Cost of living crisis: Can you still afford to be an architect in 2023?

Emma (not her real name) is currently on sick leave from her London-based practice, where she has worked as a Part 2 architectural assistant for four years. Off work because of an episode of poor mental health, she tells the AJ anonymously that she is worn down by her economic situation and cannot afford to commute to her studio for three days a week.

‘It has caused so much mental pressure and anxiety,’ she says. ‘It’s just not rewarding enough for me [and] mentally it has just been exhausting.’

The Architects Benevolent Society (ABS) tells the AJ that Emma is not alone. Requests for mental health support are up 15 per cent on last year. What is more, the numbers of people asking the ABS for financial support are even higher, with a 100 per cent increase in appeals in the last quarter of 2022 – a figure the anti-poverty charity says will likely rise.

Rob Ball, the society’s chief executive, says there has been a notable increase in the need for financial support from ‘younger members of the architectural community’, though most (47 per cent) of those seeking money are fully qualified architects. Part 1s and Part 2s account for 33 per cent of the appeals for assistance to the ABS and the remainder are retired.

‘It is clear to us that the cost of living crisis is being felt across the industry but those on lower salaries have been impacted the most,’ says Ball. ‘They have few options and simply can’t afford essentials, such as petrol or heating for their homes.’

The situation begs the question: Can Emma, and others like her entering the profession, really afford to continue their dreams of working in architecture, especially

in the current economic climate? Secondly, is architecture becoming a career accessible only to those with independent wealth? Thirdly, can those in the profession, after years of salary stagnation, make ends meet as inflation runs rampant, mortgages rise and energy costs spiral?    

Cost of living: ‘the brutal truth’

New salary data supplied exclusively to the AJ shows that architects’ salaries, though increasingly outstripped by other professions such as law and medicine, are creeping upwards.

But the growth in pay packets is not keeping up with the cost of living. Rises are, on average, just half the rate of current inflation, which is running at 11.1 per cent nationally. This means that the real value of architects’ pay is being steadily and continually eroded.

From the AJ’s own research, the response from the UK’s leading practices to the cost of living crisis has been, at best, mixed. Some, it seems, are simply turning a blind eye to the problem.

Speaking anonymously to the AJ, another architectural assistant, Megan, says she has received ‘nothing’ from her top-30 AJ100 employer, despite ‘multiple’ appeals for help. Megan says her practice has done little more in the way of financial help than split the annual Christmas bonus into two parts, awarding half of it six months early – something other practices told the AJ they had similarly done. Megan says: ‘Their answer is that they’ve already helped out by giving half of that bonus at the end of June.’

Emma explains she has received a mere £50 a week extra for moving to London from a regional studio. She says her company has done nothing else to address the increased cost of living. No pay rise effectively means her standards of living have been reduced.

Of the 20 top-ranked practices in the AJ100 approached by the AJ about the support they’d given to employees during the increasingly tough economic climate, only seven firms said they had offered staff some financial help, or were due to. The majority declined to respond. 

Support for staff varied from single one-off payments or ‘above-average’ salary increases. Allies and Morrison, for instance, handed its staff a £1,000 one-off payment, while WilkinsonEyre awarded a single bonus of an undisclosed amount.

‘We have tried absolutely to maximise payments this year to help with the increased cost of living and have been able to make three bonus payments this calendar year,’ says a spokesperson for Purcell, which became employee-owned in May 2021. tp bennett,  a limited liability partnership, says it gave its employees a £2,000 additional bonus this summer and plans an additional £1,000 bonus in January because of the ‘period of exceptional economic uncertainty, rising energy bills, and soaring inflation’. Many practices were vaguer, saying they had made financial planning services and counselling available. One said it had provided free breakfasts, but no additional bonus payment.

Charlie Edmonds, co-founder of the Future Architects Front (FAF) campaign group, says it was ‘almost to the point of being insulting’ that breakfasts had been offered in place of monetary help and that proferred money-saving tips were merely a ‘Googling’ exercise at best.

The ABS, meanwhile, highlighted that twice the number of people have been forced to seek financial assistance in the past three months compared with the previous quarter. ‘The brutal truth is, they don’t have enough money coming in to cope with this crisis,’ says Ball.

 

Salaries: ‘rising, but not quickly enough’

Levels of pay remain a huge issue for architects. Last month, the first results of an anonymous salary survey were made public, revealing which UK architecture practices are paying what. Its organisers – a group of unnamed activists coming together under the Pay 100 banner – hope that in the long run greater transparency about who is paid what will lead to fairer wages.

But separate data provided exclusively to the AJ by Paul Chappell, director of 9B Careers, shows that salaries continue to trail well behind inflation.  In fact, since the recruitment agency’s research began in 2016, the average pay for certain architects’ roles has barely changed at all. An associate architect today earns about £55,500. Six years ago that was only marginally less (£54,000).

