All - curious to know if anyone has purchased the compensation survey from Design Intelligence and if they found it worthwhile. Thanks in advance for any insight.
Gregory Walker
Mar 8, 12 10:48 am
voxl,
we were participants in the survey so we have a complimentary copy. any specific questions?
i will say some of the numbers were far more shocking than the aia's compensation report (which we were also participants in). they had no problem showing where and how salaries have fallen over the past few years.
one quick tidbit: the mean for year 1 intern is 37k; year 2 is 41k, year 3 is 46.7k. the highest paying region right now is the midwest/south (depends on the year and high/low). lowest is the west by far. starting mean there is 34.5k, with the lowest quartile being 28k.
Gregory Walker
Mar 8, 12 10:53 am
one other immediate thought: there is a huge (and i mean huge) and growing disparity of salaries between the smallest firms (lowest 20%) and the highest 20% of firms.
for example, an architect with 20 years exp. has an mean base salary of 161k in firms in the top 20% of revenue size (which is 74M a year in billings). the same experience at a firm in the lowest 20% of revenue (1M and less a year in billings) is 72k. even at the 4th slot (meaning 60-80% size wise), the mean base salary is only 84k. so, either somethings flawed in how that data was reported or interpreted or the big are truly, truly getting bigger...
Keith Carlson
Mar 8, 12 2:08 pm
Wow, interesting info. Just a personal comparison. I graduated undergrad in 1990, got a job in NYC for a firm doing HUD housing. My starting salary was $35,000 per year. Just one problem for today's recent grads (the ones that can get jobs), a little something called inflation.
So I used an online calculator, and in today's dollars that equates to $57,500 per year (I cannot vouch for the calculators accuracy).
Granted the NYC market is going to have higher salaries compared to other regions.
That is a very telling stat on the salaries of the big vs smaller firms for the 20 year veterans. I hope it is a clerical error, but I suspect that is accurate, and worse, that trajectory may continue....
Gregory Walker
Mar 8, 12 5:05 pm
keith - i don't know about that particular category. in looking through some of the others, the spreads nowhere near that big (5-9year, 10-19). maybe it's a dearth of experienced project managers for really large projects?
overall though, yes, there are much bigger spreads between firm sizes than the aia's survey indicates. lower starting as well. and a clear downward trend on salaries over the past 2 years (especially at the entry level).
Keith Carlson
Mar 8, 12 5:15 pm
Thanks Greg, let's hope the ship is righting as we speak.
solocup
Mar 9, 12 6:49 pm
Mean BASE salry of 161k?......so a 45 yr old architect at an hok/som type is pulling in that cash? Find that hard to believe
Erin Williams
Mar 9, 12 7:24 pm
Do they distinguish between architects who work for other people vs. those who run their own practices? I suspect that at the 20-year mark that could have a big impact. Someone who's worked for 20 years and is a sole proprietor is a totally different situation than someone with the same experience who runs a firm of 20–30 people, which is again very different than someone who is a PM or Design Director at somebody else's firm.
Gregory Walker
Mar 9, 12 7:31 pm
like i said, it's a kind of outlier on their scale - generally, it does a good job of distinguishing between owners vs. employees (and this was employee), so not sure that's the issue. my personal guess is that a lot of 20+ year people (up to the 40 year mark) are covered in that, as well as a range of job types (not just a plain old PM or Director).
if you pull that graph back, the next step below is much more believable. if you made a similar incremental jump as the previous 4 steps, the mean would be closer to 100k, which seems much more realistic.
LITS4FormZ
Mar 9, 12 9:31 pm
I'm going to pitch purchasing this to the asst dean next week...this is definitely something every university library should have. It'll either scare away undergrads or at least give graduates a base to start negotiating.
solocup
Mar 9, 12 10:03 pm
100k is much more realistic. 160k is more of a managing partner at a major corporate firm ....not anywhere near a typical "architect" salary.
Andrew Chaveas
Mar 13, 12 2:52 pm
So I thankfully have an interview for an entry level position at a mid-sized architecture firm in Philadelphia Suburbs (Norristown).
Since graduating this past May I’ve been working for a glass subcontractor as a project manager in the DC metro area, and I would bring 1 year of relevant architectural internship experience.
As I’m hoping that all goes well, what do you think I should use as a median salary to negotiate with for that area/position/etc?
