Three ways to quote the same project. See what each one earns, and which one actually pays.
Most studios pick a pricing model once and quote that way for years. The three formats are not interchangeable, and on the same project they pay very differently.
Project value is what the client will spend on execution. A rough range is fine.
Put in what you would charge in each format. Skip any you do not offer.
Read as a fee charged on top of execution, so project management or consulting. If your percentage is margin buried inside your BOQ rates, switch to turnkey above instead.
Same project, three ways of charging. They are almost never the same money.
Put at least one of your rates in above and this will show you what it earns on this project.
No sign up required.
The single biggest driver of design effort, bigger than area.
Uncapped revisions are the most common way a fixed fee turns into a loss.
Sets a default monthly salary for whoever does the design work. Override that, plus utilisation and overhead, under "How this is calculated".
The execution margin is what pays for the design work here, so it is counted in the answer below.
This is what pays for the design work when the fee is waived. Blended across carpentry, civil and brought-out items. Most residential turnkey lands between 18 and 32.
Add the carpet area up in step one and this will cost the project out, hour by hour.
The verdict
Of the rates you entered, this one fits the project and pays for the work. ₹3 lakh, or 3.94x what delivery costs you.
₹3 lakh
₹250/sq.ft. · 12.5 percent of project · 3.94x delivery cost
At ₹3 lakh you are at a 3.94x multiplier, above the healthy band. Comfortable, if the client agrees.
Your scope is repeatable enough that area is a fair proxy for effort.
₹2.5 lakh
₹208/sq.ft. · 10.4 percent of project · 3.28x delivery cost
At ₹2.5 lakh you are at a 3.28x multiplier, above the healthy band. Comfortable, if the client agrees.
Scope is defined and revisions are capped, which is exactly the condition a fixed fee needs.
₹1.92 lakh
₹160/sq.ft. · 8 percent of project · 2.52x delivery cost
At ₹1.92 lakh you clear break-even but by less than 15 percent, which is where margins go razor thin. ₹2.28 lakh is the healthy number.
Defensible at this size, and the CoA minimum of 7.5 percent (₹1.8 lakh here) gives you a published number to point at. The catch: it ties your fee to the client's spending. If they value engineer the BOQ your fee falls even though your drawings do not.
Our fee for this project is ₹3 lakh. We price at ₹250 per sq.ft. because it keeps the fee proportionate to the space we are actually designing. You are not paying for rooms you do not have.
Everything below is an assumption, and assumptions are where a tool like this goes wrong. These are benchmarks for Indian residential practice, not facts about your studio. If you know your own numbers, put them in and the whole thing recalculates.
Salary only, what you pay the person doing the drawings each month. Your own draw, if it is you.
You pay for the whole month but only part of it is client work, so the billable hours have to carry the salary for all of it.
Rent, software, internet, admin and anyone on the payroll who does not bill time. Not designer salaries.
You alone is 1. Count anyone whose hours go on client projects, and nobody whose do not.
Your fee as a multiple of what those hours cost you in salary, before overhead or profit. 3x is the industry norm.
How long one 1,000 sq.ft. home takes you to draw, start to finish.
Door to door, one site visit.
A small round runs about 2 hours, a medium one 6, a large one 15. Published figures put one full round at 8 to 12, so if you are unsure, go higher.
Client calls, vendor follow-ups and paperwork across the whole project.
Time on site running execution each month, on a 1,000 sq.ft. project. Scales with area, like the drawing set. Turnkey only.
This is a decision aid, not a valuation.
The three models talked through in eleven minutes, before you read the comparison below.
There are three honest ways to price design work, and a fourth that most of the market uses without admitting it. Each fits a particular shape of project. None is a house style to apply to everything you take on.
| Model | Works when | Breaks when | Typical in India |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fixed fee | Scope is defined and revisions are capped | Revisions are uncapped, or the job runs past ten months | ₹50,000 to ₹5 lakh and up |
| Per sq.ft. | Work is repeatable and the flat is above about 900 sq.ft. | Small flats, and fully bespoke detailing | ₹100 to ₹300 per sq.ft. |
| Percentage | Turnkey and execution, where scope moves | The client value engineers the budget | 8 to 15 percent, CoA floor 7.5 |
| Buried in the rates | Never, honestly | The moment they take your drawings elsewhere | Most of the market |
One number, agreed before work starts. It is the easiest thing for a client to approve, because it is the only model where they know on day one what they will pay. It is also the easiest thing in the world to lose money on.
A fixed fee is a bet that you have understood the scope. It needs two conditions to hold: defined deliverables, and a revision cap written into the contract. Without the cap you have sold unlimited work for a limited number.
The default in the Indian market, and the one most often copied without thought. Its appeal is that it sounds objective: a rate multiplied by a measurable quantity.
Its problem is the assumption underneath, that effort rises and falls with area. It does not, and the smaller the flat the more badly it does not. A 700 sq.ft. two bedroom has the same kitchen, the same wardrobes and very nearly the same drawing count as a 1,200 sq.ft. one.
