What a public art commission costs, and what the budget has to cover
A commissioned outdoor sculpture in the UK usually costs £8,000 to £150,000 all in, a painted exterior mural of 20 to 100 square metres £2,000 to £20,000, and a landmark work on a major site starts at about £250,000 and runs into seven figures. Those totals are for the whole commission and not for the object: they include the artist’s fee, the making, the engineering, the foundations and the installation. A commissioner who reads the low end as a making budget discovers the difference when a structural engineer asks for a ground investigation.
No standardised price index for public art exists in the UK. The bands below are honest working ranges, not survey data, and their width comes from four things the section on variation sets out: who holds the fabrication contract, what the ground turns out to be, which consents bite, and how long the work must stand.
What the headline number actually covers
The headline number covers seven cost lines and the object is only one of them. Commissioners who have run a job before write all seven into the brief; those who have not write one figure and assume the rest is inside it. The lines below overlap and their bands do not add to one hundred per cent, because a project that spends heavily on fabrication spends lightly on site works, and the reverse.
| Line | What it pays for | Typical share |
|---|---|---|
| Artist fee | Design, development, meetings, consultation, project time, overheads | 15% to 25% |
| Materials and fabrication | The making, whether in the artist’s studio or a specialist workshop | 35% to 55% |
| Engineering and surveys | Structural design, ground investigation, services search, loading calculations | 5% to 12% |
| Site works and installation | Foundations, groundworks, craneage, traffic management, power, lighting | 10% to 20% |
| Management and consents | Project management, planning application fees, insurance, consultation | 5% to 12% |
| Documentation and evaluation | Photography, as-built records, maintenance manual, reporting to funders | 1% to 3% |
| Contingency | The unknowns, which are found in the ground and in the weather | 10% to 15% |
Why the bands vary so widely
All four reasons are decided before an artist is appointed. The first is who holds the fabrication contract: where the artist carries it, the artist prices the fabricator’s risk into their own figure and the fee line rises towards the top of its band; where the commissioner contracts the fabricator directly, the artist’s share falls but the commissioner absorbs the overrun.
The second is the ground. A work on existing hard-standing with known services costs a fraction of the same work on a site needing a piled foundation, and nobody knows which they have until somebody digs or scans. The third is the consent burden: a conservation area, a listed building, a highway or a railway boundary each add professional fees and months, and months are money. The fourth is permanence. A work expected to stand for fifty years is specified, engineered and finished differently from one removed after a summer.
What a sculpture costs, what a mural costs
Cost differs less by artistic ambition than by material and access. These are the whole commission, in the UK.
- Painted exterior mural, 20 to 100 square metres: £2,000 to £20,000, roughly £50 to £250 per square metre, driven by access and wall preparation rather than by paint. A powered access platform for two weeks can exceed the artist’s fee.
- Small freestanding sculpture, up to around 2 metres: £8,000 to £40,000, depending on material and whether it needs a foundation.
- Fabricated steel or bronze work, 2 to 5 metres: £25,000 to £150,000. Bronze is priced by weight and by the number of pieces to be welded and patinated, which is why two works of the same height differ by a factor of four.
- Landmark work on a major site: £250,000 upward, into seven figures, at which point the artwork is a construction project with an artist inside it.
- Integrated architectural work such as glazing, paving, railings or a facade element: no band is quoted, because it is costed against the building trade it replaces. The figure to put to a board is the net difference between the artist’s element and the standard component.
- Temporary or event-based work: £1,500 to £25,000, with hire, transport, stewarding and making good afterwards often larger than the making.
A commissioned easel painting or an interior digital artwork sits well below all of these, carrying no engineering, no consents and no installation. That shows what a public commission budget is actually buying: most of the money leaves before anyone touches the artwork.
The artist fee inside the budget
The artist fee is not the artist’s income, and the 15 to 25 per cent above is a share of the whole commission budget. A brief that states £40,000 is stating the project, so it offers roughly £6,000 to £10,000 of fee; a stated fee of £12,000 implies a project of something like £50,000 to £80,000. Where the artist is paid one all-inclusive sum and buys fabrication out of it, the headline is the whole budget wearing the word fee, and the artist’s own share is still that band. Out of it come studio costs, insurance, travel to a site that may be a long way off, materials for models and samples, the artist’s own tax and pension, and the unpaid weeks between commissions. Fee scales are not standardised in the UK. Both a-n The Artists Information Company and the Scottish Artists Union publish day rate guidance, revised periodically, that commissioners and artists use as a reference point. No figure of that kind is quoted here.
Two mechanical points belong in the brief. State whether the figure is inclusive or exclusive of VAT, because an artist trading above the registration threshold must add VAT and a budget that forgot it is short. And pay shortlisted artists for proposal work: asking three or four people to produce a costed concept design for nothing transfers the commissioner’s risk to those least able to carry it.
Contingency, inflation and the lines budgets forget
Contingency below ten per cent is a decision to overspend later, which is why no page here recommends eight. The unknowns are concentrated in the ground and the programme, and neither can be priced accurately at brief stage. Metal prices move over the twelve to eighteen months between a proposal being costed and a fabricator instructed, so a fixed price agreed early is one somebody will revisit.
Four lines get forgotten regularly: the planning application fee and the professional fees behind it, the insurance covering the work in transit and during installation, making good the site afterwards, and maintenance in the first year. Maintenance belongs on somebody’s budget from year one, not from the year the work first looks neglected.