Greg, I'm wondering what the average range is for an architect / PM (employee in 80 person A/E firm) in Ohio with 15 yrs experience? I have my compensation review next week and would love to point to another source other than the AIA 2011 Salary Survey (Oct issue of Architect) why I'm worth what I think I'm worth! Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks! --Daniel
Gregory Walker
May 5, 12 9:57 pm
daniel - i don't have the book here, but can take a look. in general, the more i dove through it, there's a broad congruence with the aia salary numbers. which is to say, don't expect a big change (presumably up, if you're in for a review).
but, i'll take a swag through monday.
danielh
May 10, 12 11:46 am
Hi Greg - any chance you got to take a look yet? Have my review tomorrow so any backup would be great. Thanks again!
get on my level
Jun 6, 12 3:56 pm
does anyone know the salary range of an intern with ~20 months experience in nyc? either via the DI survey or AIA. thanks!
OneLostArchitect
Jun 6, 12 5:26 pm
Get on my level... do they pay interns in NYC? If they do Id guess 7.35/hr! (or whatever minimum wage is these days)
H3ndrik
Jun 7, 12 4:17 pm
I have classmates interning in NYC with around 8 months experience and they mainly get stipends, monthly or weekly. I know one corporate firm was giving 300 a week, which on a 40 hr week would be 7.50 an hour, but its NYC so a work week is 50 hours and its architecture so a work week is more than that lol
Rusty!
Jun 7, 12 4:57 pm
^ ^ that's pretty sad. 12 years ago my nyc internship paid $14/h plus 1-1/2 for overtime. This was pretty common for other interns I knew. A share in (good part of) Brooklyn was under $500 (under $800 in Manhattan, but that was wasteful) I lived like a (very modest) king! Even saved $10k over 8 months that I used to fully pay for next year's tuition and rent. I really fell in love with that nyc. Future seemed bright.
Things sure have changed.
snarkitekt
Jun 7, 12 5:48 pm
get on my level, i don't have figures from DI or AIA compensation reports, but if you do find them, i would keep in mind that 'intern' is a very, very broad category these days. in my office, the 'intern' title refers to a short-term (1 week - 4 months) employee who is still a student and receives a stipend. i do not know what they are paid, but i don't imagine it can be more than $500-600 a week, and very possibly less. meanwhile, i am an 'intern' by ncarb standards (finished m.arch in 2010, 3.5 yrs experience, no license), but not by those of my office. so given the flexibility of the title, it can be tough to measure where your skills, experience, and education might land within any spectrum of 'typical' salaries. i would say if you have completed a professional degree program, and at least some of those 20 months of experience are more or less consecutive (not five summer jobs of 4 months each), and, if you can find a job in this very saturated market, you can probably expect to be paid anywhere from $0-50K/yr. bigger firms typically pay more - but occasionally <a href="http://archinect.com/news/article/42858025/rmjm-begs-us-staff-to-turn-up-to-work">don't pay at all.</a>
snarkitekt
Jun 7, 12 5:48 pm
^ewww, ugly broken html. it hurts my eyes. sorry y'all.
get on my level
Jun 7, 12 7:57 pm
everybody,
thanks for all the responses. By intern, I mean "Intern 2" as defined by the AIA, which means I have a professional degree from an accredited, venerable institution. And 20 months of solid experience at 3 firms. This question is for a full time, salaried position. National averages for a midsize firm, according to the AIA compensation survey, is around 46k. But that seems way higher than my peers are making in the city. So I'm wondering what's going on. I dont have the regional information for NYC, but this link : http://www.flickr.com/photos/13979448@N00/6175617667/
provided by Gregory Walker in a different thread, shows national averages.
I have a question if someone is interested in providng a answer, as a graduate of a a.s degree in arch tech and continuing education in architecture can i expect to be treated as a intern salary wise in a architecture firm?
Gregory Walker
Jun 9, 12 7:21 pm
get oml - the answer to your question (about the disparity) is entirely bound up in the methodology of the survey. having been a part of both the di and aia, they're fundamentally... flawed isn't the right word, but they both suffer from the fact that usually only one person - someone in the 'c' suite - is responding and filling in the answers. so, the truthfulness of their answers will help skew the results. so will the sample pool size - for atlanta, there were (if memory serves) 23 firms or so that made up the aia sample pool. now, if it were the 23 largest firms, the salary numbers would all be above what the 'true' average is around town. same would apply if all 23 firms were 5 people or less. the numbers would be much lower.
i'm not a statistician and so have no idea what constitutes a 'good' sample size. but between that fact and that it relies on the integrity of the responder...yeah, reality could be very different from what it says.
