Interior Design Salary Reality

You're tracking your true hourly rate. What does that look like?

$52,000 gross. After taxes in Massachusetts, that's about $39,800. I average 42 to 45 hours a week, which the firm doesn't pay overtime for because I'm salaried. So at 44 hours average over 50 working weeks, that's 2,200 hours. $39,800 divided by 2,200 is $18.09 net. Then I have $280 a month in commuter rail passes to get to our office in the Back Bay, which is $3,360 a year. So more like $16.56 after transportation. I keep the spreadsheet because I want to be clear-eyed about what I'm actually earning for my time, not what the salary sounds like abstractly.

$52,000 is the median salary in Boston for my role and experience level. My friend Danielle started at a residential firm in the suburbs at $46,000. My classmate from UMass, a guy named Carter, went to a firm in New York at $58,000 but his rent is $2,800 for a room in Astoria. So he's worse off than me on paper but the city is better for networking and his firm has a lot of notable projects. It's hard to compare across markets. I try not to.

What does $52,000 buy you in Boston?

I share a two-bedroom in Somerville with my roommate Jade. My share is $1,400. I have a $380-a-month student loan payment. Between rent, loans, food, transportation, and the usual stuff, I'm saving about $400 a month. Not enough to build a cushion fast. Not zero, which is something. My parents are in Rhode Island so I go home for weekends sometimes which saves on groceries. I'm not complaining about the number exactly. I knew what interior design paid. I'm more alert to what the number actually means day to day than I expected to be.

Is the pay ceiling visible from where you are?

Sort of. The hierarchy at my firm goes junior designer, designer, senior designer, associate principal, principal. My manager Preethi is a senior designer, been at the firm eight years, makes around $88,000 she told me. The associate principal above her, Mark, probably makes $110,000 to $115,000. And then the principals are equity partners and it's different. Preethi said it took her four years to get from junior to designer and another three to get to senior. So if I stay on that track I'm at $88,000 in about seven years. That math doesn't scare me exactly, but it's not exciting. I'd want to make more than $88,000 in seven years. I don't know if the right path is to stay at a firm or to eventually go out on my own. I think you have to decide if you want to build a business or build a career inside someone else's business, and they're pretty different things.

What do you wish you'd known about the money before starting?

That the gap between "I love design" and "I can afford to do design" is real and takes longer to close than people expect. I knew the starting salaries weren't high. I just didn't have a felt sense of what $52,000 feels like until I was living it. It feels like $52,000. There's nothing wrong with it. But I had a classmate who went into financial analysis and she started at $72,000 with a bonus structure. She's a friend and I don't begrudge her that. But when she mentions her year-end bonus and I'm looking at the number in my spreadsheet, I'm aware of the trade I made. I think it's a trade I'd make again. I just wish I'd made it more consciously than I did at 22.

What's yours?

How much the work requires personal investment. I spend my own time on weekends browsing showrooms, reading about materials, going to trade shows when I can afford the ticket. None of that is compensated. It's professional development, technically. But it's also just what you have to do to stay current and bring good work to clients. Preethi doesn't ask me to do it. Nobody does. But if I didn't do it, I'd show up to design meetings with a shallower frame of reference than my colleagues, and that shows. So I do it on my own time. I think of it as an investment. Sometimes I wonder if I should be charging interest.

$190,000 in design fees. What does that actually mean in take-home?

The $190,000 is gross revenue from design fees only. I also have markup income on furniture and materials, which I'll get to. On the fees alone, I have business expenses: software subscriptions, professional liability insurance which runs about $4,800 a year, my business health insurance, the trade showroom memberships I need to access wholesale pricing, some amount of marketing and client entertainment. After business expenses, my net from fees is closer to $165,000. Then self-employment tax, which is 15.3% on the first dollar, and income tax. I paid roughly $62,000 in total taxes last year. So net net, I kept about $103,000 from design fees.

But the fees aren't the whole picture. I also procure furniture and materials at trade pricing, typically 40 to 50% below retail, and I sell to the client at retail or near retail. Last year my total procurement through client projects was about $820,000. My markup net, after accounting for time spent managing procurement, freight, damage claims, and the projects where I had to absorb losses on damaged or returned items, was about $78,000. So total income was around $181,000. I paid myself $150,000, retained the rest in the business for cushion. Living in San Francisco with a mortgage in the Sunset district, $150,000 is comfortable. It is not "I've made it and nothing worries me." The mortgage is $5,100 a month.

The markup model. What does it actually cost to operate it?

It costs capital and time. To access trade pricing, I have to maintain accounts with vendors, which requires a business license and sometimes a minimum annual purchase commitment. To purchase at trade, I often have to prepay or put a deposit down before the client's item ships. So I'm fronting money, sometimes significant amounts, and waiting to be reimbursed. On a large project, I might have $60,000 or $80,000 in client furniture in transit at any given time, purchased on my business credit card. That's real capital exposure. If a client delays payment, I'm carrying that balance. I have a line of credit with a $100,000 limit that I've drawn on three times in eight years because of payment timing. I pay interest on it. That's not in the gross income number.

The time cost is also real. Every procurement item requires a purchase order, tracking, delivery coordination, inspection on arrival, installation scheduling. My assistant Greta handles most of this now, and her salary, $58,000, comes out of my business expenses. But before I had Greta, I was doing it myself and it consumed probably 30% of my working week. Some weeks more. The markup sounds like free money until you account for what it takes to earn it.

