UK Architect's Public Fee Reveal Sparks Industry-Wide Praise

A North East England architecture practice has drawn widespread praise after publicly sharing its fees on social media, reigniting debate over pricing transparency in the profession. Emily Scullion Architects posted the boutique residential firm's charges for RIBA Stages 0-6 on Instagram on Sunday, July 26, 2026.

The post, titled "Architects never share their fees, so here's mine…", drew more than 1,800 likes and shares, along with dozens of comments praising the practice's openness. Several architects used the replies to argue that smaller firms in particular needed to raise their own rates.

Director Emily Scullion said her reasoning was straightforward: having argued that greater transparency could benefit the profession, she felt she should be prepared to go first. She described honesty about her own experience as central to her Instagram content, in a profession where money remains one of its more secretive topics.

Scullion said that gap in public information left her without any benchmark when she first set up her practice, leading her to undercharge for a long period simply because she had no precedents to work from. She said she has since had similar conversations with many other architects who described the same experience.

The response caught her off guard. Scullion said she expected engagement but did not anticipate feeling as overwhelmed by the volume and tone of replies, which mixed encouragement with unresolved questions about how the industry handles fee-setting more broadly.

Fee transparency has been a recurring flashpoint in UK architecture. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has previously noted that publishing recommended fee scales carries legal risk, after the European Commission found in 2004 that the Belgian Architects' Association broke competition law by publishing a minimum fee scale, since even voluntary scales can dampen competition by shaping market expectations.

That legal caution has left individual practices largely on their own when deciding whether to publish rates. Architecture Journal's own fee surveys, run periodically since at least 2017, have aimed to give the profession benchmarking data without crossing into the kind of coordinated fee-setting that regulators have flagged as anticompetitive.

For smaller practices in particular, that absence of public benchmarks has long been cited as a structural disadvantage, leaving newer firms to price blind in a market where larger, more established practices often have far more informal access to comparative fee information through networks and referrals.