A fee expressed as a share of what the client spends on execution. It has the strongest published backing in India, because the Council of Architecture publishes a minimum, and it survives scope change better than anything else: if the project grows, the fee grows, with no renegotiation.
The catch runs the other way. Value engineering cuts your fee without cutting a single drawing. A client who trims 20 percent out of the budget has just handed you a 20 percent pay cut for the same work.
A large share of this market does not charge a design fee at all. It goes into the execution rates, a few percent added to carpentry and civil work, so the client sees one number and never sees a line called design. It is popular because it avoids the hardest conversation in the business, and it is the most expensive habit in it.
If this is you, the calculator above still works. Set it to turnkey, put your BOQ margin in, and it will show what the design effort is costing you inside that margin. That number is the fee you have been giving away.
The Council of Architecture sets a minimum fee for interior architecture under the Architects (Professional Conduct) Regulations, 1989: 7.5 percent of the cost of works assigned, plus 10 percent of the professional fee for documentation and communication, plus GST on top.
Be precise about who it binds. Those regulations bind registered architects. An interior designer who is not registered with the CoA is not covered and is not breaking any rule by charging less. But every designer in this market should know the number exists, because it is the strongest published anchor available and a far better thing to point a client at than "this is what we usually charge".
Percentage of the cost of works, by project type. Source: Council of Architecture, Architects (Professional Conduct) Regulations, 1989.
A statutory body has encoded, in a fee schedule, the thing this whole page is about. Design effort does not scale in a straight line with project size. Bigger projects cost proportionally less to design; small ones cost proportionally more. Which is exactly why one flat per sq.ft. rate applied across everything you take on will overcharge on some projects and quietly bleed you on others.
Two numbers get confused constantly, and the confusion is where money goes missing. Your design fee and the client's execution spend are not the same measure and should never be blended into one rate.
Scale runs ₹0 to ₹3,500 per sq.ft. City spread is real: Mumbai ₹1,500 to ₹3,500, Pune ₹1,000 to ₹2,500, Tier 2 lower again.
The same design work is also quoted as 8 to 15 percent of project cost, or as a flat ₹50,000 to ₹5 lakh and up. Three formats, three very different implied numbers, often from studios doing identical work. That is the first clue the market has no settled view.
That last tile is the argument of this whole page. Design work carries a far higher gross margin than execution, which is why it deserves to be sold as its own line rather than hidden inside the rates.
A worked example you can reproduce in the calculator above
A 1,200 sq.ft. 3BHK in Pune, ₹24 lakh execution value, standard finish, working drawings, revisions capped at four, six months, two site visits a month.
- Base effort: 130 multiplied by the square root of 1.2 equals 142 hours
- Plus one extra revision round (10 hours) and 42 hours of site visits, then 12 percent for coordination, equals 218 hours
- A ₹40,000 a month designer at 65 percent utilisation costs ₹350 per billable hour
- Direct labour: roughly ₹76,100
- Break-even at 120 percent overhead: ₹1.67 lakh
- Healthy fee at a 3.0x multiplier: ₹2.28 lakh, about ₹190 per sq.ft.
- For reference, the CoA floor of 7.5 percent on ₹24 lakh is ₹1.80 lakh
₹190 per sq.ft. sits mid range against the ₹100 to ₹300 Indian designers actually charge for design only work. Two independent methods landing in the same place is the best validation available in a market with no published data.
Take two projects, both standard finish, both a full working drawing set. A 1,200 sq.ft. 3BHK and a 700 sq.ft. 2BHK. The area falls by 42 percent. Ask what actually falls with it.
A flat per sq.ft. fee follows the top bar. Your costs follow the bottom one.
Not the kitchen, which is one kitchen either way and the most drawing-heavy room in a home. Not the client meetings, the selections, or the vendor coordination. Not the revision rounds, which are a function of how decisive the client is, not of how many square feet they own. What falls is a bedroom's worth of wardrobe details and some floor area on a layout you were drawing anyway.
That is why the calculator scales effort with the square root of area rather than with area itself. On the default assumptions the same designer needs about ₹190 per sq.ft. on the 1,200 sq.ft. flat and closer to ₹250 on the 700 sq.ft. one to make the same living.
Most studios quote both at the same rate, then conclude small flats are not worth taking. Small flats are fine. The rate was wrong.
A fixed fee is the only model where the client knows the number on day one, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. The number stops moving. The work does not.
Sources: PMI practitioner research, and a Harvard Business Review analysis of 1,471 projects that found the same 27 percent.
Roughly one project in two goes over what was agreed, and when it does it goes over by about a quarter. Price a fixed fee against the scope in the brief and you have priced against the version of the project that has a coin-flip chance of being the one you deliver.
The leak has a name and it is almost always revisions. Each extra round costs you roughly 7 percent of the design hours on the project, and on a ₹2 lakh fee that is real money walking out on a Tuesday afternoon. Round four is usually where a comfortable project becomes a break-even one, and nobody notices, because there is no invoice attached to it.
The fix is one clause, not a bigger number. Two or three rounds written into the contract, with a stated price for each round after that. It is not a hard clause to negotiate, because a client who is told what a revision costs asks for fewer of them. Not having it is what turns a fair fee into a loss you discover in month five.
