The American Institute of Architects (AIA) lately printed its 2021 Compensation Report, a biannual research of the monetary well being of the structure career. Given the unprecedented toll that COVID has taken on just about each area for the final 18 months, this yr’s report shed mild throughout a second that in any other case had little readability.
“Like many professions, structure companies throughout the nation have needed to climate an extremely risky interval,” stated Kermit Baker, chief economist of the AIA, in a press assertion. “Whereas we’ve got seen an unprecedented restoration in structure agency billings throughout 2021, this report gives a worthwhile snapshot of the affect the pandemic had final yr on agency compensation and employment ranges.”
Utilizing knowledge for 44 agency positions in 31 states, 33 metro areas, and 18 cities, the report’s authors found that American structure companies had misplaced round 16,000 positions between February and July 2020 alone, reflecting 8 p.c of all payroll positions throughout that interval. “At companies with fewer than 50 workers,” the report states, “advantages as a share of base pay declined to 14.4 p.c on common in 2020, after averaging simply over 18 p.c nationally twenty years in the past.”
Whereas the variety of positions held fell dramatically over the past two years, the report noticed that compensation for architectural workers at home companies modified little or no. The typical compensation has elevated 0.3 p.c per yr since 2019, considerably lower than the two.4 p.c improve seen on common throughout all professions in that very same time interval. And whereas the typical wage for current structure graduates remained below $56,000, beginning compensation varies extra extensively throughout the nation than it had up to now, now starting from $48,000 to $69,000. The AIA has offered an on-line wage calculator that features knowledge, present as of the start of this yr, for full-time architectural workers workers at AIA member companies in america with three or extra architectural workers workers.
The numbers mirrored within the two-year Compensation Report are maybe much less optimistic than the July Structure Billings Index report (ABI), which marked the six month of progress in a row since January 2021.
