$980 to Draft Terms and Conditions: Lawyer Fees in 2026

Hiring a lawyer to draft a terms and conditions page costs $980 on average, according to marketplace data ContractsCounsel published and had current as of July 2026, based on 378 recently posted terms and conditions projects. Bids on individual projects range from roughly $500 to $5,000, and a straight review without new drafting runs cheaper, averaging $750. Hourly billing sits well above that per-project math: the national average lawyer charged $349 an hour in 2025.

How much does it cost to hire a lawyer to draft terms and conditions?

$980 is the average cost across 378 terms and conditions projects recently posted on ContractsCounsel, a legal marketplace where business lawyers bid on fixed-scope work. That figure sits inside a documented range of $500 to $5,000, with the low end covering a template-style adaptation and the high end covering custom drafting for marketplaces, subscription products, or sites with heavier liability exposure. ContractsCounsel is a for-profit marketplace that earns from matching clients with the 221 business lawyers active in this category, so its published average reflects bids submitted on its own platform, not a random sample of every lawyer in the country, and the site does not disclose a fixed measurement window beyond describing the data as recent, rolling activity.

Figure 1: Average cost across four related legal-drafting services. Source: ContractsCounsel, live marketplace data, accessed July 2026 (378 terms and conditions and 275 terms of service recent projects).

A $980 average project fee is a useful budget anchor, but it hides a wide range driven mostly by how much custom drafting, rather than adaptation of existing language, a site actually needs.

What do lawyers charge per hour for legal drafting work?

The national average lawyer hourly rate reached $349 in 2025, up about 4% from $336 in 2024, according to Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report. Clio's own report page could not be directly retrieved for this piece, so that figure is corroborated here through two independent outlets that separately reported on it, Attorney Review and ConsumerShield, rather than confirmed against Clio's original publication. Both describe Clio's underlying dataset as anonymized billing activity drawn from tens of thousands of legal professionals using its practice-management software, which skews toward smaller firms that adopt cloud billing tools rather than a random sample of every practicing lawyer.

Figure 2: Reported years only; gaps between 2016, 2019, 2020, 2024, and 2025 reflect which annual figures the secondary sources disclosed. Source: Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report, as reported by Attorney Review and ConsumerShield.

Practice area matters more than the national average suggests. Attorney Review put the 2025 range at $135 per hour for juvenile law up to $461 per hour for corporate law, a 3.4x spread. LegalZoom's cost guide, citing Statista and last updated in July 2024, separately puts general contract-drafting and review work at $150 to $350 per hour, a range that lands close to Clio's national average and offers rough, independent-ish corroboration, though LegalZoom sells its own DIY legal document templates and has its own reason to frame lawyer rates as expensive.

At $349 an hour, a $980 flat-fee terms and conditions project pencils out to less than three billed hours, which is one reason flat-fee marketplace pricing has become common for this specific document type.

How does the cost change with complexity and location?

Complexity, not geography, explains most of the spread inside ContractsCounsel's $500 to $5,000 range. Four sample state-based terms and conditions projects illustrate how wide a single state's bid range can run: Wisconsin drew 15 bids from $700 to $2,975, Pennsylvania drew 7 bids from $375 to $2,775, New Jersey drew 7 bids from $395 to $1,995, and Maryland drew 9 bids from $1 to $1,750, with that $1 figure reading as a token or promotional bid rather than a realistic quote.

Figure 3: Starting bid (x-axis) against highest bid received (y-axis) for four sample state projects; Maryland's near-zero floor reflects one $1 outlier bid among nine submissions. Source: ContractsCounsel, live marketplace project data, accessed July 2026.

State	Bids received	Low bid	High bid
Wisconsin	15	$700	$2,975
Pennsylvania	7	$375	$2,775
New Jersey	7	$395	$1,995
Maryland	9	$1	$1,750

Source: ContractsCounsel, live marketplace project data, accessed July 2026.

Every one of these four sample projects has a top bid well above the $980 platform-wide average, a reminder that averages compress a genuinely wide market: the same document, drafted for a simple content site versus a marketplace with payment processing and user-generated content, can carry a three-to-fourfold price difference.

Terms and conditions vs. terms of service: does the drafting cost differ?

Barely. ContractsCounsel's data puts terms of service drafting at $970 on average, just $10 below the $980 terms and conditions figure, across 275 recent projects and 164 active technology lawyers. The bigger gap shows up on the review side: a terms of service review averages $630 versus $750 for terms and conditions, a $120 difference. For a deeper look at how these documents get read, and how long they run, see our terms of service statistics for 2026, which covers reading behavior and document length across the same family of pages.

