Salaries for lawyers starting out at firms have remained flat, with an annual pay of $160,000 continuing to be the top of the market, according to a new survey from the National Association for Law Placement.

Some 39 percent of the largest firms — those with 700 lawyers or more — reported paying that amount in the association’s 2015 law associates’ salary survey. This was up from last year, when only 27 percent of the big firms reported paying their new legal hires at the uppermost level.

But the percentage was still below 2009, when nearly two-thirds of the first-year salaries were at the top point of $160,000.

The reason is not that individual firms are paying less, said James G. Leipold, executive director of National Association for Law Placement, but “as more law firms have grown through acquisition and merger, the largest law firms are not as similar to one another as they used to be.”