Contractor Sales Commission Calculator
Every pay plan tells you what the rep earns. Almost none tell you what that costs as a share of the profit on the job — which is the number that decides whether the plan is affordable. Enter your job value, margin, and rate to see both. No login, no email.
Same money, different-looking plan: 10.0% of the sale price is the same cheque as 28.6% of gross profit, at a 35% margin.
Gross profit here is revenue less direct job cost, before overhead. Commission is priced against what the job earns, not against what the company costs to run. Figures are your inputs, calculated exactly — the seeded defaults are planning estimates, not industry pay data.
The rate on the page is not the cost
A commission quoted on the sale price and the same number quoted on gross profit are not variations of one pay plan. They are different plans that happen to share a percentage sign. On a job carrying a 35% gross margin, paying a rep 10% of the sale hands them 28.6% of everything the job earned. Written the other way round — “you get 28.6% of the gross profit” — most owners would negotiate. Written as “10%”, most sign.
The gap widens as margin falls, which is the part that catches people out. The same 10% of revenue costs 28.6% of gross profit at a 35% margin, 40% at a 25% margin, and 50% at a 20% margin. A pay plan agreed in a good year quietly becomes a different deal in a tighter one, without anyone renegotiating it.
That is the whole job of this calculator: convert the rate you have written down into the share of profit you are actually paying, so the plan can be judged on the number that matters.
The same 10% across ten trades
One flat rate — 10% of the sale price — priced against each trade’s typical job. Every row uses the same 35% planning margin, so the share of gross profit comes out identical; the dollars do not, and that spread is what makes one rate liveable in roofing and not worth a salesperson’s time in epoxy. Put your own margin into the calculator and the percentages separate too — that is the version worth acting on.
| Trade | Avg job | Gross profit | Rep earns | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roofing | $12,000 | $4,200 | $1,200 | $3,000 |
| HVAC | $9,000 | $3,150 | $900 | $2,250 |
| Kitchen Remodel | $28,000 | $9,800 | $2,800 | $7,000 |
| Bath Remodel | $16,000 | $5,600 | $1,600 | $4,000 |
| Epoxy Flooring | $4,500 | $1,575 | $450 | $1,125 |
| Windows & Doors | $11,000 | $3,850 | $1,100 | $2,750 |
| Flooring | $6,000 | $2,100 | $600 | $1,500 |
| Pool & Outdoor | $30,000 | $10,500 | $3,000 | $7,500 |
| Landscaping | $7,000 | $2,450 | $700 | $1,750 |
| General Contractors | $12,000 | $4,200 | $1,200 | $3,000 |
Job values are the planning benchmarks this site uses across its calculators, at a 35% gross margin — starting points, not surveyed industry pay data. Each trade page explains what is structurally different about paying commission in that trade.
Commission questions
- Should sales commission be a percentage of revenue or of gross profit?
- Revenue is simpler to administer and easier for a rep to verify. Gross profit is better aligned, because the rep only earns more when the job actually earned more — which matters most where the salesperson can discount, where change orders are common, or where a lot of contract value passes straight through to subcontractors. The calculator prices both so you can compare the same job on each basis.
- What does a 10% commission actually cost me?
- It depends entirely on your margin, which is why the headline rate is misleading. At a 35% gross margin, 10% of revenue consumes 28.6% of the gross profit on the job. At a 25% margin the same 10% consumes 40%. The rate on the page is not the cost; the share of gross profit is.
- How much commission can I afford to pay?
- Work backwards from what you need to keep. Decide the share of gross profit that has to stay in the business to cover overhead and leave a profit, and the rest is what is available for commission. Entering your own margin in the calculator and adjusting the rate until the “you keep” figure covers your overhead is the fastest way to find that number.
- Is commission calculated before or after overhead?
- This calculator prices commission against gross profit — revenue less direct job cost, before overhead. Commission is a job-level cost and overhead is a company-level one, so mixing them makes it impossible to tell which of the two is the problem when a month comes in short.
Your trade
- Roofing commission calculator
- HVAC commission calculator
- Kitchen Remodel commission calculator
- Bath Remodel commission calculator
- Epoxy Flooring commission calculator
- Windows & Doors commission calculator
- Flooring commission calculator
- Pool & Outdoor commission calculator
- Landscaping commission calculator
- General Contractors commission calculator
A pay plan decides what a job is worth once you have won it. If the constraint is job count rather than job economics, run the revenue and ROI calculator or see how we generate contractor leads.