What's the income curve looked like over your career?

Brutal at first. I made $47,000 my first year at a firm in 2010. I made $58,000 my second year. I left to go on my own at 32 because I thought I could make more. Year one on my own, I billed $34,000. Year two, $61,000. Year three was the first year I felt like it was working: $98,000 gross, maybe $64,000 net. Year five I hit $120,000 gross. Now I'm at $190,000 gross in fees and $78,000 in markup net. It took 14 years in the field and eight years as a principal to get here. Anyone who tells you interior design is a reliable path to high income in your 30s is describing a small fraction of the people who try.

Who are your clients?

My primary clients are households with liquid budgets of $150,000 and up for design and furnishings. That's not the full renovation cost, which the GC handles separately. Just my side: design fees plus furniture. Most of my current clients are in finance, tech, or law. My highest-budget client right now is a family in Pacific Heights doing a full primary suite and living room, projected budget on my end is $320,000. I have four active projects, three full-service and one project-only consultation. I take on about seven to nine new projects a year. I could take on more. I've chosen not to, because the quality drops when I'm spread too thin and my reputation is the only marketing I have.

What's yours?

The anxiety about the book of business drying up. I don't advertise. I don't do social media. Every single client I have came through a referral from a previous client or through my network. That's by design because that's how I built it and I believe in it. But it means that if I have a bad year relationship-wise, if I lose a key referral source or a major project goes poorly, my revenue can drop significantly the following year. I've had two years in eight that I'd describe as thin. Not catastrophic, but thin. Both times I lay awake at 3 AM running the math on how long the cushion would last. My business account had $80,000 in it and I was still calculating. The high income of a good year doesn't insulate you from the anxiety of not knowing where next year's clients are coming from. I don't think it ever does.

You left a $74,000 salary to go freelance. What happened to the money?

Year one was hard. I billed $41,000 gross. After taxes, business expenses, and the fact that I was paying for my own health insurance for the first time in my career, I netted about $27,000. For the year. I had savings, about $22,000, and I lived off a mix of that and income. My partner Marco was working, which made it survivable in a way that it wouldn't have been if I was on my own. But I was 31 and I had just left a $74,000 salary and I was making $27,000. There were months where I sent invoices and didn't know when I'd get paid and I watched my checking account balance like it was a medical chart.

Year two was better: $68,000 gross, about $45,000 net. Year three I crossed $90,000 gross for the first time. This year I'm tracking toward $112,000 gross, which will be somewhere around $75,000 to $78,000 net after everything. That's more than I made at the firm. Four years later. It took four years to beat the salary I left.

What did you underestimate about the money side going in?

How much time I'd spend on non-billable work. When I was at the firm, all I did was design work. The business administration, the contracts, the invoicing, the insurance, the taxes, all of that was handled by other people. On my own, I do all of it. My accountant Nick estimates I spend 6 to 8 hours a week on business administration tasks that I don't bill for. That's 8 hours at, let's say, $95 an hour, which is my current rate. That's $760 a week in value I'm creating for my own business and not getting paid for. $40,000 a year, roughly. If I could hire someone to do half of it for $25 an hour, I'd pay $10,000 and free up $20,000 in lost value. I'm working toward hiring a part-time bookkeeper. I should have done it year one but year one I was watching the account balance too closely to spend money on anything that wasn't survival.

How do you structure your fees now versus when you started?

When I started I charged hourly because it felt honest and simple. $75 an hour. I was too cheap and I also couldn't predict my own income because I didn't know how many hours any given project would take. Now I do flat fees with a defined scope, and the hourly rate baked in is $95 to $110 depending on the complexity. For a full-service residential project with a budget of $50,000 to $150,000, my flat fee is typically $12,000 to $18,000 depending on scope. I also take a 20% markup on procurement, which I disclose to clients upfront. The markup is not a huge number on my projects because I'm not doing $500,000 renovations. Last year markup added about $14,000 to my gross income.

The flat fee model took a year to get right because I kept under-scoping. I'd quote $10,000 for something that took $13,000 worth of my time. Now I'm better at the estimation because I have four years of actual data in the reckoning spreadsheet. I can look at what a three-bedroom apartment renovation actually cost me in hours last time and price the next one accurately. That's the part of running a business that takes time to build. You can't buy it. You have to earn it by keeping records and being willing to look at the actual numbers honestly.

Looking at the math now, was leaving the salary worth it?

Yes, but not because of the money. At least not yet. I make more than I did at the firm, but barely, and the security is less. The reason it was worth it is that my work is mine. I choose the clients. I choose the projects. When I don't like how a project is going, I have conversations that were more complicated to have when I was an employee. And when a room comes together exactly right, the satisfaction is different because nobody else made the decisions. A kitchen I finished in January, for a woman named Rafaela and her husband, felt entirely mine in a way that nothing from the firm did. That feeling has a value. I just can't put it in the reckoning spreadsheet.

What's yours?

The slow erosion of the line between work and not-work. When I was salaried I left the office and the work was mostly done. Now I live in the work. Project tracker is open on my laptop while Marco and I eat dinner. I'm photographing materials on weekends not because I have to but because my brain is always in design mode and it's hard to turn off. I don't hate it. But I notice it. The version of myself that said "I'm not going to let work consume my life" when I left the firm is now the person who checks emails at 9 PM because she might have heard from a vendor. Marco is patient. He says I've been this way since year two and he's used to it. That's probably not the endorsement I should want.