Every construction budget breaks down into two buckets.

Hard costs are the construction itself: the materials and labor that physically build your project. They’re shaped by the size of the scope, the quality of the finishes, the complexity of the design, and the specific conditions of your site.

Soft costs are everything else your project needs to succeed: design fees, engineering, survey, permits, and other professional services. They can be roughly estimated as a percentage of your hard costs, which makes them easy to ballpark once you have a construction number in mind.

In Los Angeles right now, most residential construction lands roughly between $400 and $900+ per square foot, depending on scope, finishes, and complexity. A remodel with straightforward finishes sits near the lower end of that range. New builds and highly custom work with premium materials can climb past the top of it.

On top of construction, soft costs typically add 20%-30% of your construction budget.

An often forgotten budget line that should never be skipped: a 10% contingency. Unknowns will pop up…they always do. Behind walls, under floors, at the permit counter. Planning for them is what keeps a surprise from becoming a crisis. A project with a contingency has room to breathe. A project without one is holding its breath.

These ranges reflect LA-area projects as of mid-2026, and every project is different. Treat them as a rough idea, not a quote. The real numbers come from your scope, your site, and your priorities.

Every decision in the design influences the budget. Square footage, finish levels, structural complexity. An extra long wall of sliding doors is beautiful, but it may call for steel where wood would otherwise do. Handmade tile tells a different story than mass produced. There is no wrong choice, there are just tradeoffs, and your project will be a blend of many. We encourage conversation around splurging where it will count most and being more prudent where it won’t.

The good news is you don’t have to have any of this figured out from the beginning! Exploring your options and weighing what they cost is the design process. Understanding that each design move has a financial ripple effect doesn’t limit the design, it just guides us in making informed decisions together.

Some useful context: architectural fees vary widely across the industry, both in how they’re calculated and when they’re paid. Some firms charge a percentage of construction cost, some bill hourly, some quote a fixed fee. Payment might come at regular intervals, at project milestones, or on a set schedule. None of these is wrong, but they can feel very different to live with, so it’s worth asking any architect you talk to how their structure works.

Here’s how our fees work: A fixed fee from the start of design through permitting. You’ll know the number before we begin, and it won’t drift as the design develops (barring any major changes in scope.)

During construction, we switch to hourly. Construction support looks different for every project depending on the contractor, the complexities of the project, and the needs and desires of the client. So, you pay for the level of involvement that your project actually requires rather than a one-size-fits-all number set long before construction begins.

A helpful rule of thumb for planning purposes: though we don’t bill this way, our total architectural fees typically work out to somewhere between 8%-16% of the project’s hard costs.

Every project gets a unique proposal with fees carefully considered based on our initial conversations, to be sure you will get what you want from your investment.

Our fees are billed monthly, based on progress. You pay for the work that’s been done, as it’s done.