A lean home-office solo can open the doors for roughly $8,000 to $13,000 in hard costs in year one, depending on province — before an office, before marketing spend, and before the number that matters more than either, which is runway. Here's the budget in two parts: the regulator bill, which varies by province, and everything else, which mostly doesn't.
The regulator bill, by province (2026)
Every launch starts with the same two mandatory lines: your law society's practising fee and professional liability insurance. The 2026 numbers for the three largest common-law provinces:
| Mandatory line | Ontario | Alberta | BC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Law society practising fee | $2,080 | $2,790 | $4,336 + GST (includes indemnity) |
| Liability insurance / indemnity | $3,250 base (LAWPRO); new-lawyer discounts cut 20–50% in your first four years | $3,065 + GST (ALIA levy, includes cyber) | included in fee above |
| New-solo extras | Foundations of Sole Practice course, mandatory since 2025: $250, about 30 hours | – | – |
Three notes. Ontario's LAWPRO discounts are real money: 50/40/30/20 percent off across your first four years of call, plus a 50-percent part-time option (under 20 hours a week, under $100K gross billings), capped at 50 percent combined. Real estate and civil litigation practices in Ontario add transaction levies of $65 and $100 per file. And every law society publishes its current fee schedule, so if you're launching in another province, the structure is identical: pull the practising fee and the indemnity levy and substitute them into the math below.
Province-specific quirks surface at the worst moments, so ask someone who launched in yours: members flag Alberta's LLP registration wait and BC's trust-account signing requirements as the kind of thing nobody warns you about.
The lines that are the same everywhere
| Line item | Lean year-one cost |
|---|---|
| Business registration (e.g. Ontario sole prop $60; incorporation $300 + professional-corporation permit fees) | $60–$600 |
| Practice management software ($69–$129/user/month) | $830–$1,550 |
| Accounting software ($25–$80/month) | $300–$950 |
| Email/documents (Microsoft 365, $8–$30/user/month) | $100–$360 |
| Website, domain, email setup | $200–$800 (estimate) |
| Bookkeeping (legal-savvy, outsourced) | $150–$250/month (estimate) |
| Cyber and office insurance | varies (get quotes) |
Add the provincial table to this one and a lean setup lands around $8,000 in the cheapest configurations and $13,000 in the priciest.
One line item that isn't a cost but trips people anyway: GST/HST. Registration is mandatory once revenue passes $30,000 over four consecutive quarters (or in a single quarter), but most new firm owners register voluntarily from day one. It lets you claim back the tax on startup purchases, and registering late means redoing invoices at the worst possible time. Five minutes with the CRA, ideally the same week you register the name.
A worked example
Numbers in a table hide the shape of the year, so here's a composite launch with Ontario numbers — swap in your province's regulator lines from the table above. A family lawyer, eight years called, opening a home-office practice in September.
Her September outlay: law society fee already paid for the year, insurance at the full $3,250 (eight years called, so no new-lawyer discount), $60 to register the name, first month of software at about $215, and $400 for the website and domain. Call it $4,000 to be open. October through December adds the bookkeeper at $200 a month once the trust account opens, the sole-practice course fee, and quarterly software bills. By year-end she's spent about $7,500 in hard costs. The number on her mind is a different one: the $35,000 of household runway she budgeted to bridge the gap until family-law retainers turn into steady collections. Setup to runway, roughly one to four. That's the shape of most launch budgets.
It also explains where members say to be cheap. Be cheap on the office, the branding, and the subscriptions. Don't be cheap on the bookkeeper, the insurance, or the runway.
The office question
The biggest swing in any startup budget is the line I left out of the tables: space. The 2026 answer is that the home office won. Most new solos in our community launched from home, meet clients in borrowed boardrooms or on video, and put the rent money into runway. Shared and co-working legal space in the major cities runs a few hundred to a thousand a month when you want a downtown address. Fine, but treat it as a year-two upgrade, not a launch requirement. The clients mostly don't care. The lawyers took longer to accept that than the clients did.
What you don't need yet
The spending members regret is consistent.
Premium research subscriptions before revenue. Members have been quoted five figures a year for research tools, for practices that didn't yet have files to run on them. CanLII is free and covers more than you'd think. Buy the premium database when a paying file needs it.
Directories and paid leads. The consensus inside our community is blunt: referrals and your own name build practices. Directory listings build the directory's revenue.
Custom-everything branding. A clean template site and a real headshot beat a $15,000 brand identity for a firm with no clients. The website's job in year one is to not embarrass you when someone Googles the name they were just referred.
Staff on day one. The first hire is a real decision, and I've written up the math, but for most it's a month-six decision, not a launch line item.
Runway is the real cost
The hard costs are the small number. The real cost of starting a firm is the gap between opening and getting paid, and in litigation that gap can run a year. Six to twelve months of your personal burn rate is the figure to secure before you resign: savings, a line of credit, or a household income that can carry the bridge. A $10,000 setup with three months of runway fails where the same setup with twelve months succeeds. The setup money buys software and insurance. The runway buys time to build a pipeline, and that's the purchase that decides the year. It's why the going-solo post spends more words on where files come from than on what anything costs.
Check the numbers with people who've paid them
Every budget line above came from members of Inn Laws who started firms recently enough that the invoices are still searchable. That's what a vetted community does that a blog post can't: when your insurance renewal looks wrong or your software quote feels high, someone who paid the same bill last quarter, in your province, can tell you in an hour.
If you're building this budget for real, apply below. Bring the spreadsheet to the screening conversation. It makes the fit obvious fast, in both directions.
All figures as of June 2026, in CAD. Fee schedules change annually. Confirm with your law society, your insurer, and vendors before committing.