Getting paid on time: a stage-wise fee schedule that actually holds

Most fee disputes in a small practice aren't really about the fee. They're about timing. The number was agreed at the start, everyone was content, and then the drawings went out ahead of the money and the conversation quietly changed shape. You're no longer an architect submitting an invoice. You're a creditor asking for a favour.

No reminder email fixes that. What fixes it is a schedule written down before the first sketch, with each payment tied to something the client actually wants in their hands. The Council of Architecture already publishes one, and it's worth knowing properly, because it's the closest thing Indian practice has to a default a client can't easily call unreasonable.

The schedule in full

The CoA's Conditions of Engagement and Scale of Charges sets out the stages of a commission and the percentage of the total fee payable at each. The figures are cumulative. Each one is the share of the whole fee you should have collected by that point, less whatever has already been paid, not an additional slice on top.

One detail in the schedule catches people out. The basis shifts as the job progresses. Stage 1 runs against the rough estimate, stages 3 and 4 against the preliminary estimate, and everything from the appointment of the contractor onwards against the accepted tender cost. So the same percentage can mean two different rupee figures six months apart, which is a conversation to have early rather than at the invoice.

Read down the right-hand column and the shape of the thing is hard to miss. Forty-five per cent of the fee is earned before a brick is laid, and more than half before a contractor is appointed. That isn't the CoA being generous to architects. It's a reasonably honest description of where the work sits: the design stages are front-loaded, and the construction stages are long, thin and administrative.

What the percentage is taken on

The percentage applies to the actual cost of works on completion. Three things come out of that figure before it is applied: the cost of the land, the cost of the client's site office, and the cost of supervisory staff at site. Everything else stays in.

Two consequences follow, and both belong in the first conversation rather than the last. Your fee isn't fixed at the estimate, so if the cost of works rises the fee rises with it. And the fee can't be settled finally until the works are. Interim payments run against whatever estimate is current and get reconciled at the end, which is why stage eight sits on its own line instead of being folded into virtual completion.

The CoA also publishes minimum percentages by category of work. Treat them as a floor rather than a target, and note that they are a floor with teeth: an architect in private practice is required to inform the client of the Conditions of Engagement and Scale of Charges and to observe them, and a departure is capable of being treated as professional misconduct under the Architects (Professional Conduct) Regulations, 1989, which carries disciplinary consequences under section 30 of the Architects Act, 1972.

Conservation, interiors and landscape sit at the same 7.5% as a private house, which surprises people until they think about it: all three are drawing-heavy and site-heavy relative to the construction cost they generate. Repetition drops to 2.5% on the same campus and 3.5% elsewhere, for the obvious reason that you have already done the design once.

The documentation charge is not optional

Separate from the professional fee, the client pays documentation and communication charges at 10% of the professional fee payable at each stage. Prints, reproductions, preparing documents, correspondence. It applies across all engagements and at every stage, and a studio that quietly absorbs it is giving away a tenth of its income for the privilege of running a printer.

Put it in the appointment letter as its own line, triggered stage by stage in the same way the fee is. A charge that turns up for the first time on an invoice reads as a surprise. The same charge, stated on day one, reads as a term.

GST, and what goes on the invoice

Architectural services are taxed at 18% GST. The relevant SAC codes are 998321 for architectural advisory services, 998322 for architectural services on residential building projects and 998323 for non-residential. There is no exemption and no concessional slab for this work, which is why the rate is simply the standard one.

In practice that means every fee figure you say out loud needs its basis attached. On a two-crore project, "seven and a half per cent" and "seven and a half per cent plus GST" are about two and a half lakh apart. Show the tax on its own line with the SAC code beside it and the conversation never has to happen twice.

Tie the money to the deliverable

Here's the part the schedule can't do for you. A stage-wise schedule only works if each stage's payment is attached to the thing the client is waiting for. Otherwise what you have written is a payment calendar, and a calendar is a request.

So the preliminary scheme is issued when the 20% is settled, the approval set when the 35% is settled, the working drawings and tender documents when the 45% is settled. Issued then, not invoiced then. That single word is most of the difference between a practice that gets paid on time and one that doesn't.

Plenty of architects already believe all this and still do the opposite, because the mechanics are awkward. Withholding a drawing means remembering to withhold it, which means a folder you haven't shared yet, a link you haven't sent, a conversation you're dreading. All the friction sits on your side. So the drawings go out, the invoice follows, and you're back where you started.

That's the problem payment-gated issue is built to remove. You attach an invoice to a set and it stays sealed until the payment clears, then it releases itself. The sequence is raise, pay, unlock, and the awkward part is handled by the software rather than by you on a Tuesday afternoon. The money settles into your own Razorpay account, not a platform wallet, so the arrangement costs you nothing in float.

Writing your own schedule

The CoA schedule has thirteen payment points. On a house that's too many, and a client who opens the letter to thirteen lines will read it as nickel-and-diming rather than as discipline. Compress it, but keep the shape.

When a client stalls

Sometimes a client just stops. No dispute, no complaint, only silence and an unpaid stage. The instinct is to keep working, because stopping feels like escalation and the relationship still feels salvageable. Keep working and you convert a small unpaid amount into a large one.

1. The reminder that isn't a reminder. A short note stating which stage is outstanding, which deliverable it releases, and that work on the next stage has not commenced. No apology, no chasing tone. You're reporting a state, not asking a favour.
2. The pause-of-work letter. If the first note goes unanswered, write formally: work is suspended pending settlement of the stage, the programme dates move accordingly, and the studio is holding the set. Reference the clause in the appointment letter. This is the letter that usually produces a payment.
3. Hold the set, properly. Not "I'll send it once you've paid," which invites negotiation, but a set that isn't accessible at all. If the drawings are already sitting in a shared drive, you have no position to hold.
4. Escalate outside the relationship. A formal notice, and where the conduct warrants it, the Council of Architecture route. It's rare, and it ends the relationship. The option existing is part of why the earlier steps work.

One unglamorous thing makes all four steps easier: a record. Which drawing went to whom, on what date, against which invoice, and whether it was opened. If the answer lives across an inbox and a phone, you're arguing from memory. If it lives in an audit log, you're arguing from a document. A drawing issue register gives you the same thing on paper, and the habit is easier to build before you need it than during.

The harder problem is noticing early. A stage that has gone unpaid for six weeks would have been much easier to deal with at week two, and nobody spots it by opening client folders one at a time. Being able to ask the practice a plain question, along the lines of who hasn't paid and what went out last week, beats any monthly report. That is what the studio assistant is for.

What this does not solve

A stage-wise schedule protects you against late payment. It does nothing about a client who pays every stage on time and asks for a fourth concept revision at each one. Different failure, different remedy: that one needs the scope of each stage stated as tightly as the fee.

It also won't survive mechanics that defeat it. A schedule you can't enforce, because the drawings are already in a folder the client has had access to since March, is a schedule in name only. If that describes your studio, the real question is less about the fee and more about what the practice runs on.