Executive summary
- Utilisation measures effort, not reward. BQE's 2026 study of 3,000+ architecture and engineering firms found utilisation and realisation "show almost no relationship to profit margin". The billing multiplier did far better: it was the strongest predictor of revenue growth, and top-quartile firms ran margins 7.5 points higher.
- The number to watch is effective multiplier: net fee income per £1 of direct salary. The practice in our worked example breaks even at 2.35×, and its residential work was running at 2.2×.
- Overruns are cheapest to fix mid-stage. Tracking stage fee spent against work complete, weekly, turns "we'll find out at the invoice" into a conversation you can still have in Stage 4.
- Cash is the other constraint. AJ100-scale practices averaged 87 debtor days in 2025. Lock-up (WIP plus debtors) belongs on the partner dashboard next to profit.
Architecture services at DataHexis
"Project pipeline, fee tracking, resource utilisation, and practice profitability dashboards." This article is about the distance between the first three and the last one.
— from the Industries section of the DataHexis websiteEvery practice knows its utilisation. Far fewer can say whether the hours behind that number were actually paid for.
That distinction is the whole game in architecture. A studio can be flat out, with every desk full, every timesheet showing 75% chargeable and the Stage 4 drawings going out on time, and still be losing money on the job. The effort was real. The price just wasn't right for it, and nothing in a utilisation report will tell you so.
The utilisation trap
Utilisation is popular because it's easy to measure and easy to manage: chargeable hours divided by available hours. The first problem is that nobody measures it the same way. Firm-wide figures in recent studies range from "just under 60%" (Deltek Clarity) to 64% (BQE) to an 81% median (Monograph, measuring logged time among its own users). Same profession, three definitions.
The deeper problem is that utilisation measures input. It tells you how much of your team's time went on client work, and nothing about what that time earned. If a commission was won on a thin fee, pushing utilisation higher just loses money faster. That's why the BQE finding matters: across more than 3,000 firms, the metric partners watch most closely barely moves with profit.
High utilisation on an underpriced job doesn't make money. It just loses it more efficiently.
Utilisation still earns a place on the dashboard, just not at the top of it. Track it by role (a partner at 46% and a technologist at 80% are both normal) and use it to spot capacity problems. For profit, look elsewhere.
Effective multiplier: the number that tracks margin
Effective (net) multiplier = net fee income (fees less subconsultants and disbursements) ÷ the direct salary cost of the hours spent on projects. It answers a simple question: for every £1 of salary we put into client work, how many pounds of fee came back?
Break-even multiplier = the practice's cost base (all staff costs plus premises, IT and overheads) ÷ that same direct salary cost. The distance between the two is your profit.
US benchmarks put the average net multiplier around 3.1× and break-even around 2.6× (BQE, 2025 data). There's no published UK equivalent, partly because the inputs usually live in three different systems. Hours and stages are in the practice management tool, salary costs are in payroll, and fees and subconsultant invoices are in the accounts.
Once those are joined, the multiplier does something utilisation can't. It lets you compare sectors, clients, project types and offices on the same footing. It's the only honest way to compare a London studio with a Bristol one, because each has a different salary base and therefore a different break-even. A Bristol team earning 2.5× may be doing better than a London team earning 2.6×.
Fee burn: catching the overrun in Stage 4, not at the final invoice
The second number partners need is live, and project by project: how much of each RIBA stage's fee has been spent, against how much of the stage's work is actually done. This is earned value in practice-management terms, and it's the difference between noticing an overrun and inheriting one.
Fee burn vs progress on a live commission
Stage 3 closed 18 points over fee, and nobody raised a variation. Stage 4 is 45% complete with 61% of its fee already spent, a 16-point gap with more than half the stage still to run. That's the moment to talk to the client, not in month nine.
Two details make or break this. The first is that "% complete" is the one input that has to come from a person. We make it a 30-second weekly estimate per live stage, and show the project architect their own burn line as they enter it, which is what keeps the estimate honest. The second is that agreed fee variations have to flow into the stage budget straight away. Otherwise legitimately expanded scope looks like an overrun, and the dashboard starts crying wolf.
Scope creep is the most common threat to project budgets: 73% of firms name it as the primary one in Factor A/E's 2026 benchmark. An overrun spotted at 45% complete is a fee conversation. Spotted at the final invoice, it's a write-off.
