. For a general framework on evaluating and negotiating scholarship offers, see our law school scholarship negotiation guide.
On the borrowing side, the federal landscape changed for loans disbursed starting July 1, 2026: Grad PLUS loans, which used to let students borrow up to the full cost of attendance, were eliminated for new borrowers. In their place, the Direct Unsubsidized Loan is capped at $50,000 per year and $200,000 in aggregate for law students, within an overall $257,500 lifetime federal cap, at a rate of roughly 8.07% for 2026-27 plus about a 1.057% origination fee (verify current figures before relying on them). Against Texas's roughly $63,634 all-in cost estimate, a $50,000 annual federal cap alone would leave a gap for a student without grant aid — which is precisely why the school's 94% grant-receipt rate and its median $23,375 award matter as much as the tuition number itself when estimating your real, expected cost.
On repayment, only two federal plans exist for new borrowers: a Tiered Standard Plan, which is the default and earns no credit toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP), an income-driven plan required if PSLF is part of the plan. Whether that matters to you depends heavily on where you land professionally: Texas reports about 8.1% of its recent graduating class in government roles and 9.7% in public interest, the population for whom RAP-and-PSLF is typically the relevant strategy, versus a much larger share entering large-firm practice where direct repayment on salary is the norm. For the general mechanics of loans, RAP, and PSLF, see our law school loans and PSLF guide, and for a broader framework on weighing debt against expected outcomes, see is law school worth it.
For a Texas resident, the math here is unusually favorable for a school ranked in the top 16 nationally: published tuition is $38,236 a year — though the school's data does not break out a separate resident rate — and the school's own estimate of full annual cost of attendance (tuition plus living expenses) is $63,634. That is a fraction of what peer-ranked private schools charge, and it changes the worth-it calculation considerably.
Start with the loan mechanics that apply to every law student starting in the 2026-27 aggregate borrowing year: Grad PLUS loans are gone for new borrowers, and federal Direct Unsubsidized loans cap out at $50,000 per year and $200,000 in aggregate (within a $257,500 lifetime cap across all federal student debt), at a rate expected around 8.07% plus roughly a 1% origination fee — verify current figures before you borrow, since these terms are newly effective and subject to revision. At many expensive private law schools, that $50,000 annual cap doesn't come close to covering the bill, forcing students into private loans to close the gap. At Texas Law's published cost of attendance, the federal cap alone is enough to cover most or all of a typical year's expenses, even before scholarships — a structural advantage that lowers the ceiling on how much debt a graduate is likely to carry relative to someone attending an equivalently ranked private school.
Scholarships push the picture further in students' favor. Ninety-four percent of the entering class receives some grant aid, and the reported median grant among full-time students is $23,375 — against $38,236 in tuition, that's more than a 60% discount for a typical grant recipient. The distribution is broad: about 40% of students receive an award covering less than half of tuition, 44% receive between half and full tuition, and roughly 3% attend tuition-free. There's no conditional-scholarship structure to worry about here — Texas Law does not award scholarships that get reduced or pulled based on maintaining a set class rank, which removes one of the more stressful variables law students elsewhere have to manage after 1L grades post. For the specific mechanics of comparing an offer's grant terms and negotiating with a competing offer, see the school-agnostic playbook at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation.
On the repayment side, only two federal plans exist going forward: a Tiered Standard Plan and the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP), which is the one that counts toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness. PSLF forgives remaining federal balances tax-free after 120 qualifying payments in government or 501(c)(3) work — relevant for the roughly 8% of Texas Law's Class of 2024 who went into government and the roughly 10% in public interest roles, plus the clerks among the class's 44 federal and 12 state/local clerkships, many of which lead into public-sector careers. It is far less relevant for the 39.3% of the class that went into firms of 501+ attorneys, where salaries are high enough that most graduates repay directly on the Standard Plan rather than chase forgiveness. The default enrollment is the Standard Plan, which earns zero PSLF credit, so anyone planning around forgiveness must actively opt into RAP — a detail worth flagging early, and one covered in more depth at /law-school-loans-and-pslf.
Put together, the outcomes side of the ledger — a 96.39% first-time bar pass rate against an 83.01% state average, and 99% of graduates in jobs requiring bar passage or a JD advantage nine months out — means the debt a Texas resident takes on is being weighed against a strong likelihood of employment and bar admission, even if it can't be framed as guaranteed. For an in-state applicant with a competitive scholarship, a top-16-ranked degree at roughly $40,000–$64,000 a year before aid, with federal loan caps that largely cover the bill, is a materially different financial proposition than the same ranking bought at private-school prices. Non-residents face the same tuition figure and the state's rule reserving 65% of seats for Texans, which is worth weighing separately — see /is-law-school-worth-it for the general framework on stacking a specific school's numbers against your own residency, budget, and career goals.