(the integrity means a lot - if i'd shorted every salary in our office by 10k, let's say, there's no way to verify that and with such a small pool, it could have literally pulled the whole average down by 500-800 or so. just that one wrong answer. if everyone shorted the actual numbers by 5%, then... the temptation is there, as the employer, right? you short the numbers and create a standard that allows you to then give some weight behind either lowballing an offer or, inversely, making it seem like you're paying above average when you're really not. either way, it's very easy to create a deflationary market with this. i've laid out on here before that the aia should require audited financials from the firms participating. of course, i've also maintained it should be free to all members...)
Green34
Jun 10, 12 11:42 am
I've started at $8 ph as intern, that's as an emigrant's first professional job in US, after being project architect in my country
ended at 75k as senior designer (not licensed) before laid off at the end of 2008
still hope to get nerve to finish licensing exams
MyDream
Jun 14, 12 1:40 pm
$8 bucks an hour!! i'm hoping for at least $980.00 to $1200.00 a month to start off. Also seaching thru AIA i found http://www.aia.org/aiaucmp/groups/ek_members/documents/pdf/aiap016662.pdf which is a link to construction document organization.Does anyone think that this is useful to someone to to become a drafter preparing CD'S, also new interns who are bitting nails to get some sort of experience before earning that first job or career.
Green34 i hope you have found work and back to making that 75k maybe i will get there one day.
Rusty!
Jun 14, 12 2:04 pm
"$8 bucks an hour!! i'm hoping for at least $980.00 to $1200.00 a month to start off"
$8/h works out to be $1386/month. God I hope you're better at architecting than you are at accounting.
MyDream
Jun 14, 12 2:17 pm
WOW... seems ive miscalculated 8 ph 40hs a week equals 320 a week which is 1280 a month is there a 15.3% taxes for employees or am i wrong again lol about 1084.16 a month. Anyways thanks for your correction and no im not going n accounting thanksfor the heads up
MyDream
Jun 14, 12 2:35 pm
Wel rusty im sure you are much more experienced than me inachitecture and this sort of thing so i'll just take word for it :) Thanks
ctrlZ
Jun 15, 12 1:22 pm
The AIA compensation report is completely inaccurate and probably purposefully deceptive. A senior designer in NY, Chicago, Boston, San Fran or LA does not make apprx 90k. I know senior designers and other levels of architects that have lost out after asking for the figures that the AIA decides to print.
We need to demand more transparency in the profession. It's absolutely ridiculous. Any other profession indicates a salary range in their ads. We instead believe the specious "salary commensurate with experience." Just put how much your willing to - or better yet, no to - spend on your staff so that people go into interviews knowing how much was wasted in education and exams.
Do I sound bitter? ;(
Archrichard
Jun 15, 12 8:27 pm
Right, ctrlZ, maybe Architects need to unionize!
Gregory Walker
Jun 17, 12 10:16 am
ctrlz - i'll beg to disagree on the salaries. there are definitely senior staff making north of 100k in all of those cities, never mind a second tier city like atlanta, minneapolis, houston, etc. it's a gross over simplification to suggest otherwise.
transparency is a separate issue - but really, is it something you as an owner would want out on the street? what i've suggested in my post above - that the aia ask for actual backup data supporting the salaries that are being reported - would go a long ways towards getting some transparency into the equation without compromising the individual companies involved.
archrichard - we've had plenty of conversations here about unions. i'm in no real mood to rehash them but will simply ask you to think through the following question: if you guaranteed staff a certain salary, how would you be able to go out and convince clients to up your fee to cover it? the average profit margin for all firms is around 8-10% right now, which is a very modest return on investment (and as an owner, that's what this is). if the cost of labor - the single biggest expense in any services firm - was to jump 50% overnight, do you seriously believe that firms would be able to just go out and demand that much more from their owners? if anything, it would push the unemployment rate for architects up even higher and would very likely cause those firms to go under quickly. in short, unions aren't the answer. i fully 'get' why you feel the way you do, but it's looking at the problem from only one perspective, without taking downstream effects into account.
unfortunately, at the moment, there's not too many good answers out there beyond firms figuring out how to do other services besides straight up architecture. we're just at that moment in history.
quizzical
Jun 17, 12 4:15 pm
Regarding crtlZ's comments above, I'm not a big fan of the DI survey because I find DI's data gathering approach to be suspect and feel the published results are unreliable. However, I personally participated in the design of two earlier AIA Compensation Surveys (2005 and 2008) and know that AIA is quite diligent with respect to the information they request firms to provide and quite diligent in processing that data as accurately as possible.