Meanwhile, the agency’s latest survey of more than 2,000 respondents shows that, while there has been an average 6 per cent rise in wages across all roles since 2021, this does not amount to any worthwhile rise in real terms. For example, project architects have seen their wages rise by 4.7 per cent over the last year to £40,223. But, using the Bank of England’s inflation calculator and the salary data from 2018, someone in that role should be earning at least another £6,800 a year to maintain the same standards of living.

The wages of those in practice also continue to lag behind the salaries earned in roles outside of the traditional studio set-up. Someone with up to five years’ experience working in an architecture practice is earning on average £4,565 less than their counterpart working client-side, £9,563 less than a developer and £16,581 less than a contractor with the same amount of experience, for instance.

At entry level, Part 1 and Part 2 architectural assistants have seen average 5.6 per cent and 5.3 per cent rises in salaries since 2021 respectively in roles earning up to £23,266 and £30,411, Chappell’s data shows.  That is both below the overall rise of 6 per cent and £1,763 and £3,905 respectively short of what those salaries could be if wages had kept up with living costs.

‘You can talk to someone who was a Part 1 10-15 years ago, maybe even longer, and they will tell you that their salaries then were about the same as they are for Part 1s today, if not higher,’ says Edmonds. ‘[That] obviously means that, in real terms, their salaries were significantly higher when you adjust for inflation’. Edmonds points to at least one London-based practice which recently advertised a Part 1 position with a starting salary of just £16,000 – well below the London living wage and the guidelines set out by the RIBA. The advertisement was later removed, apparently posted ‘in error’.

More encouraging is that Chappell’s salary survey reveals that becoming qualified is becoming more financially advantageous. The value of gaining your Part 3 is now worth an extra £5,550 – the highest it has ever been (though the course fees alone amount to about £3,000). The extra remuneration was only worth £3,000 in 2020.

RIBA president Simon Allford outlines the institute’s position on salaries in this statement: ‘Everyone is rightly concerned about the cost of living and inflation crisis and, in particular, its disproportionate impact on those at an early stage in their careers.

‘We must all strive to create and sustain an accessible and inclusive profession. In addition to the requirement for RIBA Chartered Practices to pay their staff at least the Living Wage, as set by the Living Wage Foundation, we encourage practice leaders to also acknowledge and address knowledge and skill gaps within their teams and to invest in their professional development and wellbeing.’

At the other end of the experience scale, somebody with 11 years’ experience in practice is now about £10,000 worse off because of flatlining wages, the AJ calculated from 9B Careers’ figures.

And, while senior architects have enjoyed a recent 6.6 per cent increase in their salaries (from £45,735 to £48,759), when pay is tracked back six years to a starting point of £44,480 in 2016, they are around £7,000 short of what they should be of inflation-adjusted earnings (£55,765).

For women, the pay disparities are even more pronounced. According to 9B Careers’ data, just 39 per cent of women receive an annual bonus, compared with 50 per cent of men. Women with the most experience – 21 years-plus – are also earning nearly £14,000 less than their male colleagues, on average.

 

The future: ‘redundancies will be inevitable’

Those practices which responded to the AJ’s questions about the current economic crisis said fee levels – and particularly the undercutting of competitors – were a ‘fundamental’ reason why wages are failing to keep pace with inflation and that any movement on salary will only be the result of architects getting paid more by clients for their expertise and output.

‘As much as most employers would like to increase salaries further, this is never going to be possible unless fees rise,’ said Chappell in a report accompanying his data. He added: ‘As we move into 2023, I fear firms that don’t have a strong pipeline of new work will start reducing fees to undercut competitors. At those practices which are not subsequently winning new projects, redundancies will become inevitable’.

Whatever happens in the broader economy, architects on the lowest pay, or with the least experience, are likely to continue to be worst-off. As the AJ’s recent student survey showed, fledging architects routinely work many hours of unpaid overtime. More than two-thirds (68 per cent) of students in jobs said they were never paid for working beyond their contracted hours. Indeed, Edmonds believes, ‘a lot of businesses are structurally dependent on [unpaid overtime]’. He adds: ‘Just because you’re dependent on exploitation doesn’t mean that you should permit it.’

Speaking in an interview with Involved Magazine last month, incoming RIBA president Muyiwa Oki said introducing overtime pay requirements for RIBA chartered practices and fairer treatment of Part 1s and Part 2s were part of his aspirations for the future.

In the more immediate term, as RCKa architects director Russell Curtis warns, the overlapping crises affecting young people – including soaring rent, rising living costs, low wages and now the prospect of redundancies – make this ‘a truly concerning time’.

All this is set against fears of a slowdown in projects and the lack of new commissions. The RIBA’s latest Future Trends survey reveals that workloads are just 92 per cent of  what they were a year ago and that London firms remain the most pessimistic. ‘For too long now, there have been practices which buy work through low fee bids, funded by minimal wages, long hours and under-investment,’ Curtis says. ‘Until we address the underlying problem of fees there’s little prospect of architects’ salaries rising to match inflation, let alone to a level commensurate with those of other equally qualified professionals.’
Data supplied by 9B Careers