At EPFL’s ENAC school, the open-source BIM initiative (CNPA) makes a quiet argument: the toolchain is a public good, not a licence you rent. The framing matters this autumn, because the number attached to the work — the planning fee — has just stopped being something you could look up.

Die Ausgabe 2026 der Leistungs- und Honorarordnungen (LHO) SIA 102, 103, 105 und 108 ist das Ergebnis einer umfassenden Revision — the first comprehensive revision since 2014, and the first time in the roughly hundred-year history of the LHO that all four commissions worked jointly and with equal weight. Buried inside it is the fact every Swiss office has to read: the fee calculation nach aufwandbestimmenden Baukosten (Art. 7, LHO:2014) had to be withdrawn after an intervention by the Wettbewerbskommission (WEKO).

For most of a century a Swiss office could derive its fee from a curve indexed to construction cost. That curve is gone. LHO:2026 replaces it with a deliberately methodenneutral provision: an orienting Art. 3 setting out what a Kalkulationshilfe must satisfy to stay competition-law compliant, and a contract-relevant new Art. 7 naming the project-specific characteristics you must weigh. The revision states it plainly: «An die Stelle einer allgemeinen Verbandsformel für die Honorarermittlung tritt eine methodenneutrale Verbandsbestimmung für die projektspezifische Honorarermittlung im Einklang mit dem Wettbewerbsrecht» — a method-neutral provision for project-specific fee calculation, in line with competition law. You may still take an Ausgangszahl from a Kalkulationshilfe. But the number you defend in front of a Bauherr is one you adjusted, from your knowledge of the effort.

Say it straight: this is good work. Identical services finally carry identical names — «Unterschiedliche Beschreibungen für identische Leistungen gibt es nicht mehr.» An die Stelle des Denkens in Gewerken tritt ein Denken in Funktionen. The old rule that the «Gesamtleitung» sat inside the architect’s Grundleistungen is gone — an honest correction, because on plenty of projects it was never the architect holding it. And the WEKO intervention is not a scandal: a trade association publishing a binding price formula is a cartel problem anywhere. This is competition law working as designed.

Now the second force, and only one paragraph of it. The production layer that historically justified the number — drafting, documentation, visualisation — is exactly the layer software is cheapest at. “You can now get a rendering for 15$,” Kostika Lala of Flashcube Labs told a vendor research blog — one quote, four interviews, no disclosed sample size, so treat it as colour, not proof. Whatever the true figure, the direction is not in dispute.

Here is the trade-off nobody prints on a factsheet: a methodenneutral fee regime transfers pricing risk to whoever is least able to measure their own effort. A formula is crude, but symmetrical — the six-person Atelier and the forty-eight-person office read the same curve. Replace it with “argue your number from project-specific characteristics” and the advantage moves to whoever has the better effort history. That is nobody’s fault — a distributional consequence, because the offices most exposed are the least likely to be reading a revision factsheet.

←TODAY: LHO:2026 is the edition Swiss planning contracts are being written against.
→3012: In Zurich-3012 the office that priced from measured effort still owns its margin; the one that priced from feeling was absorbed.
Fulcrum: The fee is an argument you can only win if you kept the evidence — your own effort data — before anyone asked for it.

Atelier: Two quiet articles will cost offices money next year. New Art. 2.6, «Fachkoordination der technischen Infrastruktur und Installationen», is now described as coordination inside, outside and below the building — Werkleitungen included — so it belongs to the «Gesamtleitung», not the Gebäudetechnikplanung; delegate it and the planner performs it in the Gesamtleitung function, with separate remuneration. Beside it, «Digitales Informationsmanagement» gets a completely new Art. 2.7 instead of a BIM appendix nobody costed. Monday move: before your next offer, write down two names — who holds Gesamtleitung, and who holds digitales Informationsmanagement — because both are now named functions that can carry a separate remuneration line, and assuming they arrive free with the architect’s basic services is the habit this text removes.

Hack: See which term actually dominates your fee — a rate concession or an unmeasured effort. These parameters are illustrative, not SIA figures.

ausgangszahl = 100000                       # illustrative start fee, CHF (not an SIA figure)
after_concession = ausgangszahl * 0.98      # you give the Bauherr a 2% rate concession
after_bad_estimate = ausgangszahl * 1.20    # 20% effort you never logged
print(round(after_concession), round(after_bad_estimate))  # 98000  120000

The concession costs 2%; the effort you failed to measure costs ten times that.

PAZ Takeaway: The new Art. 7 asks you to argue a fee from your own effort history — the same discipline of measuring-before-arguing that PAZ’s SIA416-native Kostenrechner add-on already brings inside Archicad, turning model geometry into a costed, defensible breakdown without an IFC export. Pair that habit of instrumenting the model with a written record of effort per function, and the Ausgangszahl becomes a number you can stand behind.

So do one thing this month, before the next big offer: start recording effort per Teilphase and per function — «Gesamtleitung», «Fachplanung», «Bauleitung». Begin now and you have a year of evidence before your next Wettbewerb-to-execution leap; begin when the client asks and all you have is an opinion. The office that can describe its own effort sets the number. Open the log on Wednesday.