There are wide ranges in compensation within individual communties and wider ranges still in compensation levels as one moves from one community to another, so it is dangerous to use national averages to assess a single job opportunity -- that is why AIA publishes data subsets for each individual state and for most large individual metro areas. One also needs to pay strict attention to how individual jobs are described (in detail) and not just rely on job titles, because there is wide variation in how job titles are used around the country.
Additionally, because of the massive amounts of data that must be processed, by the time AIA (or any other survey purveyor) actually brings their data to publication, some time has passed and one must interpolate the published numbers based on changes in actual market conditions over time. For example, the 2011 AIA survey asked firms to report data "as of 1-1-2011" -- that data is now 18-months old.
While no such survey can be perfect in all respects, I believe the AIA compensation survey can be very useful in helping both firms and individual job seekers establish a starting point for discussions about pay. However, as with everything else in life, many other factors will influence what a firm ultimately is willing to pay and what an individual ultimately is willing to accept.
Gregory Walker
Jun 17, 12 7:48 pm
quizz - i agree. i've done both the d.i. and aia surveys and i'll validate that it's by far the better of the two. but don't you think it can, in fact, be gamed? there's quite a bit of detail asked for but i'd still contend that, with the small sample sizes, it can be skewed by just a handful of less than honest answers.
quizzical
Jun 18, 12 10:56 am
Greg: I suppose any survey can be "gamed" but in the case of the AIA Compensation Survey, I have a hard time understanding how an attempt to "game" the survey results would have meaningful effect.
Since AIA publishes the sample size (both '# of offices" and "number of positions" for every bit of data published, rows with large sample sizes will tend to nullify the effect of outliers. Rows with small sample sizes will make the outliers fairly obvious, due to an obviously wide disparity between the 'mean', 'median', 'lower quartile' and 'upper quartile' figures.
AIA does not publish data for individual positions when the sample size is statistically insignificant -- as I recall, the minimum sample size is 5.
I also question why someone would want to go to a lot of trouble to 'game' the AIA's survey. I know firms will 'game' industry marketing surveys, like the 'Design Giants' survey and the various 'Business Chronicle Top Firm' surveys -- in those cases, when the data is published the firms are identified by name. Consequently, it's to a firm's advantage to 'fudge' the data (and I've seen some egregious examples of that happening.) I'm not much inclined to think that happens a lot with a compensation survey.
ViviMimo
Apr 18, 14 12:08 pm
I know this thread is kind of old but 161k is a salary for a studio manager at a large firm. 100 k would be for a senior associate. now this would be in a larger city like NY or San Fran of course.
All - curious to know if anyone has purchased the compensation survey from Design Intelligence and if they found it worthwhile. Thanks in advance for any insight.
voxl,
we were participants in the survey so we have a complimentary copy. any specific questions?
i will say some of the numbers were far more shocking than the aia's compensation report (which we were also participants in). they had no problem showing where and how salaries have fallen over the past few years.
one quick tidbit: the mean for year 1 intern is 37k; year 2 is 41k, year 3 is 46.7k. the highest paying region right now is the midwest/south (depends on the year and high/low). lowest is the west by far. starting mean there is 34.5k, with the lowest quartile being 28k.
one other immediate thought: there is a huge (and i mean huge) and growing disparity of salaries between the smallest firms (lowest 20%) and the highest 20% of firms.
for example, an architect with 20 years exp. has an mean base salary of 161k in firms in the top 20% of revenue size (which is 74M a year in billings). the same experience at a firm in the lowest 20% of revenue (1M and less a year in billings) is 72k. even at the 4th slot (meaning 60-80% size wise), the mean base salary is only 84k. so, either somethings flawed in how that data was reported or interpreted or the big are truly, truly getting bigger...
Wow, interesting info. Just a personal comparison. I graduated undergrad in 1990, got a job in NYC for a firm doing HUD housing. My starting salary was $35,000 per year. Just one problem for today's recent grads (the ones that can get jobs), a little something called inflation.
