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National Salary Survey FAQs

The ACA National Salary Survey returns for 2025, offering valuable insights into architectural salaries across Australia. Look out for an email from ACA Survey landing in your inbox soon. For further details, check out our Frequently Asked Questions below.

NOTE: THE SURVEY CLOSES ON FRIDAY, 15 AUGUST 2025.

In an evolving employment landscape marked by skilled labour shortages and shifting market dynamics, understanding where your practice stands is crucial. By participating, you will:

  • Inform Strategic Decisions: Utilise the survey’s findings to make evidence-based decisions on remuneration, aiding in staff retention and attraction.
  • Benchmark Your Practice: Compare your salary packages across various roles with those of similar practices, considering factors like location, size, and practice type.
  • Contribute to Industry Advocacy: Your input helps build longitudinal data essential for ACA’s advocacy efforts, promoting fair and sustainable practices within the profession.

What is the ACA National Salary Survey?

The ACA National Salary Survey offers practices vital information about their position within the broader marketplace. It also develops important longitudinal data about architectural remuneration.

The survey questionnaire covers a wide range of roles and positions including professional, technical, and administrative and line management. It has filters for location, size and type of practice, as well as a question regarding benefits within packages.

The survey is independent and anonymous, and the results are available to all participants. ACA members are also able to benchmark their practices’ salaries against other participants by State or nationally through a private portal.

Why take the survey?

The ACA National Salary Survey is a significant resource for individual practices, and for the industry as a whole. The results provide valuable information to help inform a multitude of decisions in your practice:

  • Setting staff salaries – are yours competitive? The survey allows you to benchmark against other practices locally and nationally.
  • Preparing for staff reviews
  • Avoiding potential loss of staff (and thereby losing knowledge and incurring substantial costs associated with recruitment)

Completing the ACA Salary Survey also increases knowledge of current trends in employment and remuneration across the country, and therefore of the health of the industry. The findings are an important base for ACA advocacy and build significant longitudinal knowledge.

How long has the ACA been conducting the survey?

The first ACA Salary Survey was conducted in 2013, and there have been steady improvements over the years to make the data more meaningful. In 2019, the ACA opened the Salary Survey up to non-members as well as members, ensuring that we enable a much larger proportion of the architectural population to contribute to the salary survey results. After a break during the early stages of the pandemic, we began surveying the profession again in 2022.

We encourage all practice owners to participate in the 2025 Salary Survey – the more responses we receive, the more meaningful the data that we can provide on these important issues.

What are the benefits of the Salary Survey?

When we surveyed members about the importance of various functions of the Salary Survey to their practice, the following were listed in order of importance:

  • Providing reliable, independent, up-to-date annual data on remuneration in Australian architecture
  • Tracking remuneration trends in architecture over time to understand longitudinal trends
  • Enabling practices to benchmark against similar firms within the survey platform
  • Collecting up-to-date data to inform remuneration within individual practices

What is the timeline for 2025?

The survey will be launched in late July 2025. It will be open for three weeks to allow maximum participation. The analysis will be conducted by an independent organisation and the results provided by late September.

  • Launch: late July 2025
  • Completion: August 2025
  • Analysis of Data: September 2025
  • Release reports: late September 2025

How long will it take?

The survey will take approximately 15 minutes to complete, depending on the size of your practice.

What do I need?

Before commencing the survey, please read the definitions below and have at hand the remuneration details for all staff including:

• The average salary per role (e.g. total remuneration / no. of staff in that role).
• The lowest salary per role
• The highest salary per role
• The list of the benefits your firm offers staff

IMPORTANT: If any role category where there is only ONE STAFF member, simply list the salary for that staff member in the ‘Average’, ‘Lowest’ and ‘Highest’ columns. If there are NO STAFF in a particular position, DO NOT ENTER ANY DATA.

Salary Survey Input Spreadsheet

To help simplify the process we have developed a Salary Survey Input spreadsheet, enabling practices to gather data before they begin. Get started now by completing the Input spreadsheet early. You may also find it to be a useful tool for your practice.

Download the Salary Survey Input spreadsheet from here.

Definitions

‘Salary package’ means total cost to business including superannuation and packaged benefits but excluding dividends, distributions and bonuses.
‘Combined full-time equivalent’ means total number of full-time hours worked, with wages adjusted for part-time staff to be full-time equivalent.

Outcomes

A detailed analysis of the data will be carried out on behalf of the ACA. The resulting report will be available to all survey participants, with an executive summary available publicly.

Contact

For further information, contact Sascha Byrne.