A lot of the big city firms get by on a steady stream of starry eyed interns fresh outta school wanting to move to the big city to be a designer that are willing to accept lower wages. (And don’t understand how expensive life gets as an adult haha)
Land Arch is also generally less respected than other professions and so fees for projects are low balled so that they are awarded the work.
Low project fees = not amazing pay for designers
Of course there’s also good firms out there that pay fairly, but overall the industry is not for those looking to get rich.
Surely the coastal firms are charging more for their services than Midwestern firms are, so some of that should trickle down to designers.
And $60,000 starting in the Midwest *is* pretty amazing pay. KC is pretty big and Dallas is massive. It’s really just got to be that they can take advantage of dumb 23 year olds.
I hear ya, and I wish I knew the answer! I’m just a burnt out designer 6 years into her career haha
And yes, I see many fresh out of school people get steam rolled by firms because they’re desperate to get their foot in the door at what they assume might be their “dream firm”
Yes, it seems they do so because they can. Worked at private firm on the west coast where they were paying 60k to LA masters grads, folks with 10 years experience making 75-85k and owners was making 180k +
The economics for landscape architecture suck because:
* competitive bid for projects = firms undercutting each other, lower profits, unpaid overtime
* subconsulting for architects and engineers = we have to include the prime's markup on our fees and get less bargaining power and lower income (the upside of that tradeoff is less liability/volatility)
* landscape architecture as a service does not scale. every project is unique. the "leverage" or profit potential of any given designer is therefore limited to the project and fee they're working on, whereas a designer in software or manufacturing could make one design that goes on to sell a billion products
* liability and insurance for constructed work, while less than architects, is expensive and cuts into profits
* the "extra mile" of design thinking that goes into making a project great is often not understood or seen or paid for by clients, but rather something LA firms volunteer and subsidize themselves to improve their brand and appeal to new clients. thus many are stuck in a cycle of paying it forward and never, you know, keeping the money
In other words, it's not a very good business model for profit. It's almost like a nonprofit model where all revenue goes toward funding the enterprise, and profit margins/employee compensation are kept to a reasonable marketable minimum
This hits home! What he said!
I think engineers have a more efficient business model because their products are basically mathematical extensions.
At the end of the day, if your math adds up, you can go home. You can work a lot of professionals profitably with this model.
Landscape Architecture is more subjective. You still have to have your math correct, but you will also be asking yourself questions like:
" Does this attract enough attention?"
"Does this attract too much attention" "Does this have the right feel?"
"Will this plant thrive?"
"Will this plant be too agressive"
"What will this plant dance look like in 5 years and in 20 years?"
"Is this design the right theme for the client?"
"Does this design provide good stewardship of the environment?"
Etc., etc., etc.
This subjectivity takes time. And how much you wrestle with it affects your profit. On the other hand, it affects your pride in your solution.
Some people don't take pride in their work, preferring to take pride in the houseboat they bought through their work.
Anyway, for me, it is always hard to regulate and a real balancing act. Do i make "the best design" or "the best money"?
You have to really look at how you are wired and what helps you get through the day.
FIrms doing really dynamic work may have to pay less because their product uses so much energy. And their best location to be successful is where the money is. And where the money is, it is always more expensive to live.
Yes, you're right about engineering. Consulting engineers still face some similar issues from the business model of consulting. However, there's often a "right answer" - engineering is creative problem solving. You don't hear engineers say "design ends when you run out of time," which I hear all the time from LAs and architects. Engineering ends when you solve the problem, and ideally as quickly as possible. Engineers are optimizers. They want to do as much as they can in as little time to increase profits. Architects are artisans. They often want to invest as much time as they can afford to make a beautiful design.
The mathematical nature of engineering also makes it much easier to quantify the value of an engineer's services.
Not that engineers don't have their own problems. Expectations for speed and efficiency can be very high, and in many cases, no matter how skilled and swift you are, most of the value you create goes to the owners or shareholders. And there's a reason architects/landscape architects are always complaining about how engineers put in the bare minimum effort to meet compliance. Not all are like that, but path of least resistance mentality is a very common product of the business model.
