ABA 509 Reports Explained: How to Read Any Law School's Standard 509 Disclosure

What a 509 Report Is

Standard 509 of the ABA's accreditation standards requires every ABA-approved law school to publish a fixed set of consumer information in a fixed format. Schools submit the figures to the ABA's Section of Legal Education, and the ABA publishes them at abarequireddisclosures.org, with each school's report available for every year from 2011 to 2025. The site notes that the figures are submitted by the schools themselves; the ABA compiles them but does not audit each number.

Because every school reports the same fields under the same definitions, the 509 is the one law school dataset where a number at one school can be compared directly with the same number at another.

The Nine Sections

The Standard 509 Information Report is split into these sections, and the ABA site will compile any one of them across all schools for a given year:

• The Basics / Academic Calendar — school type, application fee and deadline, term structure.
• First Year Class — the admissions section: applications, offers, matriculants, LSAT and GPA percentiles.
• Curricular Offerings — class sizes, seminars, clinics, field placements.
• Faculty Resources — full-time and part-time faculty counts.
• JD Enrollment and Ethnicity — total enrollment by year and demographic.
• Grants and Scholarships — how many students receive grants and the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile award.
• Tuition and Fees / Living Expenses / Conditional Scholarships — sticker price and how many scholarships carried conditions that students failed to keep.
• Attrition — students who left, split into academic and other reasons.
• Transfers — students transferring in and out, with the GPA of transfers in.

Employment outcomes and bar passage outcomes are separate reports under their own tabs on the same site. They describe earlier graduating classes, not the entering class in the admissions section.

Reading the First Year Class Section

This is the section most applicants want, and four numbers do almost all the work. Here is Harvard Law School's fall 2025 entering class from its 509 report:

Source: ABA Standard 509 Information Report, Harvard University, 2025. Offers derived from the reported acceptance rate.

Turning the Numbers into Rates

• Acceptance rate = offers ÷ applications. Harvard: about 816 ÷ 8,872 = 9.2%.
• Yield = matriculants ÷ offers. Harvard: 483 ÷ about 816 = 59.2%.
• Matriculation rate = matriculants ÷ applications, which is the acceptance rate times the yield. Harvard: 5.4%.

Across all 196 schools reporting for fall 2025, applications totalled 517,127 and offers came to about 137,200. The median school admitted 35.5% of applicants and saw 31.4% of the students it admitted enroll. The extremes:

Source: ABA Standard 509 Information Reports, 2025, compiled by AdmitBase. Rates are rounded to one decimal.

Yield is worth reading alongside selectivity. BYU admitted 22.8% of applicants and 81.1% of them enrolled, the highest yield of any ABA school in 2025. A school with a high yield has to make fewer offers to fill its class, so its waitlist moves less.

Four Mistakes People Make Reading a 509

• Treating applications as applicants. One person applies to several schools, and each application is counted at each school. LSAC counted 82,487 applicants and 579,839 applications in the 2026 cycle, about seven per person (LSAC).
• Reading the percentiles as admission cutoffs. The 25th percentile is not a floor: a quarter of the enrolled class scored below it, and admitted students who chose another school are not counted at all.
• Mixing up the year. The 2025 report describes the class that entered in fall 2025. Compare like with like when you look at trends.
• Treating outcomes as admissions data. Bar passage and employment describe graduates of earlier classes. They tell you about the school, not about the class you would join.

Where to Get Every School's 509 at Once

The ABA site produces one school at a time or one section across all schools. AdmitBase compiles the First Year Class, tuition, grants, attrition, transfers and outcome data into a single series for every ABA school, admissions from 2017 and outcomes from 2023, with each row linked to the disclosure it came from. It powers every US law school acceptance rate on the site.