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As Fast Company wrapped up its latest report on the state of the design jobs market, we wondered which companies paid the highest premium for designers. We looked at the 40,000 job listings wed gathered from Googles job search engine, over a period between December 2024 and February 2025, and zeroed in on the salaries that companies were offering to prospective employees across various different experience levels (entry level, 23 years, 45 years, 67 years, and anything above 8 years). We then averaged the salaries for all jobs that a company posted across these various experience levels and identified the seven highest spenders from each of seven categories: architects, game designers, graphic designers, urban designers, interior designers, product designers, and UX designers. The good news: Not every designer needs to be in the latter half of their career to reach the highest salaried heights. The bad news: All architects actually do need to be. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}))}(); Architects Architects face a thankless pay curve: earning a top rate means coming with top experience. All the highest paid positions, mostly at big firms like HNTB and Michael Baker, require senior-level experience of at least eight years. But architecture is also the only type of design we looked at where the top paying employer includes a food companythose upscaled La Colombe interiors dont come cheap. Game Designers As Fast Company has reported, the best door into the world of game design might not be at a gaming studio: Netflix is continuing its push into gaming, and it stands out among hiring organizations for offering the highest salary for game designers with fewer years of experience than bona fide game studios do. But dont count those studios out: CD Projekt Red and Riot Games still make the list of the seven highest-paying companies for game designers. Graphic Designers Graphic designers are typically among the lowest paid in the design profession, but they might top out their salaries the fastest: The most generous hiring companies, with the exception of ServiceNow and Nvidia, dont request senior-level status: Graphite and Crocs only ask for 23 years of experience. And apparently, the Prince Georges Parks Department in Maryland, has enough funding to duke it out with Nvidia for talent. Interior Designers Like architects, interior designers need to come equipped with senior-level experience to command top pay, with no employer among our top seven listed asking for fewer than eight years. And unlike other job types with at least a mild diversity of hiring organizations at their upper limit, all the top organizations seeking interior designers are design firms like HKS and Solize. Product Designers Netflix is the only company on our list to make the highest spot in two separate design categoriesgame designers and product designersand its job listings for senior product designers offer the highest salaries on that list, at an average of $427,000. But Netflixs average salary for midlevel product designers doesnt lag far behind, at an average of $317,000, just after Anthropic, which is sparing no expense to make experiencing Claudes profuse apologies as frictionless and stable as possible. Urban Designers Urban design shows the smallest variance in how much their top organizations are willing to pay, with the narrowest band of salaries at the upper levels. Pay tops out at $169,500, and as you would expect, the most generous organizations are all in the engineering consulting, design, and construction business. UX Designers Tanium is the kind of company that few people outside an IT department would ever interact with but that seemingly every IT department does. It provides an endpoint management system demanding a particularly sophisticated set of UX chops, which it pays handsomely for, and which one doesnt need to be a senior-level UX designer to earn. Taniums top designers can expect to make $377,500 with only 45 years of experience. The list of top-paying companies is rounded out with a few usual suspects, like Google and ServiceNow, as well as Blue Origin, which is probably spending its money well in hiring designers to determine how we get back from space. This article is part of Fast Company‘s continuing coverage of where the design jobs are, including this year’s comprehensive analysis of 170,000 job listings
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If theres one thing that U.S. politicians and activists from across the political spectrum can agree on, its that rents are far too high. Many experts believe that this crisis is fueled by a shortage of housing, caused principally by restrictive regulations. Rents and home prices would fall, the argument goes, if rules such as minimum lot- and house-size requirements and prohibitions against apartment complexes were relaxed. This, in turn, would make it easier to build more housing. As experts on housing policy, were concerned about housing affordability. But our research shows little connection between a shortfall of housing and rental affordability problems. Even a massive infusion of new housing would not shrink housing costs enough to solve the crisis, as rents would likely remain out of reach for many households. However, there are already subsidies in place that ensure that some renters in the U.S. pay no more than 30% of their income on housing costs. The most effective solution, in our view, is to make these subsidies much more widely available. A financial sinkhole Just how expensive are rents in the U.S.? According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, a household that spends more than 30% of its income on housing is deemed to be cost-burdened. If it spends more than 50%, its considered severely burdened. In 2023, 54% of all renters spent more than 30% of their pretax income on housing. Thats up from 43% of renters in 1999. And 28% of all renters spent more than half their income on housing in 2023. Renters with low incomes are especially unlikely to afford their housing: 81% of renters making less than $30,000 spent more than 30% of their income on housing, and 60% spent more than 50%. Estimates of the nations housing shortage vary widely, reaching up to 20 million units, depending on the analytic approach and the time period covered. Yet our research, which compares growth in the housing stock from 2000 to the present, finds no evidence of an overall shortage of housing units. Rather, we see a gap