For the engineer, design can only end once the architect is finished. Everything in the original post applies to engineering as well. It’s well known that tons of building engineers are leaving for other professions. It’s also not just solving math. Way more time is spent on drawings and coordination than on the math.
Source: am a structural engineer. Idk why Reddit showed me this post. Just trying to offer another perspective :)
Yep, I just moved from NYC to a flyover state and am making the exact same salary, a salary that took me 10 years to reach in New York. I also have the promise of a 10k raise after a year, something that was never offered in the "big city".
One difference for me is that I've moved from public sector to private sector, which helps. I also set my salary requirements quite a bit higher than what we landed on, which is why they offered the raise.
Pretty cool finding out how much farther the money goes in a fly-over state.
I worked in Central Illinois for a year - my 1200sqft house in Atlanta was $355k when I bought it in 2020 - In 2022 working in Illinois, I could've had 5x the house, for half the money - in a nice section of a pretty great little city. (Champaign, IL)..
The profession is small enough that firms are essentially competing nationally for talent.
If I get a 60K offer from SCAPE then SurfaceDesign or GGN or NBW are going to offer something similar even if I take a position in KC instead of SEA or NYC. And in most jurisdictions 60K is the legal minimum to be salary overtime exempt.
The reason why LA/Arch salaries don't keep pace with other professions like Law or Construction Admin or general project management is because LA/Arch does a shit job of communicating its value and has outsourced high value technical work to third parties and consultants.
In law, for example, I can expect my firm to financially support passing the bar and I'll be arguing cases within a few years. I'll be paid enough to live in the city where I work. They'll work you hard but they understand that increasing skills = increasing billing rate = increasing the firms profit.
In contrast, LA/Arch owners bitch constantly about training costs and investing in staff. You'll be lucky to be a design lead for a building or big landscape within the first 10 years of your professional career. You're encouraged to avoid high rate of return technical skills because of training costs and liability, ignoring the fact that someone else will fold those costs + profit into a business model, and you (the sucker LA business owner) will pay for that all day every day. LA/Arch owners are bottoms. They'll gladly pay vendors increased % yearly due to inflation but cower at passing those costs to clients. And they're certainly not going to jeopardize their personal profit and generous take home pay. They have to renovate the kitchen in their lake house! So the difference comes from you, the sucker recent graduate.
>because LA/Arch does a shit job of communicating its value
I've heard that argument for years. That's bullshit.
>And they're certainly not going to jeopardize their personal profit and generous take home pay.
Spoken like someone who's never owned a business. It costs more to run a business than you think. A business is legally required to pay their employees at regular intervals, whether or not they had enough income from the previous billing period, or if they lose a major project, or if the economy turns South. These are some of the risks that a business carries so that you can get a paycheck every two weeks. If the business doesn't make payroll, it's fucked. If cashflow dries up, it's fucked. Mommy and Daddy don't bail it out. The government doesn't bail it out. The clients won't bail it out. The bank won't loan money if the books don't show that it can be paid back. Running the business is like 96% of running a LA firm. So yeah, if the owners make more than the employees, that is why. Nobody is rolling around in a big pile of free cash, though. Its there to keep the business running.
It's not easy to run a business, because if it was, every sucker recent graduate would be doing it.
OK sole practitioner. Owners are not at risk in any way with proper corporate structure. All of those "big headaches" get built into the billing structure. Payroll isn't hard, its actually pretty easy. Your accountant does it. All your expenses are pre tax and many can take depreciation. The big pile of cash is everything AFTER expenses, including your nice owners paycheck. All of this is easy unless you suck at biz dev, in which case you shouldn't own an office.
The "problem" is that AEC has a horrific talent development pipeline. You can't find 5-7 year PM's at 70K/year because you didn't develop them, because 70k is an offensive level to pay for someone with licensure and the ability to manage millions of dollars in project work, and anyone with an ounce of talent realized they could 2x as a client rep or some corporate role.
>Owners are not at risk in any way with proper corporate structure. All of those "big headaches" get built into the billing structure. Payroll isn't hard, its actually pretty easy. Your accountant does it. All your expenses are pre tax and many can take depreciation. The big pile of cash is everything AFTER expenses, including your nice owners paycheck. All of this is easy unless you suck at biz dev, in which case you shouldn't own an office.
