Architectural Fees

Architectural Fees is a favorite topic of mine. This is a roundup of six articles that you will find helpful.
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Click the title of each article to open it.

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Architectural Fee As A Percent Of Construction Cost

The traditional architectural fee was a percentage of construction costs. The baseline fee was 6%, but the percentage decreased as the construction cost increased; and increased as the construction cost decreased. 

The fee was allocated most often among the phases of Basic Services of the project like this:

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What Does An Architect's Fee Include?

What your fee includes is mostly up to you. But I will share my experience with fees.

The only benchmark I know of is ’Basic Services’. This is the architect’s level of involvement in the project that the standard national agreements assume, especially those developed by the American Institute of Architects. Basic Services usually include five phases of work.

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Practice Tip - Estimating Design Fees

There are probably thousands of ways to estimate design fees. My method has evolved over 30 years into this approach that I am sharing with you. 

Estimating design fees is part science and part art (OK...it’s math and guessing). The approach that I use is dictated by the size/complexity of the project, who the competition is, and who the client is.

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Architectural Fees - Hybrid Projects

My experience is probably a lot like yours - things are never as simple as they seem. 

Projects, for instance. It probably took me 15 years to realize that a project wasn't a project most of the time. It was actually two or three projects masquerading as one project. A Hybrid. The difference isn't great, but it is enough that it should be recognized and dealt with.

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Architectural Fee For A Custom Scope Of Services

I have written a fair bit about Architectural Fees in the past. I guess I remember what a mystery it was to me at one time. I have covered the basics of Fee Tables here and the complexity of the typical Hybrid Project here. The remaining factor in determining the appropriate fee is Scope of Services.

What are you required to do to complete the project?

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Verifying Architectural Fees​

Whether you have arrived at a fee by a wild guess or a fee schedule you want some kind of corroboration. 

One option, if you keep good records, is to compare this project to a similar project. Was the fee adequate on that other one? Usually the two projects are dissimilar in some way. 

Another way of checking the 'rightness' of an architectural fee is to evaluate its 'rightness' when viewed as a design budget.

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All of the information above is embodied in my digital fee calculation workbook, FeeCalqs.