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Welcome to the 13th edition of The GRM Group’s Legal Remuneration Report - the most comprehensive, data-led salary benchmarking tool for South Africa’s legal industry.
Our research arm, Nabii Intel, is Africa’s leading independent legal market intelligence firm, helping law firms make smarter, data-led growth decisions. The research in this report, together with 13 years of accumulated market data, underpins our work with legal teams to build sustainable, competitive talent acquisition and remuneration models.
Thank you to every participant who contributed data, context, and candour to this edition. Your input continues to strengthen the quality and relevance of this research.
As always, we welcome corrections. Our commitment is to the integrity of the data, not to the infallibility of any single edition.
If there is a single thread running through this report, it is differentiation. Legal remuneration in South Africa continues to rise, but the market is no longer moving as a single block. Growth varies significantly across roles, sectors, and seniority, with the strongest increases where client revenue, regulatory exposure, and talent scarcity intersect.
At the senior end of the market, general counsel packages are projected to increase by approximately 11% into 2027/28, reaching a median of R3,642,958 and a 90th percentile of R5,843,620. Equity-partner drawings are projected to increase by around 7%, with a median of R8,025,156 and a 90th percentile of R23,914,553. Leadership roles within alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) sit between these two groups, with director and executive remuneration at a median of R6,490,990.
The picture is more restrained at associate level. Across in-house, private practice, and ALSP roles, salary budgets are currently 2-3% below expected CPI, indicating more limited real-terms growth for lawyers at this level.
Sector remains an important differentiator. Among in-house legal teams, the highest-paying sectors - including retail banking, investment banking, and energy - offer median general counsel remuneration more than R1 million above that seen in the lowest-paying sectors, including general retail, logistics, and FMCG.
Four factors increasingly shape remuneration: segment, seniority, practice area or sector, and location. Their interaction matters more than any one factor in isolation.
Job title alone is becoming a less reliable guide to remuneration. The organisation a lawyer works for, their practice area, location, and individual contribution can all materially influence the value attached to a role.
The in-house legal function is also continuing to evolve as a senior corporate role. As regulatory complexity, commercial exposure, and the importance of legal risk management increase, experienced in-house lawyers are being remunerated in ways that increasingly reflect their broader contribution to the business.
Looking ahead to 2027/28, we expect this differentiation to persist.
Employers should plan for a further approximately three-percentage-point widening between their highest- and lowest-paying quartiles at each level by the 2027/28 remuneration review.
This does not mean that every organisation will experience the same pressures. Rather, remuneration is increasingly becoming a strategic choice: employers need to determine where they intend to compete, which talent they need to attract and retain, and how those choices will be supported through productivity, portfolio discipline, and the broader employee proposition.
A competitive package is also no longer defined by cash alone. Flexibility, development, sponsorship, and clarity of career path can increasingly influence close offers and retention, particularly where employers are competing for scarce expertise.
For professionals, the same differentiation creates both opportunity and responsibility. The market is rewarding particular specialisms and combinations of expertise, making it increasingly important to benchmark total reward rather than base salary alone, and to understand remuneration in the context of the relevant city, sector, practice area, and career level. The three segments - in-house, private practice and ALSP - should also be viewed as different routes through the same broader legal careers market, rather than as entirely separate worlds.
In that environment, averages can mislead. The organisations that compete most effectively for legal talent will be those that understand precisely where they intend to play, make informed remuneration choices, and communicate those choices clearly to their people and to the market.
We will continue to track these developments closely and share what we learn. We hope this report earns a place on the desk, and in the budget conversations, of everyone who hires, manages, or advises legal talent in South Africa.
We welcome challenge and conversation; a benchmark is only as strong as the market it reflects.
How do you gather the data, and what is the sample size?
Sample sizes vary by role, sector, and seniority level. While it would be ideal to survey every legal professional in South Africa, our analysis draws on many thousands of interviews with legal professionals, together with 12 years of proprietary remuneration data collected through our ongoing market research.
The data draws on both a substantial body of current market input and a long-term view of remuneration trends. We also analyse the data across relevant dimensions, including city, sector, industry, role, and level of seniority, to provide meaningful benchmarks.
The survey is designed to help professionals and employers assess remuneration within the appropriate peer group or band. You can compare a current remuneration package with the market for comparable roles in your city, field, and industry.
Why do we refer to the immediate next two years?
Our remuneration forecasts are focused on the next remuneration cycle, rather than simply reporting on the current year.
For example, this edition looks ahead to 2027/28. Remuneration decisions for the new financial year are typically informed by what employers experienced in the preceding year, including changes in the market, inflation, talent demand, and business performance.