Lock-up and the Stage 4 cash trough
Profit and cash are different problems, and UK practices feel the second one hard. Moore Kingston Smith's 2026 benchmarking of AJ100-scale practices found debtor days averaging 87 in 2025 (down from 97). US firms report closer to 49. Add work in progress (hours worked but not yet invoiced) and you get lock-up: the number of days of fee income tied up between doing the work and banking the money.
The usual culprit is Stage 4. Technical design is long and labour-heavy, and if it's billed only on completion, WIP builds for months while salaries go out every four weeks. The fix is contractual rather than technical: agree monthly instalments within long stages. But you can only make the case to a client, or to your own partners, when you can see lock-up by project and by stage.
A worked example: the studio view
Here's what the finished reporting looks like for a typical multi-studio practice: studios in London and Bristol, about £7.7m of annual fee income across commercial, residential, education and heritage work. It's a composite of typical practice set-ups rather than a single client. The figures are illustrative, but they're calibrated against the UK benchmarks cited throughout.
Studio leads start the week with a view that refreshes daily from timesheets. It's judged against their own studio's break-even, not the practice's.
Studio view: London
Week 37, to dateUtilisation is still here, but it sits beside the numbers that say whether those hours are paying. Every status carries a word and an icon, not just a colour.
Resourcing forecast: booked hours as % of capacity, next 7 weeks
Looking forward, not back. W+4 is over-booked across architects and technologists (two Stage 4 deadlines landing together), and W+7 has capacity to spare. One is a hiring or freelance decision, the other a business-development prompt, both a month early.
Project portfolio matrix
Strong multiplier, high strategic value. Resource properly; lead pitches with it.
Strong multiplier, lower profile. The work that pays for the ambitious work.
Strategic but thin. Fine by choice: cap the hours and agree it up front.
Thin and low-profile. Re-scope, re-price at the next stage, or decline next time.
"Investment" is a legitimate category. It just needs to be chosen deliberately at fee proposal, not discovered at close-out.
The partner view
Partners don't need this week's timesheets. They need to know whether the practice is pricing its work properly, where the money is tied up, and whether the busiest sector is also the best one. It's the same model at a higher altitude.
Utilisation barely moved. Multiplier did.
Utilisation held at 71–73% throughout. Once fee burn and sector multipliers were visible, the multiplier rose from 2.44× to 2.61×, from pricing the next stage properly and raising variations on time rather than working harder. Both are shown on separate axes on purpose.
Effective multiplier by sector
Commercial fills the studios; heritage and conservation pays best per hour. Residential is running below break-even, so every extra hour of it costs the practice money. That's a fee-scale conversation for the next proposal, not a criticism of the team.
Where each £1 of fee goes
Staff costs at 57% match the latest AJ100-scale average, and the 9% operating margin sits just above the 7% sector norm. Because salaries dominate the cost base, a small drift in multiplier shows up here within weeks.
Lock-up, practice-wide
Down from 112 to 94 days after moving long stages to monthly instalments. There's still work to do, but each 10 days released is roughly £210k back in the bank.
Under the hood (for the data team)
Practice data is messier than it looks from the outside. Here's how the model is built so partners can rely on it.
Data model and sourcesStage-level grain, cost-rate history, studio security
A lightweight warehouse sits between the source systems and Power BI. Whatever you run (Deltek, Synergy, Monograph, Harvest, Xero, Sage or a spreadsheet you'd rather we didn't mention), the model conforms it to one structure:
| Table | Grain | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Fact Timesheet | Person × project × RIBA stage × day | Utilisation, direct salary cost and fee burn all start here, at stage level, not project level |
| Fact Stage Fee | Project × stage, including agreed variations | The budget each stage burns against |
| Fact Stage Progress | Live stage × week, % complete | The one human input; everything else is system data |
| Fact Invoice & Receipt | Invoice line, with paid date | Debtor days, WIP and lock-up |
| Fact Subconsultant Cost | Invoice matched to project and stage | Turns gross fee into net fee, so a late structural engineer's invoice lands in the right month |
| Dim Staff | Person, role, studio, cost rate history | Salary changes don't rewrite last year's multipliers |
Row-level security gives each studio lead their own studio and projects, and gives partners the whole practice, from a single semantic model.