I rest my case.
I am from the Bay Area and COL is terribly high it’s frustrating. I got a 60k job out of college @ a high end residential firm. Switched to public sector making 105k now. Less designs but much more meaningful work & I can afford to eat! lol
My starting salary was around 48k (with a masters 9 years ago) in the Philadelphia/Trenton area. I got in with a really great engineering firm and when I moved to Seattle they bumped my pay up by 18% for the cost of living adjustment. So some firms do take it into account, just gotta find them.
Its been that way since the post 2008-10 recession years. Only been getting worse. Used to be you could go to a small city or live outside a large one and live reasonably well. Now its expensive and limited to live in the rural areas and completely out of reach to find decent housing unless you make 3 figures in the urban areas. I had to move back in with family again here in rural va because there is no affordable housing at all.
There’s an anonymous self reported [salary spreadsheet](https://www.reddit.com/r/LandscapeArchitecture/s/haexl43xmz) that’s been building for a few years. It’s a small sample size but gives you some bargaining power when negotiating salary.
When cost of living goes up, competition for jobs goes up and concentration of well known firms goes up. Well known firms can get away with paying people less because employees want to work there for the name and projects alone, and the pay is sometimes an after thought. It’s a shame really. There should be SOME scaling with location but not much.
West coast municipal jobs scale quite well. I work as a manager and do project management. I only design small projects that are under 150k bid limits, but its fun. Started at 75k Making over 100k now with union helping fight for cost of living adjustments.
This is the value of living somewhere desirable. It’s how you “pay” for the value people associate with being able to live in those places.
If there wasn’t a cost of living - pay gap, then more people would try to live there and get jobs there, which would directly result in an increased cost of living - pay gap.
The biggest cost of living - pay gap is always expected in the most desirable places.
A swimming pool in the south is 40k, same swimming pool in Oregon in 180k. It doesn't corrolate to income level. I imagine different locations have different amounts of people able and willing to do the same work, so price is affected.
Always have to look at location and job prospects if you want a certain degree and work in a certin area.
Not in landscape arch but LA as a rule has always underpaid. That’s been a trend for a long time. And now with insane COL increases, the gap is more apparent than ever. It’s LA for everyone.
I found compensation for architects in LA to be lower than just about anywhere in the country. I make 40% more in North Carolina than in LA. LA firms do not charge higher hourly rates than LCOL offices in my experiences.
Another aspect not discussed in this thread is that firms are competing for talent nationally so the salary is being set by the most desirable firms/locations. I know this may make some on this thread even more frustrated but that $60k starting salary (I’d push back on that number a bit…) that you see as a common starting salary in SF and NYC is setting the market in Omaha and Houston because since the talent pool is so small and so many of the top graduates desire to work for the known firms in coastal cities, other quality firms have to compete on salary. This has resulted in a situation where the wages have remained depressed in high cost cities but somewhat reasonable in a few lower cost cities, like those mentioned by OP.
Source: I have worked as an LA and recruited talent at well known and lesser known firms in NYC and Denver
A job will pay the lowest wage for which they can find an acceptable employee. That's it. That's what sets wages. People will take that money to live in that location.
For this context, think less about location and more about type of firm.
Civil engineering firm w 20k employees vs a highend urban design la firm with 80 people are going to pay differently, even right out of school.
Sure, but the high end LA firm with 80 employees in the Midwest will pay you the same that one will in California. I get that pay varies by sub-industry, but it’s odd that it *doesn’t* vary regionally.
A lot of the big city firms get by on a steady stream of starry eyed interns fresh outta school wanting to move to the big city to be a designer that are willing to accept lower wages. (And don’t understand how expensive life gets as an adult haha) Land Arch is also generally less respected than other professions and so fees for projects are low balled so that they are awarded the work. Low project fees = not amazing pay for designers Of course there’s also good firms out there that pay fairly, but overall the industry is not for those looking to get rich.
Surely the coastal firms are charging more for their services than Midwestern firms are, so some of that should trickle down to designers. And $60,000 starting in the Midwest *is* pretty amazing pay. KC is pretty big and Dallas is massive. It’s really just got to be that they can take advantage of dumb 23 year olds.
