It seems there is no current useable salary survey for Specifiers out there! The last thread on this subject was back in Jan. 2005!. There was also the “Specifier Stats Revisited” thread from March 2017, that did not really get into salary/compensation. Colin, is this something that you will be willing present to the forum and oversee? - with the hope that specifiers (salaried or independent) will be willing to share, anonymously, details of their salary/compensation packages, possibly including:
Work Status: Salaried or Independent Specifier
Location: State or city
Base Salary:
Bonus, if any:
Benefits, if any:
Years of experience in design/construction industry:
Years of experience in Specification Writing:
Certification / Licensing: CDT, CCS or Registered Architect, etc.
Hrs. worked per week:
Employer’s staff size:
Other useful information:
I think many of us will benefit from such a survey! Dear esteemed colleagues, we’ll love to hear from you! Thanks.
Sunny Onadipe, CCS, CCCA, LEED AP, Green Specialist, PMP, SCIP
Specifications & Green Building Consultants Network (SGBCN)
E-mail: sgbcn@specsandgreenconsultants.com
Can we do this? I seem to remember that SCIP looked into doing a similar survey at one time and there were some legal barriers to sharing Fee and salary type of information.
Margaret is correct. The DOJ considers the publishing of fee schedules to be price fixing. this goes way back to the last sixties or early seventies when AIA had a published fee schedule that Architects were supposed to follow. This was or still is the subject of a restraining order and the AIA paid some hefty fines.
Fees: A payment made to a professional person or to a professional or public body in exchange for advice or services.
2: Salaries: A fixed regular payment, typically paid on a monthly or biweekly basis but often expressed as an annual sum, made by an employer to an employee, especially a professional or white-collar worker.
It’s one thing for a fee schedule to be published by a professional organization as a guide or recommendation for what is to be charged (like the AIA did years ago). It’s another thing to simply state in public what one charges or what one earns. In this situation, there is no professional organization suggesting what to charge, nor is there a meeting among specifiers to decide what to charge. My (non-legal) opinion is that this violates no laws whatsoever - this sort of informal survey is absolutely not what the AIA got into trouble for.
Traditionally, AIA’s Code of Ethics was all about respecting your fellow architects. AIA published a fee structure and mandated that its members adhere to it. AIA’s salary survey, as others have pointed out, assesses a different area (employee salaries) than the area (architect’s fees) covered in the consent decrees resulting from the litigation.
ASCE does a salary survey every year: https://www.asce.org/civil-engineering-salaries/. It is optional and they collect the information via an online survey. Some of the salaries are for government positions so they are broken down into Grades, GS-6, etc. so they have a set way to compensate according to work description. They have been doing it for awhile so it must be legal.