The measuresSample DAX for multiplier and fee burn
Direct Salary Cost =
SUMX (
FILTER ( Timesheet, Timesheet[Is Chargeable] ),
Timesheet[Hours] * RELATED ( Staff[Hourly Cost Rate] )
)
Effective Multiplier =
DIVIDE ( [Fee Income] - [Subconsultant Cost], [Direct Salary Cost] )
Fee Burn vs Progress (pts) =
VAR FeeSpent =
DIVIDE ( [Time Value at Charge-out Rates], [Stage Fee incl. Variations] )
RETURN
( FeeSpent - [Stage % Complete] ) * 100In production the cost rate is looked up by effective date from the staff history table, rather than with a simple RELATED. The sample is simplified for readability.
Already on Deltek, Synergy or Monograph?Good. Here's where Power BI adds to them
Practice management platforms are good at the project in front of you. Where practices get stuck is everything that crosses a system boundary: salary costs from payroll, subconsultant invoices from the accounts, a resourcing plan kept in a spreadsheet, and several years of history from before the last software change. A vendor-neutral model sits across all of it, reconciles to the ledger and belongs to the practice, so switching platforms later doesn't mean losing your history.
Sole practitioners and small studios
Most practices aren't multi-studio. RIBA's 2025 benchmarking puts 78% of chartered practices at one to nine people. For them this matters even more, because a single under-priced commission can be a quarter's profit and there's no other studio to absorb it. The model is much lighter: one timesheet tool, one set of accounts and a single page. That page shows your multiplier against break-even, fee burn on every live stage, lock-up, and the next quarter's booked hours.
The question is the same size whether you're one desk or sixty: when a job feels like it's going well, do the numbers agree?
Frequently asked questions
What is a good utilisation rate for an architect?
It depends on role. RIBA benchmarking shows architects, technologists and assistants billing over 70% of their time, associates around 64% and partners or directors around 46%, because they carry management and business development. Practice-wide figures in published studies range from about 60% to over 80%, largely because definitions differ. Compare yourself by role, using one consistent definition.
What is an effective multiplier, and what's a good one?
Effective (or net) multiplier is net fee income divided by the direct salary cost of time spent on projects. US benchmarks put the average around 3.1× with break-even around 2.6×. What matters most is your own multiplier against your own break-even, which depends on your salary levels and overheads. It will differ between a London and a regional studio.
How do you track fees against RIBA stages?
Record time against the RIBA Plan of Work stage, not just the project. Hold each stage's fee (plus agreed variations) as its budget, and have the project architect estimate % complete weekly. Fee burn vs progress (the share of stage fee spent minus the share of work done) is the early-warning number. A gap of more than 10 points on a live stage deserves a conversation.
What is lock-up, and what's normal for a UK practice?
Lock-up is WIP days plus debtor days: how long fee income sits between doing the work and receiving the cash. Moore Kingston Smith's 2026 benchmarking found AJ100-scale practices averaging 87 debtor days in 2025. Billing long stages in monthly instalments is usually the fastest way to bring lock-up down.
Do we need new practice management software?
No. The reporting layer sits on top of whatever you already use (Deltek, Synergy, Monograph, Harvest, Xero, Sage or spreadsheets) and joins them up. A first working dashboard is typically live in around two weeks.
Sources
- BQE, 2026 A&E Benchmarking Reports (press release, 6 August 2026). prnewswire.com
- BQE, "Top architect KPIs: formulas, examples and benchmarks" (2025 benchmark data). bqe.com
- RIBA Journal, "What can architects learn about billable work?" (RIBA Business Benchmarking, 7 December 2023). ribaj.com
- RIBA Journal, RIBA Business Benchmarking Survey 2025 (20 November 2025). ribaj.com
- Moore Kingston Smith, UK Architecture Sector Benchmarking Report 2026 (May 2026). mooreks.co.uk
- Deltek Clarity A&E Industry Study (12 May 2026). deltek.com
- Monograph, utilisation benchmarks for architecture firms (April 2026). monograph.com
- Factor A/E, 2026 Architecture & Engineering Industry Benchmark (press release, 10 June 2026). prnewswire.com
- RIBA Plan of Work 2020. riba.org
Related reading
What's your practice's real multiplier?
In a free 60-minute discovery call, we'll look at where your timesheets, fees and accounts live, and tell you how quickly you could see your multiplier, fee burn and lock-up on one page.
Book a free discovery call → First dashboard typically live in about two weeks · Works with the systems you already use