There’s been a steady stream of 'year ahead' pieces over the past few weeks. RIBA commentary, construction forecasts, market outlooks. If you read them all back-to-back, it’s easy to come away thinking that 2026 is either a turning point, or just another false dawn.

The truth, as usual, sits somewhere in-between.

2026 seems marked not by optimism or pessimism, but a kind of measured realism. Architects aren’t short of things to think about. They’re trying to make sense of what actually happened last year, and how much trust to place in what they’re being told now.

2025: not a bad year, but a draining one

2025 didn’t feel dramatic. It felt slow.

There was plenty of talk about housing, infrastructure, net zero, reform. But on the ground, much of the work people expected to move… didn’t. Projects weren’t scrapped en masse; they were paused, delayed, reprogrammed. Decisions took longer. Start dates slipped. Pipelines stretched.

Brian Green, writing in RIBAJ, described the moment as one of “economic dissonance”: strong long-term need, but insufficient effective demand to unlock it. That captured the experience well. The issue wasn’t a lack of ambition; it was timing, confidence, and capacity.

Regulatory friction played a role too. Glenigan’s construction data shows that sectors like education and health saw sharp falls in project starts during 2025, largely because schemes were held up at approval stage rather than removed from the pipeline altogether.

That gap between what should have happened and what actually did is probably the defining memory of last year.

In the end, much of it came down to confidence and timing. Interest rates stayed higher for longer. Clients hesitated. Regulatory processes, especially around building safety, proved heavier and more time-consuming than many had expected. So even where the intent was there, delivery lagged.

By the end of the year, many architects weren’t questioning the value of the profession. They were simply tired of waiting for things to start.

Why 2026 feels different; but not 'exciting'

This year is being talked about more positively, and for understandable reasons. Savills, for example, expects interest rates to ease. Public investment plans look clearer. Forecasts suggest more work coming through, with Glenigan projecting an uplift in construction starts through 2026, driven by housing, infrastructure, and refurbishment.

But what’s interesting is how cautiously this is being received.

After last year, there’s less appetite for big claims. People are paying closer attention to practical signals: approvals clearing, tenders being issued, programmes holding their shape. Optimism is conditional now. It’s earned, not assumed. You only need to look at the RIBA Future Trends Survey to see that sentiment tends to follow workload — not headlines.

That doesn’t mean architects are pessimistic. It means they’re experienced.

The conversations have shifted

If you zoom out from the forecasts and listen to what’s coming up again and again, a few themes are clearly shaping how people are approaching 2026.

• Delivery matters more than ambition. There’s a growing sense that the industry doesn’t lack vision, it lacks capacity, coordination, and time. The focus is less on what we want to build, and more on whether the system can actually deliver it without grinding teams down.

• AI is being treated with curiosity, not blind faith. Most architects aren’t worried about being replaced. They’re more concerned about workflows, learning, and quality. The underlying question isn’t “what can AI do?”, but “what should we fix before we use it?” As Muyiwa Oki recently argued in RIBAJ, technology only helps if it raises capability rather than accelerating bad process.

• Public purpose feels more fragile than it used to. There’s a quiet anxiety that civic value, generosity, and long-term thinking are easier to lose under pressure than people like to admit. If they’re not protected early, they tend to disappear later.

• Retrofit has moved to the centre. Working with existing buildings is no longer the fallback option. It’s where a lot of the real work, and real complexity, now sits. That’s changing the skills, patience, and mindset architects need.

So what’s actually useful to take into this year?

The most helpful takeaway from all of this isn’t that 2026 will be 'better'. It’s that it’s likely to be clearer.

Clearer about which projects are real.

Clearer about where the bottlenecks are.

Clearer about the kinds of skills and roles that are genuinely valued.

For architects, that means approaching the year with a mix of openness and discernment. Being willing to move, but not rushing. Being hopeful, but not relying on hope alone.

2025 taught the profession a quiet lesson about patience and realism. 2026 looks like a year where that realism might finally start to pay off. And that, for most people we speak to, feels less like doom and gloom, and more like a solid place to stand.

How we’re thinking about 2026

If there’s one thing we’re holding onto this year, it’s this: clarity beats confidence.

Architects don’t need perfect conditions to do good work, but they do need certainty about what’s real, what’s funded, and what’s deliverable. In practice, that clarity looks less like big announcements and more like smaller signals: approvals finally clearing, programmes holding their shape, fees being agreed without endless deferral.

The signs suggest more of that clarity is emerging. Not everywhere, and not all at once, but enough to make plans, hire, or commit without having to cross your fingers.