Salary
Average Salary: $95,000
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $3,966,060
Attorneys working for the Department of Justice make a starting salary of about $55,700, higher if you have experience working as a clerk (source).
Federal prosecutors working as assistant U.S. attorneys (AUSAs) make between $49,000 and $142,000 (source).
That is one huge range. We're talking bigger than the Andes.
It all depends on how much experience you have, where you worked, and whether or not you went to Harvard.
AUSAs make more if they spent a few years working as lawyers in the private sector, as opposed to those fresh out of school. AUSAs also make more money if they have judicial law clerk experience or advanced law degrees.
Of course, like everything else in the U.S. judicial system, there's a scale for that.
There's a huge range in salary, mainly because the U.S. Justice Department—let's just call it the JD—offers this thing called "locality" pay.
Locality pay says that certain areas cost a heck of a lot more money to live in, so a federal employee living in those places gets a higher salary.
It costs more money to live in NYC or L.A. or Washington, D.C., than it does to live in Buttsville, NJ, or Flint, MI, so the pay is different.
If only all jobs did this.
There's even a locality tool, if you want to see how much money a federal employee makes because of this due to the percentage increase.
As glorious as all this sounds, it's still not half as much as you'd make working for a big law firm. Plus you still have all those hefty student loans to pay back, remember?
Lawyers who work for the government are in it for reasons other than the money.