Where have all the MRICS Building Surveyors gone?

The UK's shortage of traditional residential and commercial building surveyors is the visible end of a decade-long shift: a generation of chartered building surveyors retiring faster than this part of the profession can replace them, a chartership route that has quietly stopped paying for itself, and a talent pipeline that was never wide enough to begin with. RICS names building surveying as one of the disciplines hit hardest by the UK's wider skills shortage, and the numbers back that up.

I see this gap play out in almost every brief that lands on Cobalt's building surveying desk. We placed around 40 building surveyors last year alone, drawing on a candidate database built over 25 years in this specialism, and even with that reach, clients still ask for an MRICS building surveying candidate who cannot be found. In some regions, that candidate simply doesn't exist. Understanding why is the first step to fixing it, both for individual employers and for the residential and commercial building surveying profession as a whole.

The scale of the shortfall

RICS surveyed 2,339 of its own members for its Surveying Skills Report 2025, and building surveying came back as one of the disciplines worst affected. The headline findings:

• 87% say the skills shortage is affecting their part of the profession: 27% call it “critical,” a further 60% call it “moderate”
• In building surveying specifically, two-thirds point to an ageing, retiring workforce as the driver
• 57% report reduced capacity and output as a direct result
• 40% report rising costs, and 30% say it is slowing innovation across the built environment

The demand isn't the problem, the supply is.

Why MRICS Building Surveyor candidates have all but disappeared

Candidates retiring explains only half the story. The other half is economic, and it's the half most employers don't see coming. RICS puts the average age of its members at around 50, with an ageing, retiring membership repeatedly named as the single biggest driver behind the shortage, and it's the same succession risk I see on my own building surveying desk every week. As chartered building surveyors retire faster than they can be replaced, firms have leaned harder on AssocRICS building surveyors to keep delivering, and raised associate pay to match, or beat, chartered pay to keep them.

I am consistently placing AssocRICS building surveying candidates on basic salaries in the mid-£60,000s, while some chartered building surveying colleagues at the same firms sit on legacy pay bands closer to £55,000, set years before the market moved. Once that inversion exists, the incentive to charter completely evaporates. Why should someone sit the Assessment of Professional Competence (APC), pay annual RICS membership fees and take on the extra liability of chartered status, when the building surveying market already pays you the same without it?

It's a question RICS's own membership has asked loudly before. Its relationship with its own members hit a genuine low in 2021, when a governance crisis triggered a review that drew more than 8,000 member responses and saw satisfaction crash to a historic low, as Cobalt explored in MRICS Building Surveyor: Was It Worth It? I haven't seen a more recent equivalent survey, but that episode still shapes how building surveying associates weigh up whether chartering, and paying to stay chartered, is worth it.

The chartership route is itself a bottleneck

Even building surveying candidates who want to get chartered face real barriers, and I hear about this from candidates constantly. Surely, we should be making the process easier rather than harder?

• Progression from AssocRICS to MRICS requires further study, advanced work experience and a final APC assessment with a peer interview, all of which needs an employer willing to invest time: mentoring, sign-off, study leave
• In practice, many firms are too stretched to provide it, and promised APC support often never materialises, sometimes for years, simply because there aren't enough chartered building surveyors left to mentor candidates
• The alternative experience route requires a minimum of five years' relevant sector experience under RICS's own eligibility criteria, and in my experience recruiting for building surveying roles, it often runs well beyond that in practice

The result is a building surveying profession where growing numbers of capable surveyors are stuck indefinitely at associate level, not through lack of ambition, but through lack of employer capacity to invest in the time to develop them.

What it means for employers and the wider built environment

This isn't only a traditional residential and commercial building surveying problem. It's a case study in what happens across the built environment when a chartership pipeline breaks down. AssocRICS building surveyors cannot sign off on every type of survey or undertake the higher-risk inspections some clients require by regulation or lender policy, which leaves employers who insist on MRICS building surveyors in areas where chartered candidates don't exist choosing between:

• An unfilled seat
• A stalled project
• Months of searching for someone who may not exist in that specific geographical location

CITB puts the scale of the wider challenge in concrete terms: its latest Construction Workforce Outlook estimates 206,000 extra workers are needed across construction between 2026 and 2030, averaging just over 41,000 a year, against an industry where fewer people are entering and experienced people are leaving too soon. Traditional building surveying is simply where that pattern is most visible to me. This is structural, not cyclical: it will persist even when the wider market cools, and it isn't new. Cobalt's Map the Gap research traces the built environment's skills-gap concerns back to a workforce report from 1934, a useful check on any assumption that this will fix itself with time.

A market that needs a rethink, not a wait

“To guarantee that the profession is fit for the future, it is critical to develop new talent while retaining and upskilling those already working in the sector,” Nicholas Maclean OBE, RICS's president, wrote in the report's foreword. That’s the shift the building surveying market needs to make.

The shortage will not resolve itself if employers simply wait for more MRICS building surveyors to appear. It needs firms to invest properly in developing AssocRICS building surveying talent through to chartership, to price both grades competitively and consistently, and to look seriously at entry routes like the SAVA diploma, which brings career changers into residential building surveying without requiring a traditional degree. None of that is a quick fix. All of it is more realistic than waiting for a generation of retired building surveyors to un-retire.

This is exactly the pattern Cobalt, in association with BE News' Map the Gap campaign, was built to surface: employers see empty roles, professionals see stalled careers, and too often, nobody compares notes on why. We're gathering insight from both sides of the built environment to build a clearer, evidence-based picture of where the real gaps are, and what will actually close them.

Take a few minutes to shape the built environment's skills data.

Cobalt has spent 25 years specialising in real estate recruitment, across housebuilder, contractor and consultancy environments shaping the built environment in the UK, US and Germany. That depth shows up in the detail: hiring strategies, workforce planning, and remuneration advice grounded in what the market is actually doing right now.

If you'd like to discuss the current residential and commercial building surveying market, or a talent challenge in your own team, speak to Ashleigh Pearce, Executive Consultant, Cobalt Recruitment UK.

*Sources

• RICS, Surveying Skills Report (2025)

• RICS, Progression from AssocRICS to MRICS

• RICS, APC Preliminary Review: The Experienced Professional's Route to Chartership

• CITB, Construction Workforce Outlook (2026–2030)

• Building, “Members’ anger laid bare as satisfaction rate with RICS slumps to historic low” (2021)

• Cobalt Recruitment, “MRICS Building Surveyor: Was It Worth It?”

• Cobalt UK building surveying desk placement data