So I used an online calculator, and in today's dollars that equates to $57,500 per year (I cannot vouch for the calculators accuracy).
Granted the NYC market is going to have higher salaries compared to other regions.
That is a very telling stat on the salaries of the big vs smaller firms for the 20 year veterans. I hope it is a clerical error, but I suspect that is accurate, and worse, that trajectory may continue....
keith - i don't know about that particular category. in looking through some of the others, the spreads nowhere near that big (5-9year, 10-19). maybe it's a dearth of experienced project managers for really large projects?
overall though, yes, there are much bigger spreads between firm sizes than the aia's survey indicates. lower starting as well. and a clear downward trend on salaries over the past 2 years (especially at the entry level).
Thanks Greg, let's hope the ship is righting as we speak.
Mean BASE salry of 161k?......so a 45 yr old architect at an hok/som type is pulling in that cash? Find that hard to believe
Do they distinguish between architects who work for other people vs. those who run their own practices? I suspect that at the 20-year mark that could have a big impact. Someone who's worked for 20 years and is a sole proprietor is a totally different situation than someone with the same experience who runs a firm of 20–30 people, which is again very different than someone who is a PM or Design Director at somebody else's firm.
like i said, it's a kind of outlier on their scale - generally, it does a good job of distinguishing between owners vs. employees (and this was employee), so not sure that's the issue. my personal guess is that a lot of 20+ year people (up to the 40 year mark) are covered in that, as well as a range of job types (not just a plain old PM or Director).
if you pull that graph back, the next step below is much more believable. if you made a similar incremental jump as the previous 4 steps, the mean would be closer to 100k, which seems much more realistic.
I'm going to pitch purchasing this to the asst dean next week...this is definitely something every university library should have. It'll either scare away undergrads or at least give graduates a base to start negotiating.
100k is much more realistic. 160k is more of a managing partner at a major corporate firm ....not anywhere near a typical "architect" salary.
So I thankfully have an interview for an entry level position at a mid-sized architecture firm in Philadelphia Suburbs (Norristown).
Since graduating this past May I’ve been working for a glass subcontractor as a project manager in the DC metro area, and I would bring 1 year of relevant architectural internship experience.
As I’m hoping that all goes well, what do you think I should use as a median salary to negotiate with for that area/position/etc?
Thanks.
one hundreed bee-lee-on dollars
Bee-u-ta-ful
did you try salary.com
http://swz.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Architectural-Drafter-I-Salary-Details-Philadelphia-PA.aspx
Greg, I'm wondering what the average range is for an architect / PM (employee in 80 person A/E firm) in Ohio with 15 yrs experience? I have my compensation review next week and would love to point to another source other than the AIA 2011 Salary Survey (Oct issue of Architect) why I'm worth what I think I'm worth! Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks! --Daniel
daniel - i don't have the book here, but can take a look. in general, the more i dove through it, there's a broad congruence with the aia salary numbers. which is to say, don't expect a big change (presumably up, if you're in for a review).
but, i'll take a swag through monday.
Hi Greg - any chance you got to take a look yet? Have my review tomorrow so any backup would be great. Thanks again!
does anyone know the salary range of an intern with ~20 months experience in nyc? either via the DI survey or AIA. thanks!
Get on my level... do they pay interns in NYC? If they do Id guess 7.35/hr! (or whatever minimum wage is these days)
I have classmates interning in NYC with around 8 months experience and they mainly get stipends, monthly or weekly. I know one corporate firm was giving 300 a week, which on a 40 hr week would be 7.50 an hour, but its NYC so a work week is 50 hours and its architecture so a work week is more than that lol
^ ^ that's pretty sad. 12 years ago my nyc internship paid $14/h plus 1-1/2 for overtime. This was pretty common for other interns I knew. A share in (good part of) Brooklyn was under $500 (under $800 in Manhattan, but that was wasteful) I lived like a (very modest) king! Even saved $10k over 8 months that I used to fully pay for next year's tuition and rent. I really fell in love with that nyc. Future seemed bright.
