ACA Fee Scales Survey
CONFIDENTIAL
The ACA is still looking to issue an update to the traditional Scale Fee chart to provide a simple and realistic benchmark for percentage fees. The starting point is how many hours are actually consumed in a practice providing a proper service in relation to the size of the job. As the ACA could never be considered a monopoly, there cannot be any government objections to this as mooted to the RIBA version. In practice, the ACA feels that a recommended fee scale can be extremely useful because it is rarely clear at the beginning of a project, just how much work may be needed over the 2, 3 or more years it often takes to realize a building, particularly for new or inexperienced architects. Clients will naturally try to underestimate the effort which may ultimately be involved whilst good architects investigate more aspects of a building which inevitably takes more time. Quality requires time and resources. The purpose of this survey is to assess the time that a good service has actually taken real architects in the past decade and from this try to prepare a contemporary recommended fee scale to reflect contemporary staff wages with standard overheads and profit margins.
Please fill out and return the attached ACA Fee Scales Survey FORM 2016 with a selection of projects since 2000 which you feel took a reasonable amount of time to give a good professional result so that we have a reliable database on which to assess fees.