Inside SIC 71111: UK Architecture's Record Year That Most Practices Missed

A summary of the Construct365 Sector Intelligence Report on SIC 71111 — the Companies House subclass for architectural activities, the code that holds the UK's architecture practices. The full report, with the AJ100-derived practice table, the Plan of Work segmentation and the product-fit verdict, is a free direct download — no email address required.

Disclosure: Section 10 of the report considers whether a fee-quoting product belongs in this code, in the context of Construct365's own product work — including a fee proposal builder for consultants now in development. For architects the report's verdict is no, because the RIBA already provides its members a free fee calculator, and this summary repeats that conclusion as written.

Record revenue that most of the profession never felt

The report puts the code at about £8.6bn in 2026 — derived by taking IBISWorld's £9.5bn figure for the 71.11 group and removing the £877m urban-planning-and-landscape sibling (71112). Alongside it sits a different, equally true number: RIBA chartered-practice revenue topped £5bn, up 24% in the year to May 2025, the strongest real-terms rise since 2017. The two measure different populations and must never be added — one is an activity measure across every firm in the code, the other a membership measure that includes the chartered practices' substantial overseas earnings.

The distribution behind the headline is the story. 83% of the overseas revenue driving the growth came from practices with 100 or more staff, while firms of one to four people saw flat income and a slight fall in owner earnings. The report calls it a two-speed profession, and the speeds are diverging.

78% of the practices, 13% of the money

This code has an unusually accurate spine: the title "architect" is protected in law, so the ARB register (~44,000 individuals) and the RIBA Chartered Practice scheme (~4,000 firms) give real counts where most construction codes have only soft ones. Around 11,000 companies carry the code at Companies House.

The defining structural figure comes from the RIBA's own benchmarking: small practices of 1–9 staff are 78% of all practices but earn just 13% of the revenue. Large practices — a low single-digit share by count — take roughly 61%. And for the better part of a decade the whole profession lived a revenue-up, profit-flat trap: salaries (54% of expenditure), indemnity insurance and software rose faster than fees, and only in 2025 did profit meaningfully turn — led by the large firms, where it rose more than 70%. Planning is the bottleneck that keeps the base pinned: an architect cannot invoice Stage 4 on a scheme stuck in an under-resourced planning queue.

Forbidden to publish fees — so the institute built the tool

Competition law ended RIBA fee scales decades ago; even reporting average fees now carries cartel risk, so the profession has no published price signal at all. In its place the RIBA built and gives away — free to every chartered practice — a resource-based Fee Calculator: the practice enters its own overheads, salaries and cost rates plus a project profile and margin, gets a fee apportioned across the Plan of Work stages, keeps every version as an audit trail, and exports straight into RIBA Contracts Digital to generate the appointment.

Why the report says no to a fee product here

Section 10 applies the recalled-versus-measured test from the earlier trades reports and finds architecture is neither: the fee is costed — staff cost rates × estimated hours per stage, plus overhead and margin — so a photo-and-voice quoting agent has no purchase, because the quantity is the estimate and the estimate is the skill. But the decisive fact is the incumbent. Every serious practice already gets the exact tool a third party would try to sell, free, from the body that certifies it, wired into the profession's own contracts. The report's words: competing with that is not a wedge, it is a wall.

This finding matters directly to Construct365's own roadmap. We are developing a fee proposal builder for consultants — and this report is the reason architects are not its market. The companion SIC 71122 report found consulting engineers have no institute-built calculator, which leaves that door ajar; here the RIBA closed it years ago, and the report treats "does the profession's institute already own the pricing tool?" as a disqualifying question worth asking of every professional code before any build.

What the profession does lack, the report argues, is on the demand side: three overlapping populations no free source reconciles, subscriber-only league tables, and — for the small-practice majority — a thin, planning-throttled domestic pipeline. Matching clients to practices is a directory problem, and that is the business Construct365 already runs.

Get the full report

The complete report covers the scope and the protected-title boundary, the three-figure market sizing and how to reconcile it, the 78/13 size structure, the composite table of the ten largest practices with profiles, the BIM-era technology stack and the fee layer, seven strain points from the two-speed squeeze to design-and-build novation, the product-fit test, and a caveats section that explains exactly which numbers are derivations.

Download the SIC 71111 Sector Intelligence Report (free — no email required)