Probably not, and finding out takes one afternoon and your last five closed projects. No organization publishes an architecture fees benchmark, so you build one from three directions: what the work costs you (honest hours times cost rate times your break-even multiplier), what the industry earns on average (Deltek Clarity 2026 sets its high-performer bar at a 3.0 net multiplier and puts operating profit at 16.7%), and what the market tolerates as a share of construction cost. If a proposed fee divided by a realistic hour estimate yields a multiplier below your break-even, you are undercharging, whatever the firm across town quoted.
Most principals who feel underpaid are right. They just cannot prove it, because nobody has run the arithmetic on the projects that already closed. Here is how to run it.
Why is there no official fee schedule for architects?
There used to be. The AIA (American Institute of Architects) and its chapters published recommended fee schedules until a 1972 antitrust consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice ended the practice. Since then, AIA research describes how firms charge, never what they should charge.
The AIA Firm Survey Report 2024 reports that a stipulated (fixed) fee is the most common compensation method, that percentage of construction cost has declined as a method, and that hourly billing with a not-to-exceed cap is common on small projects. The AIA Compensation & Benefits Report 2025 tells you what the people doing the work cost by title and region. Neither report gives you a fee for a 6,000-square-foot clinic TI (tenant improvement, a fit-out inside an existing building). That number is yours to build, and building it is the benchmark.
How do you benchmark a fee from the bottom up?
Four steps, and the first one is where most fees go wrong.
- Estimate hours by phase from your own history. Pull the last three similar projects and use the hours they actually took, not the hours their proposals assumed. The AIA Handbook’s traditional split (SD 15%, DD 20%, CD 40%, bidding 5%, CA 20%, for schematic design, design development, construction documents, and construction administration) is a starting distribution. Then push CA up: practitioner consensus is that CA regularly consumes 25% to 30% of effort against a 20% budget.
- Multiply by the cost rate of the people who will actually do the work. Not a blended firm average. If a senior project architect will carry the CDs because nobody else can, price the senior.
- Multiply by your target multiplier. Break-even is 1 plus your overhead rate. Deltek Clarity 2026 reports median overhead of about 161% of direct labor, which puts break-even near 2.6; divide by (1 minus your profit target) and at 15% profit you land at about 3.07, which is why Deltek treats 3.0 as the high-performer bar. How to Calculate Your Firm’s Break-Even Multiplier walks through the overhead side.
- Add consultants at cost plus markup, and reimbursables. Keep the net fee (yours) separate from the gross fee (with consultants). Benchmarks apply to net.
Worked through: the clinic TI takes 600 hours across the phases at a weighted cost rate of $45 an hour, for $27,000 of direct labor. At a 3.0 multiplier the net fee is $81,000. If the owner’s budget says $65,000, that fee yields a 2.4 multiplier, under break-even. You can still take the job, but you are taking it knowing it loses money, which is a different decision from taking it because the fee felt about right.
What do percentage-of-construction-cost benchmarks tell you?
Less than they used to, and never enough on their own.
Rules of thumb still circulate: roughly 6% to 12% of construction cost for full basic services on commercial and institutional work, with custom residential and small renovations running higher. Treat those figures as a sanity check on the bottom-up number, not as a price.
Hours do not scale with construction cost. A $2 million renovation of a 1920s masonry building with no existing drawings needs far more architectural hours than a $2 million tilt-up warehouse, and a client who upgrades the finish package raises a percentage fee without adding an hour of your work. Percentage fees reward expensive buildings and punish efficient ones, which is part of why the method has declined in the AIA Firm Survey Report 2024. Fixed Fee vs. Hourly vs. Percentage of Construction: Which Is Healthiest? compares the three structures.
Use the percentage in reverse. Divide your bottom-up fee by the construction budget. If a complex renovation lands at 4%, you have undercounted the hours, and it is better to learn that in the proposal than in CA.
What are the signs you are undercharging?
Any two of these together mean the fee is the problem, not the team.
- CA is over budget on most projects. The 20% allocation is a historical convention, not a measurement.
- The effective multiplier sits below break-even on more than a project or two. What Is Effective Multiplier vs. Target Multiplier? explains how to read it.
- You win nearly everything you propose on. A very high win rate on price-sensitive work usually means you are the cheapest, not the best.
- Principals are at 80% utilization doing production. The role-based rule of thumb from PSMJ Resources and Deltek puts principals at 40% to 55%. Principals drafting at 80% are subsidizing fees with time the overhead rate assumed they would spend running the firm.
- Every project ends with unbilled extra services. B101-2017 Article 4.2 exists so the client’s third redesign gets invoiced. If your firm never sends the letter, the fee absorbs it. How to Stop Scope Creep Before It Eats Your CA Fee has the letter.
- Salaries have moved and your rates have not. If cost rates rose for three years and fee per square foot did not, the multiplier fell whether or not anyone noticed.
How do you raise fees without losing clients?
Show scope, not rate. A phase-based proposal with hours visible per phase, a stated number of meetings and site visits (B101-2017 Section 4.2.3 lets you set limits beyond which the work is additional), and clear exclusions gives the client something to negotiate other than the total.
Move small work to hourly with a not-to-exceed cap. It is the structure the AIA Firm Survey Report 2024 finds common on small projects, and it protects you from the $8,000 kitchen study that becomes a $40,000 addition.
Raise rates on a schedule, every January, by a stated amount tied to labor costs. Clients accept an annual adjustment far more readily than a surprise.
Put the fee next to the construction cost in the conversation. On a $3 million project, an 8% fee is $240,000. A 1% fee increase is $30,000, while a 5% construction overrun caused by thin construction documents is $150,000. Most owners can do that math when someone lays it out.
And decline the bottom of the pursuit list. The firm that walks away from its worst 10% of fees is the firm with capacity for its best 10%.
Charging enough comes down to measuring the last project before pricing the next one, and that measurement belongs in the same monthly review as What Are the KPIs Every Architecture Firm Should Track?.
AECPulse Project Manager keeps the actual hours by phase and the effective multiplier for every closed project in one place, so the next fee proposal starts from what the work cost rather than from what the last proposal hoped.