Things sure have changed.
get on my level, i don't have figures from DI or AIA compensation reports, but if you do find them, i would keep in mind that 'intern' is a very, very broad category these days. in my office, the 'intern' title refers to a short-term (1 week - 4 months) employee who is still a student and receives a stipend. i do not know what they are paid, but i don't imagine it can be more than $500-600 a week, and very possibly less. meanwhile, i am an 'intern' by ncarb standards (finished m.arch in 2010, 3.5 yrs experience, no license), but not by those of my office. so given the flexibility of the title, it can be tough to measure where your skills, experience, and education might land within any spectrum of 'typical' salaries. i would say if you have completed a professional degree program, and at least some of those 20 months of experience are more or less consecutive (not five summer jobs of 4 months each), and, if you can find a job in this very saturated market, you can probably expect to be paid anywhere from $0-50K/yr. bigger firms typically pay more - but occasionally <a href="http://archinect.com/news/article/42858025/rmjm-begs-us-staff-to-turn-up-to-work">don't pay at all.</a>
^ewww, ugly broken html. it hurts my eyes. sorry y'all.
everybody,
thanks for all the responses. By intern, I mean "Intern 2" as defined by the AIA, which means I have a professional degree from an accredited, venerable institution. And 20 months of solid experience at 3 firms. This question is for a full time, salaried position. National averages for a midsize firm, according to the AIA compensation survey, is around 46k. But that seems way higher than my peers are making in the city. So I'm wondering what's going on. I dont have the regional information for NYC, but this link : http://www.flickr.com/photos/13979448@N00/6175617667/
provided by Gregory Walker in a different thread, shows national averages.
here you go...2011 AIA compensation survey charts
https://hotfile.com/dl/159201934/7b62866/AIA_2011_salary_survey.pdf.html
I have a question if someone is interested in providng a answer, as a graduate of a a.s degree in arch tech and continuing education in architecture can i expect to be treated as a intern salary wise in a architecture firm?
get oml - the answer to your question (about the disparity) is entirely bound up in the methodology of the survey. having been a part of both the di and aia, they're fundamentally... flawed isn't the right word, but they both suffer from the fact that usually only one person - someone in the 'c' suite - is responding and filling in the answers. so, the truthfulness of their answers will help skew the results. so will the sample pool size - for atlanta, there were (if memory serves) 23 firms or so that made up the aia sample pool. now, if it were the 23 largest firms, the salary numbers would all be above what the 'true' average is around town. same would apply if all 23 firms were 5 people or less. the numbers would be much lower.
i'm not a statistician and so have no idea what constitutes a 'good' sample size. but between that fact and that it relies on the integrity of the responder...yeah, reality could be very different from what it says.
(the integrity means a lot - if i'd shorted every salary in our office by 10k, let's say, there's no way to verify that and with such a small pool, it could have literally pulled the whole average down by 500-800 or so. just that one wrong answer. if everyone shorted the actual numbers by 5%, then... the temptation is there, as the employer, right? you short the numbers and create a standard that allows you to then give some weight behind either lowballing an offer or, inversely, making it seem like you're paying above average when you're really not. either way, it's very easy to create a deflationary market with this. i've laid out on here before that the aia should require audited financials from the firms participating. of course, i've also maintained it should be free to all members...)
I've started at $8 ph as intern, that's as an emigrant's first professional job in US, after being project architect in my country
ended at 75k as senior designer (not licensed) before laid off at the end of 2008
still hope to get nerve to finish licensing exams
$8 bucks an hour!! i'm hoping for at least $980.00 to $1200.00 a month to start off. Also seaching thru AIA i found http://www.aia.org/aiaucmp/groups/ek_members/documents/pdf/aiap016662.pdf which is a link to construction document organization.Does anyone think that this is useful to someone to to become a drafter preparing CD'S, also new interns who are bitting nails to get some sort of experience before earning that first job or career.
Green34 i hope you have found work and back to making that 75k maybe i will get there one day.
"$8 bucks an hour!! i'm hoping for at least $980.00 to $1200.00 a month to start off"
$8/h works out to be $1386/month. God I hope you're better at architecting than you are at accounting.
WOW... seems ive miscalculated 8 ph 40hs a week equals 320 a week which is 1280 a month is there a 15.3% taxes for employees or am i wrong again lol about 1084.16 a month. Anyways thanks for your correction and no im not going n accounting thanksfor the heads up
Wel rusty im sure you are much more experienced than me inachitecture and this sort of thing so i'll just take word for it :) Thanks
The AIA compensation report is completely inaccurate and probably purposefully deceptive. A senior designer in NY, Chicago, Boston, San Fran or LA does not make apprx 90k. I know senior designers and other levels of architects that have lost out after asking for the figures that the AIA decides to print.
