Artist fees: what the number in the brief is really paying for
Artist fees on a UK public art commission pay for six things at once, and only one of them is the artist’s own labour: research and site work, design time, travel, insurance and professional costs, subcontracted technical input, and the tax that has not been deducted yet. The fee is not income. In the worked example below, a fee of £12,000 leaves about £9,150 against 38 working days, and income tax and National Insurance still come out of that. Anyone reading the number in a brief as a wage is reading it wrongly, and so is a commissioner who sets it by asking what the artwork is worth.
Setting Out publishes no fee scale and tells no artist what to charge. Fee levels in UK public art are not standardised, there is no statutory rate, and the day rate guidance that exists comes from artist membership bodies, the a-n Artists Information Company and the Scottish Artists Union, rather than any regulator. Those figures move, so read the current version from the body itself rather than a number quoted on a website.
What the fee has to cover before it pays for a day’s work
The fee covers everything the artist is not separately reimbursed for, and the brief decides how long that list is. Two structures are common.
- Split structure: the artist is paid a design and delivery fee, and fabrication, installation, groundworks and engineering sit in separate budget lines held by the commissioner.
- All inclusive structure: the artist is paid one sum out of which fabrication, installation, transport, insurance and every subcontractor is also paid, making the artist a main supplier carrying commercial risk.
The difference between them is arithmetic, not opinion. On the percentage shape used throughout this site the artist fee is 15 to 25 per cent of the whole commission budget, so a project of £40,000 carries a fee of roughly £6,000 to £10,000, and a stated design fee of £12,000 implies a project of something like £50,000 to £80,000. An all inclusive figure is the whole budget wearing the word fee: the artist’s own share is still that band, and the rest is subcontractors passing through the artist’s bank account. Which structure a brief uses is the first question to ask, before any question about whether the number is enough.
A worked example of where a fee goes
This example is arithmetic, not an average and not a recommendation. It assumes a split structure, a permanent exterior work of modest scale, and an artist who carries their own insurance and the structural check.
| Line | Basis | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Design and delivery fee | Stated in the brief | £12,000 |
| Travel and subsistence | Nine site and meeting visits | £900 |
| Public liability and professional indemnity | Share of annual premium attributed to this job | £450 |
| Structural engineer’s check and calculations | Subcontracted, carried by the artist | £1,200 |
| Accountancy and administration | Share of annual cost | £300 |
| Remaining for the artist’s own time | After the four lines above | £9,150 |
The time that £9,150 has to pay for is 38 working days: eight days of research and site visits, four days attending consultation, fifteen days of design development and drawings, six days coordinating with the engineer, the fabricator and the contractor, and five days of meetings, reporting and snagging. That is a little over two hundred pounds a day of gross self-employed income before income tax and National Insurance, and before any allowance for studio rent or unpaid time between commissions. The figure is the result of this example’s own arithmetic. It is not a rate anyone publishes and it should not be treated as one.
The unpaid time before appointment
Unpaid work sits in front of every fee, and it is the part that never appears in a budget. An expression of interest costs an artist half a day to a day. A shortlist stage usually pays a concept fee, and no standard scale for it exists, so no band for it is quoted here; what can be said is that it commonly pays less than the concept work actually takes once a site visit and a set of drawings are included. An artist shortlisted three times and appointed once absorbs two lots of that shortfall out of the one fee that arrived.
Treat the concept fee as a partial contribution rather than as payment, and check before applying whether it exists at all. A commission that asks an open field for developed designs and pays nothing for them is asking several artists to subsidise the commissioner.
Tax, VAT and the business side
Commission income is trading income, and an artist taking commissions is running a business for tax purposes whether or not it feels like one. Fees are declared through Self Assessment, the tax year runs from 6 April to 5 April, and income tax and National Insurance are paid on profit rather than turnover, so the travel, insurance, engineer and accountancy lines above are deductible costs rather than losses. Payments on account can fall due in the year after a large commission, which catches artists whose income arrives in lumps.
VAT is the trap on larger public work. Registration becomes compulsory once taxable turnover crosses the threshold in any rolling twelve month period, and a single six figure all inclusive commission can cross it alone. The threshold is set by government and has changed more than once, so confirm the current figure with HMRC rather than a number found online. Two consequences follow. A registered artist must add VAT to the fee, which a commissioner who cannot reclaim it, such as some charities and trusts, feels as a real increase. An unregistered artist quoting against a budget that assumed VAT was recoverable may be compared unfairly with a registered one, so briefs should state whether budgets include VAT, and artists should ask when they do not.
Negotiating, and what is actually negotiable
The headline fee is usually the least negotiable number in a public art brief, because it has been reported to a committee, written into a planning obligation or drawn from a fixed capital line. Four other things move more readily than the fee does.
- Move the scope, by reducing the number of consultation sessions or the number of design iterations included.
- Move the risk, by asking the commissioner to hold the fabrication contract instead of the artist.
- Move the payment profile, by front loading a stage payment so the artist is not funding materials personally.
- Move the extras, by getting travel, engineering and insurance reimbursed at cost outside the fee rather than absorbed within it.
Prices quoted online for digital art commissions belong to a different market and are not comparable with any of this. A public art fee buys a design that must survive planning, engineering, a construction programme and twenty years of weather, and it is priced against that, not against an image.
This page has recommended no rate, published no scale and rated no one, and the daily figure that falls out of the worked example above is the arithmetic of that example only, not a rate to quote at anybody. What it offers instead is the shape of the money, so an artist can do their own sums and a commissioner can see what their number is buying.