Low fees are a constant source of frustration for architects. As part of our Performance Review of the profession, Nat Barker delves into the issue.

In many countries architects are fed up. They feel underpaid, overworked and disrespected.

That was the finding of a major survey Dezeen conducted a year ago, and it echoes other studies that have attempted to gauge worker wellbeing in the profession.

At the core of the issue is a simple fact: most architecture studios struggle to make much money from the work they do.

“It is a real problem, and it’s a real problem for the majority of practices,” said Peter Farrall, a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool who co-wrote the Good Practice Guide on fees for the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

“There’s no question that fees are under massive pressure,” he told Dezeen.

“You can only afford to pay decent salaries and provide good working conditions if you have put forward the right fee.”

“Architecture is a weak profession”

Farrall was talking about the UK architecture profession, but the phenomenon is international.

“It’s just definitely the case that architecture is a weak profession, in the US particularly,” said Yale University professor Peggy Deamer, whose research focuses on architecture as a form of labour.

“People accept low wages because they know the firms they want to work for have low fees. That’s a common dynamic I’ve heard from students, which I think is tragic.”

The Fees Bureau, a division of Mirza & Nacey Research, has been compiling business data on architecture since the 1990s.

According to the bureau’s Architects Fees Index, in the UK, fees have actually grown 48 per cent since 2000, adjusting for building-costs inflation.

But these rising revenues have struggled to keep pace with wider inflation, ballooning insurance premiums and increasing responsibilities and complexities on projects – meaning margins have got tighter and tighter.


Dezeen research previously found that most architects feel underpaid

The Fees Bureau recently published research showing that in the UK, architects’ average annual salaries are now £13,000 lower than those of chartered surveyors.

Earlier this year, the bureau also produced the first ever Europe-wide study of the architecture profession for the Architects’ Council of Europe.

It found that, with a few notable exceptions such as Germany, Denmark and Switzerland, concerns about low earnings are affecting studios across the continent.

“They are all saying that they’re underpaid for what they’re expected to deliver – the responsibilities they have, the length of the training, everything,” Mirza & Nacey Research director Vince Nacey told Dezeen.

From an architect’s point of view it’s a sorry state of affairs, but how did it come about? And can anything be done?

“Race to the bottom”

Several decades ago, architects and their clients had little choice about the fees they agreed. They were set according to scales determined by professional bodies.

“A lot of older architects have happy memories of when there used to be an RIBA fee scale, which everybody was meant to work to then,” explained Farrall.

“And then, of course, Mrs Thatcher got rid of that because she thought it was restrictive.”

As governments pushed to liberalise markets in the late 20th century, they passed new competition laws, also known as antitrust laws.

Architects’ bodies came under pressure to drop fee scales. Under Margaret Thatcher as prime minister, the UK Government took action against the RIBA in 1982 and its fee framework became advisory-only.

The US Department of Justice took legal action against the AIA twice over fee schedules. Photo by Felix Lipov via Shutterstock

A decade later, it was watered down again to become merely loose guidance based on survey data. By 2009, the RIBA had stopped publishing information on fees altogether.

Similarly, in the US the American Institute of Architects (AIA) was sued twice by the federal government – once in 1972 and again in 1990 – over the issue of fee schedules.

“It’s seen by the Department of Justice as collusion, and so you cannot mention fees or wages at any AIA meeting at all,” said Deamer.

“This is where a weak profession comes into play,” she added. “The Department of Justice went after all the professions in the ’70s – didn’t just go after architecture – but other professions found a way around those.”

In the absence of overarching fee guidance, architecture fees became subject to secretive and often cutthroat bidding processes in which undercutting is rife.

“This lack of oversight fosters a rather inevitable race to the bottom as practices seek to win work,” said Mark Tuff, a partner at London- and Zurich-based architecture studio Sergison Bates.

“Without any common parameters, there is not much to limit that race.”

Tuff shares Deamer’s frustration that other professions, such as law, appear to have done a better job than architecture of protecting fees in the push for competitive markets.

He also points out that two of the main outliers on architecture fees – Switzerland and Germany – still have forms of “oversight” in place.

The Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects publishes guidance on “standard fees”, while Germany still has a government-approved fee schedule known as the HOAI.

Though the HOAI is under review after the European Court of Justice ruled that it breaches EU law in 2019, Tuff said the schedule “still persists as a starting point for discussions with clients on levels of fee”.

“We’re not driven by profit”

Of course, the end of fee schedules theoretically opened the possibility for architects’ fees to go up as well as down.

But, as Nacey delicately puts it, the ability to negotiate fees “may have left the architects in a position that they’re not at their strongest”.

Deamer is more robust. “I think we’re kind of laughed at by developers,” she said. “It’s the first place where they save money. If they say no to certain fees for one architect, they’ll find someone else willing to do it.”

Farrall agrees that a lack of business acumen has harmed many architects’ ability to command strong fees.

“Architects are passionate about design, they’re not quite so keen on running the business,” he said.

“That really isn’t the way we were all brought up, as it were, at college. We’re not driven by profit as many other professions are, actually.”