Employers often make these decisions during the remuneration review cycle, typically around September, before they take effect at the start of the new financial year. In this case, the decisions made during the 2026 review cycle inform remuneration that becomes effective in 2027/28 and applies through to 2028.
This approach allows the survey to provide a forward-looking view of remuneration based on current market evidence and the decisions employers are making for the upcoming remuneration cycle.
Are you just using AI?
No. The data analysis, scoring models and market intelligence referenced throughout this report are supported by AQ, The GRM Group’s proprietary analytical platform and closed AI tool, powered by Amazon Q in AWS QuickSight.
AQ is an enterprise-grade, permissions-based AI layer operating within AWS’s encrypted, GDPR-aligned, and POPIA-supportive cloud environment. It includes encryption at rest and in transit, comprehensive logging and role-based access controls suitable for regulated environments.
Teams from The GRM Group and AWS developed the platform over 18 months, enabling our data analysts and economists to build, train, and deploy machine-learning solutions that support our recruitment, market intelligence, and advisory services.
The GRM Group retains control of the methodology. We design and control the underlying assessment methodology for people, teams, firms, markets, and projections. AQ uses our proprietary datasets and mathematical scoring formulas, developed, tested, and refined in-house over more than 14 years, using a curated corpus of 17,000+ legal, corporate, and finance market documents.
AQ does not independently decide on candidate quality, firm attractiveness, or business projections. It provides a secure analytical interface through which we apply, report on, and visualise our own models and data. The information is not used to train public or open AI systems, and candidate, client and firm data remains within our controlled environment.
GRM consultants apply professional judgement to all model outputs before making final evaluations, rankings, or recommendations. Experienced professionals reviewed, interpreted, and validated every finding in this report rather than generating it through a fully automated AI system.
The technology accelerates our analysis. The judgement remains human.
Every year we hear from attorneys who regard this report as the most accurate picture of the market, and from others who feel the numbers sit some distance from their own experience. Both reactions are understandable. We draw the figures exclusively from actual data we collect.
Sample depth varies by job title, practice area, and sector, so some salary bands rest on denser evidence than others and are correspondingly more robust.
Outliers will always appear in any remuneration data set. They are most visible at the 10th and 90th percentiles, and become more pronounced when sample sizes are smaller or when the data is segmented more finely. Greater segmentation increases the chance that individual high or low observations influence the reported bands.
We welcome feedback and additional data submissions. All information is handled under strict confidentiality and data-protection protocols. Broader participation improves the reliability of future editions.
A clear grasp of how percentiles are calculated and what they represent is essential to interpret the salary bands correctly and use them effectively.
The salary bands presented in this report are derived from three complementary data sources, triangulated to reduce the influence of outliers and self-reporting bias:
For every role, segment, and sub-market, the combined data set was cleaned and then subjected to percentile analysis.
Five reference points are reported; the 10th, 25th, 50th (median), 75th and 90th percentiles and translated into four practical salary bands:
Band 4
75th - 90th
Market-leading/ premium platforms, scarce skills, top performers
Band 3
50th - 75th
Upper mainstream
Band 2
25th - 50th
Lower mainstream
Band 1
10th - 25th
Entry/developing end of the credible market
At every level surveyed, the mean is pulled materially above the median by a long upper tail. Benchmarking to an average therefore systematically overstates the mainstream market and understates the premium. Percentile bands show where the market actually clusters and where it thins out.
The remuneration data includes base salaries, short-term incentives (e.g., bonuses), long-term incentives (e.g., stock options, profit shares), and total cash compensation.
To interpret the data:
This report is published by The GRM Group for general informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal, financial, tax, or professional advice of any kind, and should not be relied upon as a substitute for independent professional counsel tailored to your specific circumstances.
The data, analysis, projections, and commentary contained in this report represent our independent research, drawn from verified placement data, structured surveys, employer validation interviews, and our proprietary analytical methodology developed over more than 14 years. While we have made every effort to ensure accuracy, we acknowledge that no dataset is exhaustive and no projection is certain. The legal market is dynamic and individual circumstances vary widely.
We welcome corrections. If any figure, finding, or characterisation in this report is inaccurate or incomplete, we invite readers to contact us directly so that we may review and, where appropriate, amend. Our commitment is to the integrity of the data, not to the infallibility of any single edition.
No part of this report should be interpreted as a recommendation to accept, reject, or renegotiate any specific employment offer, compensation package, or business transaction.
© 2026 The GRM Group. All rights reserved.
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