Compensation shapes the culture of every architecture firm, whether you like it or not. It influences who joins your team, who stays, and how people imagine their future in the profession. Many architects hesitate to admit it, yet compensation is as important to attracting and retaining talent as the quality of the work itself. Design excellence may set a firm apart, but clear and credible salary structures determine whether the right people feel valued enough to build that work with you and dedicate their careers to your firm.

In a profession defined by creativity, technical rigor, and long project lifecycles, leaders need reliable data to understand where salaries stand and how to communicate that value. The challenge is that the compensation landscape in 2025 is scattered across multiple sources, with opaque data, making it difficult for firms and emerging professionals to get accurate information or see a complete picture.

This article brings together what the leading datasets tell us about architectural compensation today and explains how firms and professionals can use this information to make better decisions. It also introduces a new way to explore that data through BQE’s Architecture Salary Map, a tool developed to bring clarity, transparency, and accessibility to compensation benchmarks across the United States.