Last updated November 6, 2026
General information, not tax or legal advice. The rules depend on your country and your situation, so check anything with a tax or legal consequence with your accountant.
To write an architect's fee proposal from past hours, take the recorded hours per stage on three or more comparable jobs, scale them to the new job, adjust for what's different, price them at your staff rates and add an allowance for risk. Then write the scope, exclusions and payment stages around that figure.
Why build a fee from past hours rather than a percentage?
Building a fee from past hours shows what the job will cost you to deliver, which a percentage of construction cost can't. A percentage tells you what a client might accept. Your hours tell you whether you can afford to accept it.
You also won't find an official percentage to lean on. RIBA explains that it stopped publishing fee scales because of competition law. It points Chartered Practices to its RIBA Fee Calculator, which produces resource-based calculations aligned to the stages of the Plan of Work, and to its Good Practice Guide on fees. The method below is the same idea worked by hand.
How do you find comparable jobs and their hours?
Comparable jobs are recent projects of a similar building type, procurement route and scope of service, ideally three to five of them. A new-build house and a listed refurbishment of the same size won't tell you much about each other.
Clean the numbers before you use them:
- Take out additional services. They were billed on top, so they aren't part of what the fee had to cover. See additional services.
- Leave your own rework in. It will happen again in some form, and pretending otherwise is how fees end up short.
- Ask why a job overran. If a client changed their mind for a year, don't price that into the next one. If your Stage 4 always runs long, do.
- Use the same stage boundaries. Time logged to "the project" with no stage is hard to use, so if that's what you have, sit down with whoever ran the job and estimate the split. Mark it as an estimate.
A worked example: from past hours to a stage fee
Here's an invented example: a practice pricing the refurbishment of a 200 m² listed house, from three past refurbishments. First, past hours per stage, and hours per square metre across all three:
| Stage | Job A, 180 m² | Job B, 220 m² | Job C, 160 m² | Total, 560 m² | Hours per m² |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Preparation and Briefing | 18 | 24 | 16 | 58 | 0.104 |
| 2 Concept Design | 52 | 60 | 48 | 160 | 0.286 |
| 3 Spatial Coordination | 66 | 80 | 72 | 218 | 0.389 |
| 4 Technical Design | 94 | 120 | 88 | 302 | 0.539 |
| 5 Manufacturing and Construction | 60 | 84 | 66 | 210 | 0.375 |
| 6 Handover | 10 | 12 | 10 | 32 | 0.057 |
| Total | 300 | 380 | 300 | 980 | 1.750 |
Next, scale to 200 m², add 15% to Stages 3 and 4 because none of the past jobs was listed, price at an invented blended rate of £85 an hour, and add a 10% allowance for risk, rounded to the nearest £50:
| Stage | Scaled hours | Adjusted hours | At £85 | With 10%, rounded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 21 | 21 | £1,785 | £1,950 |
| 2 | 57 | 57 | £4,845 | £5,350 |
| 3 | 78 | 90 | £7,650 | £8,400 |
| 4 | 108 | 124 | £10,540 | £11,600 |
| 5 | 75 | 75 | £6,375 | £7,000 |
| 6 | 11 | 11 | £935 | £1,050 |
| Total | 350 | 378 | £32,130 | £35,350 |
The split across stages belongs to this imaginary practice and isn't a RIBA split. How to divide and phase the result is covered in RIBA stage fees. The rate deserves its own work too: see charge-out rates and blended hourly rates.
Finish with a sense check, which doesn't change the build-up. If the expected construction cost is £600,000, £35,350 is about 5.9% of it. Compare that with what you've won and lost on similar jobs. If it looks far off, find out why before you touch the number. The job may really be different, or your past hours may be telling you something unwelcome.
What should an architect's fee proposal include?
An architect's fee proposal should state the scope by stage, the fee or how it's calculated, what's excluded and what you've assumed. In the UK, ARB's guidance on terms of engagement lists what terms should cover, in the document or alongside it:
- The contracting parties and the scope of services
- The fee, or the method of calculating it
- The architect's and the client's responsibilities
- Any limitations or exclusions of liability
- How disputes are resolved and how the agreement ends
- Confirmation that professional indemnity insurance is held
- That a complaints-handling procedure is available on request
- How data will be handled
- The name of the architect in control of the work, and that they're regulated by ARB
To protect the fee, add the number of design options and rounds of changes, the assumed contract period, the rate for extra work, how expenses are charged, the payment stages and how long the offer stands. Remember that the RIBA Plan of Work isn't intended to be a contractual document, so naming a stage doesn't define your scope on its own. Say what you'll actually produce.
The assumptions matter more than people expect. Wording like this does the job:
Our fee is £35,350 plus VAT, fixed for RIBA Stages 1 to 6 as set out in the schedule. It assumes a building of about 200 m², two concept options with one round of changes to the preferred option, one planning application and one listed building consent application, and a contract period of up to 30 weeks. Work beyond these assumptions is an additional service, which we'll price and agree with you in writing before starting, at £85 an hour unless we agree a fixed sum. Surveys, structural engineering, statutory fees and printing are excluded. This offer stands for 60 days.
What goes wrong with fee proposals built from hours?
Fee proposals built from hours usually go wrong in the inputs rather than the arithmetic.
- Pricing from the job you remember. Memory drops the bad months. Use recorded hours where you have them.
- Forgetting Stage 5. Site visits, queries and valuations take real time even when the contractor is building. Job B above spent 84 hours there.
- Mixing rates. A blended rate only holds if the mix of people is similar. A job run by a director needs a higher one.
- No number of options or revisions. Without one, every further round is arguably included.
- Adding Stage 7 out of habit. RIBA says tasks beyond the end of Stage 6 need to be set out in separate professional services contracts.
- Winning on a low number and hoping. If the fee is below your hours, cut the scope in writing, or decide you're investing in the client and record it. A budget against actual hours will show the gap either way.
Building a fee proposal in ERPFlow
ERPFlow doesn't have a timer or timesheets today. Time tracking, including converting tracked time into invoices, is coming soon. ERPFlow also has no fee estimator or stage budgets, so the working above stays in a spreadsheet. ERPFlow can supply some of the inputs and handle the document:
- Past hours. If each job has a board in Projects with a card per stage and time spent typed in, the CSV export gives you each card's title, project, column and time spent, ready to pivot by stage.
- The priced offer. A quote with one line per stage, tax set per line, goes out as a PDF in any of 19 languages with a record of the email. The quote's notes print on the PDF, which suits short assumptions. Longer terms stay in your own appointment document, sent separately, because attachments on a quote are internal.
- Acceptance. There's no e-signature or online acceptance. You mark the quote accepted by hand and can attach the signed copy.
- Billing. Choose Convert to invoice for each stage. Every conversion makes a fresh draft invoice of the whole quote, so delete the other lines and keep that stage's. The guide to converting a quote to an invoice covers the detail.