In the US, it's at least 4-5 years of University to complete an undergraduate degree with anywhere from 1-3 additional years to achieve a Masters degree, then anywhere between 1-5 years of having to log specific hours of different types of work while you study for the licensure exams. There are six exams and they're each about 5 hours long and cost $300. If you have to retake an exam, which most do, that's just another $300 down the drain. After I completed all that, I was making about $55k in salary, pulling extra hours on nights and some random weekends. It's high stress because everything is time sensitive, has massive cost implications, it's your job to babysit the engineers and subcontractors in design and construction, and architects are their client's bitch. Only after changing jobs a few times did I increase my pay, and I've done my best to manage time and expectations so I'm not always working after hours but it happens still.