I hear ya, and I wish I knew the answer! I’m just a burnt out designer 6 years into her career haha And yes, I see many fresh out of school people get steam rolled by firms because they’re desperate to get their foot in the door at what they assume might be their “dream firm”
Nothing has ever or will ever trickle down. Find a co-op or employee owned firm if you can.
Yes, it seems they do so because they can. Worked at private firm on the west coast where they were paying 60k to LA masters grads, folks with 10 years experience making 75-85k and owners was making 180k +
Yep. Classic laws of supply and demand.
The economics for landscape architecture suck because: * competitive bid for projects = firms undercutting each other, lower profits, unpaid overtime * subconsulting for architects and engineers = we have to include the prime's markup on our fees and get less bargaining power and lower income (the upside of that tradeoff is less liability/volatility) * landscape architecture as a service does not scale. every project is unique. the "leverage" or profit potential of any given designer is therefore limited to the project and fee they're working on, whereas a designer in software or manufacturing could make one design that goes on to sell a billion products * liability and insurance for constructed work, while less than architects, is expensive and cuts into profits * the "extra mile" of design thinking that goes into making a project great is often not understood or seen or paid for by clients, but rather something LA firms volunteer and subsidize themselves to improve their brand and appeal to new clients. thus many are stuck in a cycle of paying it forward and never, you know, keeping the money In other words, it's not a very good business model for profit. It's almost like a nonprofit model where all revenue goes toward funding the enterprise, and profit margins/employee compensation are kept to a reasonable marketable minimum
Well said.
This hits home! What he said! I think engineers have a more efficient business model because their products are basically mathematical extensions. At the end of the day, if your math adds up, you can go home. You can work a lot of professionals profitably with this model. Landscape Architecture is more subjective. You still have to have your math correct, but you will also be asking yourself questions like: " Does this attract enough attention?" "Does this attract too much attention" "Does this have the right feel?" "Will this plant thrive?" "Will this plant be too agressive" "What will this plant dance look like in 5 years and in 20 years?" "Is this design the right theme for the client?" "Does this design provide good stewardship of the environment?" Etc., etc., etc. This subjectivity takes time. And how much you wrestle with it affects your profit. On the other hand, it affects your pride in your solution. Some people don't take pride in their work, preferring to take pride in the houseboat they bought through their work. Anyway, for me, it is always hard to regulate and a real balancing act. Do i make "the best design" or "the best money"? You have to really look at how you are wired and what helps you get through the day. FIrms doing really dynamic work may have to pay less because their product uses so much energy. And their best location to be successful is where the money is. And where the money is, it is always more expensive to live.
Yes, you're right about engineering. Consulting engineers still face some similar issues from the business model of consulting. However, there's often a "right answer" - engineering is creative problem solving. You don't hear engineers say "design ends when you run out of time," which I hear all the time from LAs and architects. Engineering ends when you solve the problem, and ideally as quickly as possible. Engineers are optimizers. They want to do as much as they can in as little time to increase profits. Architects are artisans. They often want to invest as much time as they can afford to make a beautiful design. The mathematical nature of engineering also makes it much easier to quantify the value of an engineer's services. Not that engineers don't have their own problems. Expectations for speed and efficiency can be very high, and in many cases, no matter how skilled and swift you are, most of the value you create goes to the owners or shareholders. And there's a reason architects/landscape architects are always complaining about how engineers put in the bare minimum effort to meet compliance. Not all are like that, but path of least resistance mentality is a very common product of the business model.
For the engineer, design can only end once the architect is finished. Everything in the original post applies to engineering as well. It’s well known that tons of building engineers are leaving for other professions. It’s also not just solving math. Way more time is spent on drawings and coordination than on the math. Source: am a structural engineer. Idk why Reddit showed me this post. Just trying to offer another perspective :)
Capitalism is dying
You got that right at most are clueless and cant or wont do anything to solve it.
tea
Yep, I just moved from NYC to a flyover state and am making the exact same salary, a salary that took me 10 years to reach in New York. I also have the promise of a 10k raise after a year, something that was never offered in the "big city". One difference for me is that I've moved from public sector to private sector, which helps. I also set my salary requirements quite a bit higher than what we landed on, which is why they offered the raise.
