Architect Fees

[Chocolate1984]

We have met with an architect who charges a fee of 10% + VAT of total construction costs. Is this average? I feel like it's a lot. Other architects have been a bit vague about their charging- in fact one wouldn't even tell us.

How much did your architect charge?

THats a bit weird , we are having a extension and I had a lot of trouble finding a architect to do the plans to submit .. I knew what I wanted and found a friend to do it in the end . Some of them were £5000!!! Crazy!

Assuming they are a proper architect doing the full service including contact management that might be reasonable, but for what hendrick says it would be excessive.
If you just want a box or something like that then a plan drawer is plenty but a decent architect is supposed to design what you actually need rather than what you think you need.
We signed up with an architect in the hopes that it would pay off, then we thought they weren't listening to what we wanted, then eventually we realised they understood our needs better than we did!
A bit like a hospital, you don't tell them what operation you want, you explain your problem and they spend ages doing tests and eventually do something different to what you expected!

The initial measurements, site survey & drawings are £1700. They aren't project managing for 10% but they are staying with the project until the end, submitting plans etc.

We had essentially planned to add 4x7m onto the back to make a big kitchen & utility but the architect said our budget of £85,000 wasn't enough. Said they would be able to design within our budget by adding less space but making better use of it.

Agree @johnd2 .. ours is a simple garage conversion and small extension so didn't need a £5k plan .. I can see that they would be needed in other extensions .. why the 10% thing though . Surely you pay them then they do the plans and move on?

Whereabouts are you? I'm doing a garage conversion and building a new garage and have lots of quotes for around £50k in the south east . Not including the kitchen but I'm not going to go crazy on that and have seen some lovely ones for around £7.