Figure 4: Share of the 653 combined terms and conditions and terms of service projects ContractsCounsel had recently logged as of July 2026 (378 T&C, 275 ToS). Source: ContractsCounsel.

The practical takeaway: businesses should not expect meaningfully different drafting fees based on which of these two names they use for the same core document. Review pricing is the more useful lever for cutting cost.

Is it cheaper to skip the lawyer and use a document generator instead?

For a site with standard clauses, no complex commerce, and no unusual liability exposure, a generator-drafted terms and conditions page covers the routine clauses at a fraction of the $980 average lawyer fee, leaving budget free for a flat-fee lawyer review only where it matters. A terms and conditions generator built for standard e-commerce and SaaS clauses produces that starting document in minutes rather than the roughly three billed hours a $980 flat fee implies at the $349 national hourly average.

Figure 5: A practical decision path between lawyer drafting and generator drafting based on business complexity and budget. Source: ContractsCounsel average cost data, general small business drafting practice.

Skipping legal review entirely carries its own cost, just not a billed one. Most users never read the document either way: how many users click agree without reading covers just how rarely anyone actually opens these pages before accepting them. That has not stopped publication from becoming standard practice regardless of who drafted the document; most SaaS companies publish a terms of service page whether or not a lawyer ever touched it.

The Bottom Line

$980 is a reasonable planning number for a lawyer-drafted terms and conditions page, but the real range, $500 to $5,000 on ContractsCounsel's own data, means the actual bill depends far more on document complexity than on which state a business is in. Hourly billing tells a similar story from a different angle: at a $349 national average rate, a $980 flat fee buys less than three hours of attorney time, which is why flat-fee and generator-first approaches have become common for this specific document. A generator-drafted starting point paired with a flat-fee review, averaging $750 for a full document, covers most standard sites for well under half of what a full custom drafting engagement costs, while reserving actual billed attorney hours for the complexity that genuinely needs them.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to hire a lawyer to draft terms and conditions? $980 on average, according to ContractsCounsel's marketplace data current as of July 2026, based on 378 recently posted terms and conditions projects among 221 active business lawyers on its platform. Individual bids range from about $500 to $5,000 depending on complexity.

What is the average hourly rate for a lawyer? $349 per hour nationally in 2025, up about 4% from $336 in 2024, according to Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report as reported by Attorney Review and ConsumerShield. Rates range from roughly $135 per hour for juvenile law up to $461 per hour for corporate law.

Is drafting a terms of service page cheaper than terms and conditions? Barely. Terms of service drafting averages $970 versus $980 for terms and conditions, a gap of just $10, according to ContractsCounsel. The bigger gap shows up in review costs: $630 for terms of service versus $750 for terms and conditions.

Can a document generator replace a lawyer for terms and conditions? For many informational sites and simple SaaS products, a generator-drafted terms and conditions page covers standard clauses at a fraction of the $980 average lawyer fee, though sites with complex commerce, subscriptions, or heavier liability exposure still benefit from at least a flat-fee lawyer review, which ContractsCounsel prices at $750 on average.

Where the Numbers Come From

1. ContractsCounsel. Accessed July 2026. "Terms and Conditions Lawyers." Average drafting cost $980, average review cost $750, based on 378 recent projects and 221 active business lawyers; state bid examples for Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland.
2. ContractsCounsel. Accessed July 2026. "Terms of Service Lawyers." Average drafting cost $970, average review cost $630, based on 275 recent projects and 164 active technology lawyers.
3. Attorney Review, reporting on Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report. Published May 27, 2026. National average lawyer hourly rate of $349 in 2025, up about 4% year over year, with a range of $135 to $461 by practice area.
4. ConsumerShield, reporting on Clio's Legal Trends data. National average lawyer hourly rate history, including $255 in 2016 and $336 in 2024, rising to $349 in 2025.
5. LegalZoom, citing Statista. Updated July 2024. General contract-drafting and review hourly rates of $150 to $350.

Note: All figures verified as of July 2026. ContractsCounsel's marketplace averages are a live, continuously updated figure rather than a fixed annual survey, and reflect bids on its own platform rather than a random sample of all lawyers. Clio's original 2025 Legal Trends Report page could not be directly retrieved for verification, so its hourly-rate figures are corroborated here through two independent secondary sources rather than the primary report itself. This post's figures will be refreshed at least twice a year as newer data publishes.