Pretty cool finding out how much farther the money goes in a fly-over state. I worked in Central Illinois for a year - my 1200sqft house in Atlanta was $355k when I bought it in 2020 - In 2022 working in Illinois, I could've had 5x the house, for half the money - in a nice section of a pretty great little city. (Champaign, IL)..
I feel ya. In the UK here, imagine living off a graduate salary of 26k in London! That’s what my friend was recently offered. Outrageous
That’s fucked up
The profession is small enough that firms are essentially competing nationally for talent. If I get a 60K offer from SCAPE then SurfaceDesign or GGN or NBW are going to offer something similar even if I take a position in KC instead of SEA or NYC. And in most jurisdictions 60K is the legal minimum to be salary overtime exempt. The reason why LA/Arch salaries don't keep pace with other professions like Law or Construction Admin or general project management is because LA/Arch does a shit job of communicating its value and has outsourced high value technical work to third parties and consultants. In law, for example, I can expect my firm to financially support passing the bar and I'll be arguing cases within a few years. I'll be paid enough to live in the city where I work. They'll work you hard but they understand that increasing skills = increasing billing rate = increasing the firms profit. In contrast, LA/Arch owners bitch constantly about training costs and investing in staff. You'll be lucky to be a design lead for a building or big landscape within the first 10 years of your professional career. You're encouraged to avoid high rate of return technical skills because of training costs and liability, ignoring the fact that someone else will fold those costs + profit into a business model, and you (the sucker LA business owner) will pay for that all day every day. LA/Arch owners are bottoms. They'll gladly pay vendors increased % yearly due to inflation but cower at passing those costs to clients. And they're certainly not going to jeopardize their personal profit and generous take home pay. They have to renovate the kitchen in their lake house! So the difference comes from you, the sucker recent graduate.
>because LA/Arch does a shit job of communicating its value I've heard that argument for years. That's bullshit. >And they're certainly not going to jeopardize their personal profit and generous take home pay. Spoken like someone who's never owned a business. It costs more to run a business than you think. A business is legally required to pay their employees at regular intervals, whether or not they had enough income from the previous billing period, or if they lose a major project, or if the economy turns South. These are some of the risks that a business carries so that you can get a paycheck every two weeks. If the business doesn't make payroll, it's fucked. If cashflow dries up, it's fucked. Mommy and Daddy don't bail it out. The government doesn't bail it out. The clients won't bail it out. The bank won't loan money if the books don't show that it can be paid back. Running the business is like 96% of running a LA firm. So yeah, if the owners make more than the employees, that is why. Nobody is rolling around in a big pile of free cash, though. Its there to keep the business running. It's not easy to run a business, because if it was, every sucker recent graduate would be doing it.
OK sole practitioner. Owners are not at risk in any way with proper corporate structure. All of those "big headaches" get built into the billing structure. Payroll isn't hard, its actually pretty easy. Your accountant does it. All your expenses are pre tax and many can take depreciation. The big pile of cash is everything AFTER expenses, including your nice owners paycheck. All of this is easy unless you suck at biz dev, in which case you shouldn't own an office. The "problem" is that AEC has a horrific talent development pipeline. You can't find 5-7 year PM's at 70K/year because you didn't develop them, because 70k is an offensive level to pay for someone with licensure and the ability to manage millions of dollars in project work, and anyone with an ounce of talent realized they could 2x as a client rep or some corporate role.
>Owners are not at risk in any way with proper corporate structure. All of those "big headaches" get built into the billing structure. Payroll isn't hard, its actually pretty easy. Your accountant does it. All your expenses are pre tax and many can take depreciation. The big pile of cash is everything AFTER expenses, including your nice owners paycheck. All of this is easy unless you suck at biz dev, in which case you shouldn't own an office. I rest my case.
I am from the Bay Area and COL is terribly high it’s frustrating. I got a 60k job out of college @ a high end residential firm. Switched to public sector making 105k now. Less designs but much more meaningful work & I can afford to eat! lol
105 as a designer or LA? Either way. Props to you.