between the number of low-income households and the number of affordable housing units available to them; more affluent renters face no such shortage. This is true in the nation as a whole and in nearly all large and small metropolitan areas. Would lower rents help? Certainly. But they wouldnt fix everything. We ran a simulation to test an admittedly unlikely scenario: What if rents dropped 25% across the board? We found it would reduce the number of cost-burdened rentersbut not by as much as you might think. Even with the reduction, nearly one-third of all renters would still spend more than 30% of their income on housing. Moreover, reducing rents would help affluent renters much more than those with lower incomesthe households that face the most severe affordability challenges. The proportion of cost-burdened renters earning more than $75,000 would fall from 16% to 4%, while the share of similarly burdened renters earning less than $15,000 would drop from 89% to just 80%. Even with a rent rollback of 25%, the majority of renters earning less than $30,000 would remain cost-burdened. Vouchers offer more breathing room Meanwhile, theres a proven way of making housing more affordable: rental subsidies. In 2024, the U.S. provided what are known as deep housing subsidies to about 5 million households, meaning that rent payments are capped at 30% of their income. These subsidies take three forms: Housing Choice Vouchers that enable people to rent homes in the private market; public housing; and project-based rental assistance, in which the federal government subsidizes the rents for all or some of the units in properties under private and nonprofit ownership. The number of households participating in these three programs has increased by less than 2% since 2014, and they constitute only 25% of all eligible households. Households earning less than 50% of their areas median family income are eligible for rental assistance. But unlike Social Security, Medicare, or food stamps, rental assistance is not an entitlement available to all who qualify. The number of recipients is limited by the amount of funding appropriated each year by Congress, and this funding has never been sufficient to meet the need. By expanding rental assistance to all eligible low-income households, the government could make huge headway in solving the rental affordability crisis. The most obvious option would be to expand the existing Housing Choice Voucher program, also known as Section 8. The program helps pay the rent up to a specified payment standard determined by each local public housing authority, which can set this standard at between 80% and 120% of the HUD-designated fair market rent. To be eligible for the program, units must also satisfy HUDs physical quality standards. Unfortunately, about 43% of voucher recipients are unable to use it. They are either unable to find an apartment that rents for less than the payment standard, meets the physical quality standard, or has a landlord willing to accept vouchers. Renters are more likely to find housing using vouchers in cities and states where its illegal for landlords to discriminate against voucher holers. Programs that provide housing counseling and landlord outreach and support have also improved outcomes for voucher recipients. However, it might be more effective to forgo the voucher program altogether and simply give eligible households cash to cover their housing costs. The Philadelphia Housing Authority is currently testing out this approach. The idea is that landlords would be less likely to reject applicants receiving government support if the bureaucratic hurdles were eliminated. The downside of this approach is that it would not prevent landlords from renting out deficient units that the voucher program would normally reject. Homeowners get subsidieswhy not renters? Expanding rental assistance to all eligible low-income households would be costly. The Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates it would cost about $118 billion a year. However, Congress has spent similar sums on housing subsidies before. But they involve tax breaks for homeowners, not low-income renters. Congress forgoes billions of dollars annually in tax revenue it would otherwise collect were it not for tax deductions, credits, exclusions and exemptions. These are known as tax expenditures. A tax not collected is equivalent to a subsidy payment. For example, from 1998 through 2017prior to the tax changes enacted by the first Trump administration in 2017the federal government annually sacrificed $187 billion on average, after inflation, in revenue due to mortgage interest deductions, deductions for state and local taxes, and for the exemption of proceeds from the sale of ones home from capital gains taxes. In fiscal year 2025, these tax expenditures totaled $95.4 billion. Moreover, tax expenditures on behalf of homeowners flow mostly to higher-income households. In 2024, for example, more than 70% of all mortgage-interest tax deductions went to homeowners earning at least $200,000. Broadening the availability of rental subsidies would have other benefits. It would save federal, state, and local governments billions of dollars in homeless services. Moreover, automatic provision of rental subsidies would reduce the need for additional subsidies to finance new affordable housing. Universal rental assistance, by guaranteeing sufficient rental income, would allow builders to more easily obtain loans to cover development costs. Of course, sharply raising federal expenditures for low-income rental assistance flies in the face of the Trump administrations priorities. Its budget proposal for the next fiscal year calls for a 44% cut of more than $27 billion in rental assistance and public housing. On the other hand, if the government supported rental assistance in amounts commensurate with the tax benefits given to homeowners, it would go a long way toward resolving the rental housing affordability crisis. This article is part of a series centered on envisioning ways to deal with the housing crisis. Alex Schwartz is a professor of urban policy at the New School. Kirk McClure is a professor of urban planning at the University of Kansas. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Amid stagnant U.S. book sales, one genre consistently goes viral: romantasy. In this episode of FC Explains, Liz Segran breaks down how Entangled Publishing is writing a new formula for success in the book world.
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