Farrall has even heard of studios offering fees at a loss to win particularly prestigious or award-worthy projects.

Sergison Bates is based between the UK and Switzerland, where fees vary significantly. Photo by Johan Dehlin

The picture for architects has arguably not been helped by increasingly cash-strapped public bodies seeking to save money on construction projects, and wily private-sector clients being eager to benefit from the efficiencies enabled by Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology.

Architects charge clients in three main ways – as an hourly rate, as a lump sum agreed in advance, or as a percentage of the total cost of the project.

The latter is most common, as it tends to be clients’ preferred approach.

“They can compare one architect with another very easily,” explained Farrall. “They’ve got a sense of what the last 20-storey building cost them and what they paid in fees, and they feel they can do a deal.”

But percentage fees can present a problem for architecture studios.

“There isn’t a direct relationship between the resources needed to deliver the project and the fee that’s being charged,” said Farrall.

“Delivering a project is really difficult. Stuff comes out of the woodwork and inevitably the goalposts change.”

A concerning number of architecture practices, he said, especially smaller ones, don’t have provisions in place for discussing additional fees in this situation. They can therefore find themselves losing money on a project as the hours rack up.

If clients insist on a percentage fee, Farrall recommends that studios start by working out how much a project is likely to cost them taking account of the risks, add some margin for profit, and then convert that figure into a percentage “with quite a few caveats”.

“If everybody was putting forward a fee which was properly viable and sustainable and allowed them to pay their staff properly and not require staff to take up the bumps when things go wrong and they’re having to do unpaid overtime, then fees would be a little bit more rational,” he argued.

In countries including the UK, small studios – which make up a large proportion of the architecture profession and mostly work on small residential projects – are facing a particularly difficult environment.

“There is very intense downward pressure on fees from those outside the profession – people calling themselves ‘architectural services’,” RIBA head of research Adrian Malleson told Dezeen.

“I suspect most people don’t know the difference between an architect and someone who provides architectural services, but the difference is very important.”

“I think they’re struggling with the fact that there’s so much competition, and the fact that a lot of people may only use an architect once in their lifetime and probably don’t know what distinguishes an architect from an architectural designer,” agreed Nacey.

“We’ve done this to ourselves”

That arguably feeds into a wider concern for architects.

“A lot of it comes back to communication of value,” said Malleson. “Quantifying the value of design and making the value of design apparent to clients is a challenge, and it has been a longstanding challenge.”

“To deliver really good design requires an awful lot of effort, and even when people are on sensible fees, those fees don’t necessarily reflect the amount of care that’s needed to deliver buildings of that quality,” added Farrall.

“And I still think we undervalue the skills and expertise we have.”

Deamer is of the view that architecture has lost respect by confining its focus to “the aesthetic dimension”.

“My whole position is that we’ve done this to ourselves,” she said. “We shouldn’t sit here saying, ‘oh my god, the public doesn’t understand us, the media doesn’t get us,'” she said. “We’ve done this to ourselves.”

The RIBA said it is “working to find a way” to provide more guidance on fees. Photo by Philip Vile

“In Switzerland architecture is very much seen as part of their craft – it’s like watchmaking – and it’s much more respected and better paid,” Deamer continued.

“Same with Germany, where architecture is really understood to be more of an engineering technical feat, there’s more respect for it.”

It’s a problem without easy answers, and there is little consensus on ways to drive up architecture fees.

Malleson suggests that fee mechanisms could shift to reflect the value of appointing a good architect by being pegged to outcomes such as thermal performance and water tightness, but admits this is “a long way off”.

As well as calling for unionisation, Deamer makes a proposal that will likely prove controversial among architects: abolishing licensing of the profession, so that it is no longer a protected term.

“If we were not a licensed profession, we would enter into the marketplace in a normal way and be able to claim our expertise in a more honest fashion,” she argued.

Other architects may be more likely to call for greater regulation rather than less – for the mandatory involvement of registered architects in construction projects. The Architects’ Journal recently reported that the UK Government is considering such a step.

At the very least, it’s common to hear complaints that professional bodies are not doing more to find ways of protecting fees without falling foul of competition laws.

Asked about this by Dezeen, the RIBA said it is “working to find a way” to provide clients with “direct advice on architects’ fees”.

A spokesperson for the ACE said it is currently undertaking a survey that it hopes will allow it to analyse the impact of varying fee practices across different countries.

“This evidence-based approach seeks to identify good practices that promote fair fees within the framework of competition law, and to provide a balanced foundation for future policy discussions,” the body said.

The AIA emphasised the rigidity of the US’s competition laws.

“While AIA cannot set fee minimums or guidelines due to federal antitrust laws, we can and do actively advocate for fairer conditions that support the financial health of the profession,” it told Dezeen.

The top photo is by Israel Andrade via Unsplash.

Illustration by Yifei Xiang

Performance Review

This article is part of Dezeen’s Performance Review series interrogating the problems plaguing architecture and design, from difficult working conditions to ethical dilemmas.

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