Architect and Landscape Architect

Three occupations, one family, three different entry levels

All three figures are the federal 2025 medians. O*NET, working from the 2024–34 projections, puts architects at “average (3% to 4%)” with 7,800 annual openings; BLS, on the 2025–35 round, says 4% and 6,900. They agree in substance.

⚠⚠ Note the bottom row. Drafting overall is projected at +1%, but the architectural and civil part of it is at +5% — the growing corner of a shrinking occupation, and the one this family feeds.

⚠⚠⚠ The single fact that governs this whole page

Florida does not license architects on a degree in architecture. It licenses them, by statute, on a degree from a programme accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board. Section 481.209, F.S. requires an applicant to be a “graduate of a school or college of architecture with a program accredited by the National Architectural Accreditation Board”, and the statute offers no experience-only alternative.

⚠ NAAB accredits the professional degree — the Bachelor of Architecture, the Master of Architecture and the Doctor of Architecture. It does not accredit the ordinary four-year B.A. or B.S. in architecture. Those are pre-professional degrees: real, useful, and not a licence route on their own.

Where the accredited degrees actually are

⚠⚠⚠ UCF awards 43 architecture bachelor’s a year, the second-largest output in the state after UF’s 88, and holds no NAAB accreditation. That is not an oversight. UCF’s Bachelor of Design in Architecture is deliberately pre-professional and is the middle third of a 2+2+2 partnership: an associate degree at Valencia College, the B.Des at UCF (taught at the joint-use University Center on Valencia’s West Campus), then UF’s accredited M.Arch at CityLab Orlando. Entry to the UCF studio sequence is competitive — a ranked combination of overall GPA, architecture GPA and a pin-up review score.

⚠⚠ So it is a real licence route, and it is six years by design. What a student must not do is treat the B.Des as a terminal degree and discover the accreditation rule afterwards.

⚠⚠⚠ The degrees are split across two CIP codes, and half the state hides in the second one

Federal completions data files Florida’s architecture degrees under two codes, and the obvious one is not enough:

⚠⚠⚠ FAU awards no bachelor’s at all under 04.0201 and holds an accredited B.Arch; FIU awards no master’s under it and holds an accredited M.Arch. Their accredited programmes are counted in the second code. A school list built from “Architecture” alone would have omitted two of Florida’s five public architecture schools — including the only public one whose bachelor’s is the licence route.

⚠ Practical consequence for anyone comparing programmes from published data: count both codes, or you will conclude a school has no architecture programme when it has an accredited one.

Licensure: the degree is the first of three gates

1. The accredited degree — s. 481.209, F.S., above.
2. Experience. Section 481.211, F.S. requires “an internship of diversified architectural experience approved by the board”. In practice that is NCARB’s Architectural Experience Program: 3,740 hours across six areas — Practice Management 160, Project Management 360, Programming & Analysis 260, Project Planning & Design 1,080, Project Development & Documentation 1,520, Construction & Evaluation 360. ⚠ 3,740 hours is under two years of full-time work, but NCARB reports candidates take four to five years — because the hours must be the right hours, supervised, in the right categories.
3. The exam. The Architect Registration Examination, six divisions, each aligned to one of the six experience areas.

⚠⚠ Read the hour table again before choosing a first job. Two categories — planning and design, and development and documentation — are 70% of the requirement. An office that keeps a graduate on renderings, models and marketing can leave them years short of the categories that matter. Ask in the interview which AXP categories the work will record.

⚠ Florida regulates architecture and interior design in the same chapter — chapter 481, Part I, “Architecture and Interior Design” — under one Board of Architecture and Interior Design. Landscape architecture is Part II, a separate profession with its own accreditor and exam.

⚠⚠ The first studio has two course numbers, and which one you take says which system you are in

Florida’s four-semester architectural design sequence runs under two identifiers with no institution in common. Measured across the statewide file:

Zero overlap on all four. ⚠⚠⚠ And the two families are not random: the bare numbers are the institutions feeding the university architecture schools, and the “C” numbers are the state colleges plus UCF and Valencia — which is the 2+2+2 partnership showing up in the course numbering. UCF’s own admission page names the id: students are selected before “enrolling in ARC1301C Design 1”.