A fixed fee is not a price. It is a price plus a promise about scope, and the promise is the part that costs you.
A percentage is the fairest looking model in the business. It moves with the project, it needs no renegotiation when scope changes, and the CoA gives you a published floor to point at. Then value engineering happens.
Your fee is down ₹48,000. Your drawing set is identical. Nobody asked you to do less work.
This is the structural weakness of the model, and it is invisible when you quote because the cut has not happened yet. It is also the reason a percentage should never be your only number on a small project: 10 percent of ₹12 lakh is ₹1.2 lakh, which will not pay for a full design effort at any honest costing.
The other confusion worth clearing up: a percentage means two different things in this market, and conflating them is the most common pricing error in it. A percentage charged on top of execution is a consulting or project management fee, typically 8 to 15 percent, and it is what the calculator above models. A percentage buried inside your BOQ rates is a markup, not a fee, and it behaves completely differently. If that is what you do, use the turnkey setting.
Two ways to protect it. Agree the fee against the budget at appointment rather than against the final BOQ, so a later cut does not claw it back. And quote the CoA floor of 7.5 percent as a minimum rather than a target, so there is a published number under your fee that is not yours to argue about.
A percentage ties your income to how much your client spends. That is fine when they are spending. It is a pay cut when they are saving.
Everything above is about which format to quote in. This is what decides whether the number inside the format is any good, and it is where most studios have never done the arithmetic. Four steps.
The design hours the drawing set will take, plus the revision rounds you actually agreed to, plus site visits at three to four hours each including travel, plus roughly 12 percent for calls, coordination and admin. That last 12 percent never appears on a timesheet and always appears in the week.
This is the step that catches everyone out. A ₹40,000 salary does not buy 176 hours of client work a month, because nobody is billable every hour they are at work. At 65 percent utilisation it buys about 114.
Utilisation is the single most powerful lever in this calculation and almost nobody in this industry has a number for it. Moving it from 75 percent to 55 changes the fee you need by about 30 percent.
Hours multiplied by that real hourly cost is your direct labour. Two numbers come off it. Break-even is direct labour plus overhead, which is everything keeping the studio open while nobody is billing: rent, software, the admin salary, your own unbilled time. A healthy fee is direct labour multiplied by roughly 3.0.
That 3.0 is the net multiplier benchmark architecture and engineering practice has used for decades. 2.75 to 3.25 is healthy. Under 2.5 means you are billing below what the work costs you, whatever the invoice says.
The trap, because a spreadsheet version of this almost always falls into it: do not load overhead into the hourly rate and then also apply the multiplier. The benchmark is defined against unloaded direct labour. Double counting inflates every fee you calculate by about 30 percent, and you will lose work you should have won.
Design only fees run roughly 100 to 300 rupees per sq.ft., with metro studios at the top and Tier 2 cities markedly lower. Execution is a different number entirely, around 800 to 1,800 for mid range and 1,800 to 3,500 plus for premium. The right rate for you is the one that clears what the project costs you to deliver, which is what the calculator works out.
It depends on the project, not on your preference. A fixed fee needs defined scope and capped revisions. Per sq.ft. needs area to be a fair proxy for effort, which fails below about 900 sq.ft. and on fully bespoke work. A percentage suits execution and turnkey, where the fee should move with the project.
The Council of Architecture sets 7.5 percent of the cost of works as the minimum for interior architecture under the Architects (Professional Conduct) Regulations, 1989, plus 10 percent of the professional fee for documentation and communication, plus GST. It binds registered architects, not every interior designer, but it is the strongest published anchor in the market.
Price the effort, not the estimate. Count the hours the drawing set, the revisions and the site visits will take, cost them at your own salary divided by billable hours, then apply a multiplier. That gives you a fee before a single line item exists, which is exactly the moment a client asks for one.
Usually yes. A percentage moves with the project, so scope changes do not force a renegotiation, and the CoA floor gives you a published number to point at. The catch is that value engineering cuts your fee without cutting your drawings, so agree the basis before the BOQ starts shrinking.
Two or three, written into the contract, with a stated price for each round after that. Around half of all projects experience scope creep and those that do overrun by roughly a quarter. Uncapped revisions on a fixed fee is the single most common way a profitable project turns into a loss.
Because design effort does not scale with area the way a per sq.ft. fee does. A 700 sq.ft. flat has the same kitchen, the same wardrobes, the same client meetings and nearly the same drawing count as a 1,200 sq.ft. one. The area falls by 40 percent, your effort falls by maybe 15, and a per sq.ft. fee follows the area.
No. It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, nothing is saved, and there is no email gate or sign up. Close the tab and the numbers are gone. GST is also deliberately not handled anywhere in the tool, so treat every figure it shows as pre-GST.
Interix turns your own rates into a client ready quotation in the meeting, so the number you just validated survives contact with the estimate.
The calculator needs JavaScript to recalculate. With it off, everything below is the worked example for a 1,200 sq.ft. Pune 3BHK at ₹24 lakh, which is the case the article walks through.