Yesterday, September 16, 2026, the Federal Reserve raised the federal funds rate for the first time since 2023, moving the target range from 3.75% to 4.00%. If you're planning to build, that decision directly affects you. It changes the math on your project starting today. It’s more expensive to get a construction loan or a mortgage, and to buy materials and labor. It also raises the cost of every extra week you spend in design before breaking ground. 

Whether you have to build now or simply want to, Architectural Designs can help you keep those costs down. Before you look at what's ahead, it's worth looking at where you might get tripped up in the pre-construction and design phase. 

If you have built a home already, think back to when you first started looking for a house plan and the day you broke ground. Or, if you’ve never built before, imagine yourself starting this process. Customers who purchase and modify their house plans with Architectural Designs can get custom construction-ready documents within 8 weeks. If your design process is taking longer than that, it's likely costing you time and money you don't need to spend.

Was it back-and-forth with a designer over changes that took days to turn around? Trouble picturing how a modification would actually affect your plan? Or trying to get a rough budget before you had a builder lined up, without asking one to spend hours pricing something that wasn’t final yet? 

If any of that sounds familiar, that's exactly the kind of delay we can help you avoid. A stock house plan, paired with in-house modifications and cost estimating, saves critical time in the pre-construction phase. When design, modification, and cost information live in one place, you're not waiting on separate parties to hand work back and forth. 

Now let’s look at what you actually spend to get from an idea to a buildable plan. Here's what that stack looks like through Architectural Designs when you customize one of our plans:

Add it up, and a modified house plan and a cost estimate run about $4,273 on average. Toss in structural engineering, which carries an average cost of $4,890, and your full design and planning cost (plan, modifications, materials, reports, and engineering) still comes in under $10,000. Unlike the custom path, it can be done in a handful of weeks, not months.

Compare that to what a custom designer or architect may charge for the same set of deliverables. Plans, modifications, engineering, materials, and a cost estimate could take 2-6 months on average and cost anywhere from $15,000-$80,000, or a minimum of 8% of the build. With the average home costing around $400,000 to build, that 8% minimum works out to $32,000. For many homeowners, these design delays that come with the custom path are just too costly. 

For homeowners who want to see the plan in person before building, our exclusive nationwide partner, Walk Your Plans, offers one-hour sessions for around $1,500. Most of our customers who walk their plans report catching 10 or more changes and saving tens of thousands of dollars in change orders caught earlier. 

Many of our plans have CAD drawings available for purchase which give you more flexibility to manage the modification process with your builder later. See how customizing a stock plan compares to starting from scratch.

According to Zillow, the average price of a new construction home in the U.S. was $439,000 in 2025. That’s before we factor in rising material costs and labor in your area. Yesterday’s move by the Fed adds another layer: as borrowing costs rise across the board, financing that number gets more expensive too.

Customers who choose Architectural Designs can save both time and money, and get to the construction phase sooner. So here's the question worth sitting with: if Architectural Designs can help you to save an extra $5,000 or more to put toward your home, would you put it toward interest payments, upgraded finishes, or the modification that gets the plan closer to what you actually want?

Every house plan on Architectural Designs comes with:

Browse our full house plan collection to compare layouts and pricing, or read our homeowner guide to get started.