We need to demand more transparency in the profession. It's absolutely ridiculous. Any other profession indicates a salary range in their ads. We instead believe the specious "salary commensurate with experience." Just put how much your willing to - or better yet, no to - spend on your staff so that people go into interviews knowing how much was wasted in education and exams.
Do I sound bitter? ;(
Right, ctrlZ, maybe Architects need to unionize!
ctrlz - i'll beg to disagree on the salaries. there are definitely senior staff making north of 100k in all of those cities, never mind a second tier city like atlanta, minneapolis, houston, etc. it's a gross over simplification to suggest otherwise.
transparency is a separate issue - but really, is it something you as an owner would want out on the street? what i've suggested in my post above - that the aia ask for actual backup data supporting the salaries that are being reported - would go a long ways towards getting some transparency into the equation without compromising the individual companies involved.
archrichard - we've had plenty of conversations here about unions. i'm in no real mood to rehash them but will simply ask you to think through the following question: if you guaranteed staff a certain salary, how would you be able to go out and convince clients to up your fee to cover it? the average profit margin for all firms is around 8-10% right now, which is a very modest return on investment (and as an owner, that's what this is). if the cost of labor - the single biggest expense in any services firm - was to jump 50% overnight, do you seriously believe that firms would be able to just go out and demand that much more from their owners? if anything, it would push the unemployment rate for architects up even higher and would very likely cause those firms to go under quickly. in short, unions aren't the answer. i fully 'get' why you feel the way you do, but it's looking at the problem from only one perspective, without taking downstream effects into account.
unfortunately, at the moment, there's not too many good answers out there beyond firms figuring out how to do other services besides straight up architecture. we're just at that moment in history.
Regarding crtlZ's comments above, I'm not a big fan of the DI survey because I find DI's data gathering approach to be suspect and feel the published results are unreliable. However, I personally participated in the design of two earlier AIA Compensation Surveys (2005 and 2008) and know that AIA is quite diligent with respect to the information they request firms to provide and quite diligent in processing that data as accurately as possible.
There are wide ranges in compensation within individual communties and wider ranges still in compensation levels as one moves from one community to another, so it is dangerous to use national averages to assess a single job opportunity -- that is why AIA publishes data subsets for each individual state and for most large individual metro areas. One also needs to pay strict attention to how individual jobs are described (in detail) and not just rely on job titles, because there is wide variation in how job titles are used around the country.
Additionally, because of the massive amounts of data that must be processed, by the time AIA (or any other survey purveyor) actually brings their data to publication, some time has passed and one must interpolate the published numbers based on changes in actual market conditions over time. For example, the 2011 AIA survey asked firms to report data "as of 1-1-2011" -- that data is now 18-months old.
While no such survey can be perfect in all respects, I believe the AIA compensation survey can be very useful in helping both firms and individual job seekers establish a starting point for discussions about pay. However, as with everything else in life, many other factors will influence what a firm ultimately is willing to pay and what an individual ultimately is willing to accept.
quizz - i agree. i've done both the d.i. and aia surveys and i'll validate that it's by far the better of the two. but don't you think it can, in fact, be gamed? there's quite a bit of detail asked for but i'd still contend that, with the small sample sizes, it can be skewed by just a handful of less than honest answers.
Greg: I suppose any survey can be "gamed" but in the case of the AIA Compensation Survey, I have a hard time understanding how an attempt to "game" the survey results would have meaningful effect.
Since AIA publishes the sample size (both '# of offices" and "number of positions" for every bit of data published, rows with large sample sizes will tend to nullify the effect of outliers. Rows with small sample sizes will make the outliers fairly obvious, due to an obviously wide disparity between the 'mean', 'median', 'lower quartile' and 'upper quartile' figures.
AIA does not publish data for individual positions when the sample size is statistically insignificant -- as I recall, the minimum sample size is 5.
I also question why someone would want to go to a lot of trouble to 'game' the AIA's survey. I know firms will 'game' industry marketing surveys, like the 'Design Giants' survey and the various 'Business Chronicle Top Firm' surveys -- in those cases, when the data is published the firms are identified by name. Consequently, it's to a firm's advantage to 'fudge' the data (and I've seen some egregious examples of that happening.) I'm not much inclined to think that happens a lot with a compensation survey.
I know this thread is kind of old but 161k is a salary for a studio manager at a large firm. 100 k would be for a senior associate. now this would be in a larger city like NY or San Fran of course.