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Interior Designer Salary
Like most creative professions, an interior designer's salary can vary wildly depending on whether they practice as a solo professional or as part of a larger firm. Regardless of whether a designer works on a salary or on a commission basis, the more business you bring in a designer, the bigger your paycheck will be at the end of the week.
Many beginning interior designers start their careers by earning a fee per hour. A designer working for a larger firm earns a salary that their employer recoups from client fees. For a recent design school graduate, this kind of salary arrangement can provide a strong safety net during a period of portfolio building and experimentation.
As designers and firms mature, they can increase their earnings by implementing some clever and customer-oriented pricing strategies. Many experienced graphic designers charge their clients a flat fee plus expenses. Many clients love this pricing structure, since it frees them to select any furniture and fixtures they like while capping the costs if the project runs into any unanticipated delays or problems. |
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Although some clients might abuse the flat fee by requesting too much of the interior designer's time, most designers factor that potential into their fees. At the end of the project, a flat fee designer can earn significantly more money per hour than a colleague earning a typical interior designer salary.
Many interior designers now work directly for or in partnership with furniture manufacturers or general contractors. In those cases, interior designers sometimes charge their clients a percentage of the overall project costs, usually 20%. For example, a client who purchases $20,000 of material and labor on a project would pay their interior designer an additional fee of $4,000. In other cases, however, the larger company builds the designer's fee directly into the cost of the goods purchased by the client. Using a similar example, if the client purchases $20,000 of material, they pay nothing directly to the designer. Instead, that interior designer's fee has been marked up into the retail price of the furnishings.
Regardless of how an interior designer bills their clients, industry expert Suzanne DeWalt estimates that a talented first year designer can earn an average salary of over $44,000 per year. Depending on how efficiently that interior designer can serve his or her clients, that number can grow significantly year to year.
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