Five documents cover most of what a small or mid-size firm signs in a year: B101-2017 (Owner-Architect Agreement), A101 (Owner-Contractor Agreement, stipulated sum), A201-2017 (General Conditions of the Contract for Construction), C401 (Architect-Consultant Agreement), and G702/G703 (Application and Certificate for Payment with its Continuation Sheet). Add the short forms B105 and A105 for small projects. That is AIA contract documents explained in practical terms: one owner agreement, one construction agreement, the general conditions they both point at, one consultant agreement, and the payment forms.
The rest of the catalog covers delivery methods you will meet occasionally. Buy those then.
Which AIA contract documents does a small firm actually need?
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) sorts them by letter: A for owner-contractor agreements, B for owner-architect, C for other agreements including architect to consultant, E for exhibits, and G for the forms you fill out during construction.
For a firm doing design-bid-build work, the working set is short:
- B101-2017. Your agreement with the owner. Your fee, your scope, and your exposure all start here.
- A101. The owner-contractor agreement on a stipulated sum. You are not a party, but you administer it.
- A201-2017. The General Conditions, where the architect’s construction-phase authority is actually defined.
- C401. Your agreement with each consultant, flowing down the terms you accepted in B101.
- G702 and G703. The pay application and continuation sheet you certify every month.
Everything else is situational. Cost-plus work brings in A102 (with a guaranteed maximum price) or A103 (without one). Interiors brings B152. A model-heavy job brings E203 and G202. A sustainability scope brings E204.
What is inside B101-2017, article by article?
Knowing the article numbers lets you answer a client in the meeting instead of after it.
- Article 2 covers the architect’s responsibilities, including insurance.
- Article 3 is the Scope of Basic Services, phase by phase: 3.2 schematic design, 3.3 design development, 3.4 construction documents, 3.5 procurement, 3.6 construction phase. Construction phase services run from award of the construction contract to the final Certificate for Payment.
- Article 4 is Supplemental and Additional Services. Section 4.1 is the table where you assign supplemental services to a party. Section 4.2 covers additional services, including 4.2.1 for changes in the owner’s instructions or approvals and 4.2.3 for limits on site visits, submittal reviews, and responses to requests for information (RFIs, the contractor’s formal questions during construction).
- Article 5 covers the owner’s responsibilities: survey, geotechnical report, and timely decisions.
- Article 6 covers the Cost of the Work. Article 7 covers copyrights and licenses. Article 8 covers claims and disputes.
- Article 9 covers termination and suspension. Section 9.1 lets you suspend after seven days’ written notice for nonpayment, the most underused sentence in the document.
- Article 11 covers compensation. Section 11.10.2 makes payments due on presentation of the invoice, with interest running after a number of days you and the owner fill in. Fill it in.
Article 4 is where the fee lives or dies. The blanks in 4.2.3 for site visits, submittal reviews, and RFI responses are not decoration, so fill them with counts you derived from the project. The AIA Handbook’s traditional basic-services split puts construction administration (CA, the phase after the permit when the building actually gets built) at 20% of the fee, and practitioner consensus is that CA regularly eats 25% to 30% of effort against that budget. Section 4.2.3 is how you get paid for the gap, and it only works if somebody is tracking scope creep against the CA budget as it happens.
When should you use a short-form agreement instead?
B105 is the short form owner-architect agreement, A105 is the short form owner-contractor agreement, and B104 is the abbreviated version of B101 for mid-sized work. They are shorter because they carry fewer provisions, which is a trade rather than a free simplification.
Use a short form when the project is small, the scope is genuinely limited, and the client is not a developer with counsel: a residential addition, a modest tenant improvement (TI), a feasibility study. Use B101 when consultants sit under you or the client is sophisticated enough to redline.
The failure mode is predictable. A firm picks B105 because the project started small, the project triples, and the agreement has no additional services language worth arguing over. The AIA Firm Survey Report 2024 reports stipulated (fixed) fee as the most common compensation method for architects, and a fixed fee on a thin agreement is what produces the year-end conversation nobody enjoys.
Which documents do you need once construction starts?
A201-2017 is the one to read front to back, once. The architect is not a party to it, yet it defines what the architect does during construction: site visits, certification of payment, submittal review, interpretation of the documents. Section 4.2.14 requires the architect to respond to RFIs with reasonable promptness, and contractors quote that line.
The forms that follow from it:
- G701 for change orders.
- G702 and G703 for the Application and Certificate for Payment and its Continuation Sheet.
- G704 for the Certificate of Substantial Completion, which starts warranty clocks and shifts responsibility for the building.
- G710 for Architect’s Supplemental Instructions, the clarification that carries no cost or time change.
- G716 for RFIs, if the contractor is not already imposing their own form.
Two habits pay for themselves: log every G710, because a stack of them is usually the first sign a design change is quietly under way, and count submittal reviews against your 4.2.3 number as you go.
How do you flow your terms down to consultants?
C401 is the Architect-Consultant Agreement, and it is built to flow down the terms of B101 to your structural, mechanical, electrical, and civil consultants. That is the whole purpose of the document, and the part most often lost.
If the owner redlined your B101, your C401s have to carry those redlines. Accept a heightened standard of care, a shortened response time, or expanded construction-phase obligations, then sign a stock C401 with your engineer, and you have personally absorbed the gap. Nobody notices until there is a claim.
A practical rule: no consultant agreement goes out until the owner agreement is signed and someone has read both in the same sitting. Twenty minutes, and the cheapest risk management available. The AIA Trust publishes plain-language guidance on these gaps.
Contract selection is dull, and it decides a surprising share of a firm’s margin. Match the document to the delivery method, fill the Article 4 blanks with real counts, and make the consultant agreements match the owner agreement. The wider reference set behind all of this starts at the professional organizations and standards hub.
AECPulse Project Manager tracks logged hours against the site visits, submittal reviews, and RFI responses your B101 actually priced, so the additional services conversation starts with a count instead of a feeling.