⚠ The history sequence splits the same way but by number rather than suffix: History of Architecture I is ARC1701 at seven institutions and ARC2701 at four, again with no overlap.

⚠⚠ This is packaging, not a difference in what is taught, and Florida’s articulation treats lecture-plus-lab and integrated forms as equivalent. The cost is matching: an evaluator comparing ARC1301 with ARC1301C sees two identifiers. Send the syllabus and the portfolio, and name both numbers in the letter.

⚠ Watch the credit value too. The same first studio is 3 credits at FIU and State College of Florida, 4 at most institutions, and 6 at USF; Design 4 runs 3 at FIU and 6 at USF. A studio is sold by the contact hour, and the hours in the room are closer than the credit values suggest.

⚠⚠ Architecture does not require calculus — and this changes who applies

UF asks architecture transfer applicants for Physics I (PHY 2053) or Applied Physics (PHY 2004), and Precalculus (MAC 1147), or Precalculus Algebra (MAC 1140) with Trigonometry (MAC 1114). That is algebra-based physics and precalculus — not the calculus sequence and not calculus-based physics.

⚠⚠⚠ Students who rule themselves out of designing buildings because of the mathematics are usually thinking of the engineering requirement. Civil engineering needs Calculus I–III, differential equations and calculus-based physics. Architecture, at Florida’s largest programme, asks for precalculus. The structures sequence is real work, but it is not an engineering mathematics load. ⚠ Confirm your own institution’s list — this is UF’s, and the accredited programmes set their own.

Money, and what Florida does to it

⚠ Florida is a little below the national figure at the bottom and a long way below it at the top. This is the ordinary private-sector shape — not the raised-floor, lowered-ceiling pattern this site has measured in Florida public service — but the ceiling gap is large. The top of the profession is principals and firm owners, and Florida has fewer of the very large practices that pay it.

⚠⚠ What BLS actually says about AI here, and why it is different

This site tracks how the federal projections talk about AI, because the language varies and the variation is informative. For architects, BLS names it and then argues against the obvious conclusion:

“Architectural design work is becoming more efficient due to improved building information modeling (BIM) software and measuring technology along with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI). However, these productivity gains also allow architects to be more involved in the full building process and take on new roles and responsibilities.”

⚠⚠⚠ That is a different register from the one on the design pages. For graphic designers BLS says the technology is expected to reduce the need for these workers, and projects a 2% decline. For web and digital interface designers it says AI may soften the employment growth. Here it says the gains are absorbed into scope — and the projection stays positive.

⚠⚠ The drafting row is where the same technology is projected to bite, and BLS says so plainly: CAD and BIM “increase drafter productivity and allow engineers and architects to perform many tasks that used to be done by drafters”. Within one family, the same tools are described as expanding the licensed role and absorbing the unlicensed one. That is worth knowing before choosing which of the three routes to take.

Landscape architecture, briefly

A separate licence under chapter 481 Part II, a separate accreditor, a separate exam. Two Florida public institutions award it — UF (14 bachelor’s, 3 master’s) and FIU (19 master’s) — against 23,500 jobs nationally and 1,700 annual openings. ⚠ It is a small profession with a small programme footprint, and the wage is $79,870 against architecture’s $99,280. It is named here because it is genuinely adjacent, it is licensed on the same statutory pattern, and Florida’s water, coastal and stormwater rules give it more work than its size suggests.

What to do first

• Look up the programme on naab.org before you enrol, not after. The accreditation list is the whole question and it is published.
• Decide the bachelor’s or master’s route deliberately. FAU and FAMU can make you exam-eligible with a bachelor’s; UF, USF and FIU cannot.
• Start the AXP record on day one of the first job, and ask which categories the work will fill.
• If you are at a state college, find out which design-studio number your credits will land on, and get the receiving school’s answer in writing.
• Build the portfolio from the first studio. Admission to the studio sequence at UCF, and to graduate architecture generally, is decided on it.