Elon Law lists tuition at $42,504 per year, $127,512 over three years, about $187,512 once living costs are added. That is the sticker, and at this tier the sticker is unusually negotiable: schools in this band compete hard on price for above-median credentials, which makes your LSAT score the single biggest variable in what you will actually pay.
Line itemFigureNoteAnnual tuition$42,504The pre-leverage numberThree-year tuition$127,512Full-program stickerLiving expenses~$20,000 / yrGreensboro, North CarolinaThree-year cost of attendance~$187,512The real all-in numberMerit money opensLSAT 152+Where awards begin
Less than the table says, if you bring leverage: merit awards open above an LSAT of 152 and scale from there, and they routinely cut the real cost well under the published figure. Sticker is what the unleveraged pay, treat it as a starting quote.
Understand what a scholarship is from Elon Law’s side of the table: a purchase. The school buys the credentials its ranking requires, and the budget flows to applicants whose numbers defend the published medians. That is why awards cluster above the median, why they grow with distance from it, and why a written offer from a peer school changes the conversation, it puts a market price on you. Always negotiate in writing.
Withheld Tip: sequence matters more than persistence. The largest allocations go to the early pool, apply by November 1, but your negotiating position is set by the offers you hold when awards are decided. Build the peer-school applications first, so the competing numbers exist before the school prices you, not after.
Do the arithmetic the brochure will not do for you: three years of ($42,504 minus your scholarship, plus about $20,000 to live) with interest running from day one. Hold the total against real first-year incomes, regional $65 to 130K, government $55 to 90K, BigLaw $215K where it applies. At sticker, this degree costs about 1.9 years of a regional first-year salary, the single most clarifying ratio in the decision. A degree that only works in the best-case income is not a plan; it is a wager with a registrar’s office.
Non-negotiable: the debt model runs on the middle of the income distribution. Building it on the BigLaw number is how applicants talk themselves into prices the actual job market will not service. And if public interest is the path, treat LRAP as a document to read, not a rumor to rely on, terms vary and shift.
$42,504 at sticker; budget about $63,000 once living costs join the math. The operative number is yours, not the school’s, awards that open above an LSAT of 152 routinely rewrite the figure for applicants who bring leverage.
Merit aid at this tier is negotiation-responsive, particularly to written competing offers from peer schools. The negotiation is standard practice, not an imposition, aid offices expect it from leveraged applicants.
That is the sticker question, and sticker is the wrong denominator. Worth is your scholarship-adjusted cost against the school’s real placement outcomes, a calculation that takes ten minutes and changes more decisions than any ranking.
Treat tuition as the output of a process you control, not a fact you absorb. The applicants who pay least are not the luckiest, they are the ones who built leverage on purpose: a score above the median, peer offers in hand, and a November application. Price is the last thing the LSAT buys you, and it is usually the biggest.