Revit Can Increase Your Salary: Here’s How Much

By: Melita Issa
To quantify how much you can gain professionally by adding a new software to your arsenal, you may already know, is not an exact science. It certainly is an upswing, and I will advise you from my expertise, so you can understand the scope of benefit from knowing Revit as an Interior Designer.
First, we will review the research data that proves Revit will increase your wage, but in an recent interview with, Marvin Kim, of 52X Consultants he shed an enlightening perspective, Revit’s real fiscal increase is anopportunity cost.
As you will see from the BIM/Revit Expertise chart below that 44% of firms pay a premium for BIM or Revit expertise. This is a modest increase since 2013.
http://www.architectmagazine.com/practice/key-takeaways-from-the-2015-aia-compensation-survey_o
Times have changed. Once, listing Revit on your resume was enough. Now that firms have felt the burn of failed Revit projects they are wiser to what it really means when a designer says they can “use Revit.” Firms realized that creating templates, parametric families and managing complicated towers comes with much higher experience and overall pay rate. No more are the days you can just load your studio up with interns or junior level recent graduates and churn out work. Now you have a complicated system that requires a team with multi-level Revit skills, knowledge, and experience. This range of experience and skill will also reflect in how much-increased revenue you can funnel to your paycheck.
It is also important to keep in mind your firm’s location. A design firm in New York may pay double the amount of a senior level Revit capable designer versus a city like Los Angeles that for some reason has more BIM experts than New York.
INDEED.COM, for example, shows the national salary for a Revit drafter at $61,000, $66,000 in Los Angles. Job postings in LA are 7% higher on average for Revit salaries. On the other hand, as mentioned previously, when you get to New York city average salary for Revit job postings the amount was a nice $84,000. New York Revit salaries on average showed to be 36% higher than the national average.