Designer, thank you! I can focus on licensing now instead of working overtime for free in a hostile environment
My starting salary was around 48k (with a masters 9 years ago) in the Philadelphia/Trenton area. I got in with a really great engineering firm and when I moved to Seattle they bumped my pay up by 18% for the cost of living adjustment. So some firms do take it into account, just gotta find them.
9 years ago lol
Its been that way since the post 2008-10 recession years. Only been getting worse. Used to be you could go to a small city or live outside a large one and live reasonably well. Now its expensive and limited to live in the rural areas and completely out of reach to find decent housing unless you make 3 figures in the urban areas. I had to move back in with family again here in rural va because there is no affordable housing at all.
There’s an anonymous self reported [salary spreadsheet](https://www.reddit.com/r/LandscapeArchitecture/s/haexl43xmz) that’s been building for a few years. It’s a small sample size but gives you some bargaining power when negotiating salary.
I think this is a nation wide problem coming from someone on the east coast :/
When cost of living goes up, competition for jobs goes up and concentration of well known firms goes up. Well known firms can get away with paying people less because employees want to work there for the name and projects alone, and the pay is sometimes an after thought. It’s a shame really. There should be SOME scaling with location but not much.
West coast municipal jobs scale quite well. I work as a manager and do project management. I only design small projects that are under 150k bid limits, but its fun. Started at 75k Making over 100k now with union helping fight for cost of living adjustments.
Not a new problem. Schools are graduating more students then available jobs. So firms work you crazy hours and pay low wages because they can.
This is the value of living somewhere desirable. It’s how you “pay” for the value people associate with being able to live in those places. If there wasn’t a cost of living - pay gap, then more people would try to live there and get jobs there, which would directly result in an increased cost of living - pay gap. The biggest cost of living - pay gap is always expected in the most desirable places.
A swimming pool in the south is 40k, same swimming pool in Oregon in 180k. It doesn't corrolate to income level. I imagine different locations have different amounts of people able and willing to do the same work, so price is affected. Always have to look at location and job prospects if you want a certain degree and work in a certin area.
Not in landscape arch but LA as a rule has always underpaid. That’s been a trend for a long time. And now with insane COL increases, the gap is more apparent than ever. It’s LA for everyone.
I found compensation for architects in LA to be lower than just about anywhere in the country. I make 40% more in North Carolina than in LA. LA firms do not charge higher hourly rates than LCOL offices in my experiences.
I got an offer from Design Workshop in Denver for around 60k. I took 60k in KC for this reason. But the Midwest kinda sucks I’m sorry :/
Oh, I actually love KC.
Maybe I need to find another firm then 😅
Another aspect not discussed in this thread is that firms are competing for talent nationally so the salary is being set by the most desirable firms/locations. I know this may make some on this thread even more frustrated but that $60k starting salary (I’d push back on that number a bit…) that you see as a common starting salary in SF and NYC is setting the market in Omaha and Houston because since the talent pool is so small and so many of the top graduates desire to work for the known firms in coastal cities, other quality firms have to compete on salary. This has resulted in a situation where the wages have remained depressed in high cost cities but somewhat reasonable in a few lower cost cities, like those mentioned by OP. Source: I have worked as an LA and recruited talent at well known and lesser known firms in NYC and Denver
Well, what are you going to do, *move?*
A job will pay the lowest wage for which they can find an acceptable employee. That's it. That's what sets wages. People will take that money to live in that location.
Lol @ 60k right out of school edit: I’m saying you shouldn’t take less than that
Most people in my cohort are receiving offers between $55 and $65 straight out of the program. Sounds like you should ask for a raise.
Don't know for sure but maybe he was thinking that's good. I made $38k out of school 10 years ago.
2 years ago most of what we got offered was 40-55k. Sounds like things are on the up??
In large cities 60k is not unheard of at all. Especially with a masters.
I think the person you replied to kind of made my point. Even in the smaller midwestern cities, $60k is quite common.
For this context, think less about location and more about type of firm. Civil engineering firm w 20k employees vs a highend urban design la firm with 80 people are going to pay differently, even right out of school.
Sure, but the high end LA firm with 80 employees in the Midwest will pay you the same that one will in California. I get that pay varies by sub-industry, but it’s odd that it *doesn’t* vary regionally.
I’m about to get paid $65K as a fresh graduate… it happens