HVAC Sales Commission Calculator
Price an HVAC pay plan against a real install. Enter your average system price, your gross margin, and your commission rate — the calculator returns the rep’s cheque, your net on the job, and what the plan costs as a share of gross profit.
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.
A worked example: a $9,000 HVAC job
At a 35% gross margin, a $9,000 job earns $3,150 before overhead. Here is what a 10% commission costs on each basis — the same headline rate, two very different pay plans.
| 10% of the sale | 10% of gross profit | |
|---|---|---|
| Rep earns | $900 | $315 |
| You keep on the job | $2,250 | $2,835 |
| Share of the gross profit | 28.6% | 10.0% |
| Across 5 jobs a month | $4,500 | $1,575 |
Written as “10%”, the first plan costs 28.6% of the gross profit on every HVAC job — the same cheque a gross-profit plan would have to write as 28.6%. One of those two numbers gets negotiated; the other gets signed. Turn the question round and it sharpens: to keep 70% of the gross profit on this job you can afford 10.5% of the sale price, or $945 per job in the rep’s pocket.
The base-plus-commission problem in HVAC
HVAC is unusual in that the person selling the replacement is often not a full-time salesperson. Service techs surface the opportunity and are frequently paid a spiff for it, while a comfort advisor closes and is paid a percentage. That means the true selling cost of an install is usually spread across two pay plans, and most owners only ever model one of them.
The calculator prices one plan at a time. To get the real number, run the advisor’s commission first, then run the tech spiff as a second pass — a flat spiff is easiest to model as a profit-basis percentage that produces the same dollars — and add the two. A plan that looks like 8% frequently behaves like 11% once the spiff is counted.
The other HVAC-specific pressure is equipment cost volatility. Margin on a replacement moves with equipment pricing in a way that labour-heavy trades do not experience. A revenue-basis commission holds the rep harmless through an equipment price rise and pushes the entire squeeze onto you; a profit-basis plan splits it. If your margin has moved more than a few points in the last year, that argues for profit.
Common questions about HVAC commission
- How do I include a tech spiff in the calculation?
- Run it as a second pass. Compute the advisor’s commission, then enter the spiff as its own commission — a flat dollar spiff is easiest to enter as the profit-basis percentage that produces those dollars on your average job. Add the two results to get the true selling cost per install.
- Is commission on the system price or the installed price?
- Whichever you choose, the calculator prices it — but be explicit in writing. The common dispute is whether accessories, permits, and electrical upgrades are commissionable. Anything you pass through at little or no margin should not be, because a revenue-basis commission on a zero-margin pass-through is paid entirely out of the profit on the rest of the job.
- What margin should I use?
- Use your own, on completed jobs, after warranty and callbacks. The 35% seeded here is a planning default, not a benchmark for your market. If you do not know it, that is the more urgent number to go find — every commission decision downstream of it is a guess until you do.
Next
A pay plan decides what a job is worth once you have won it. If the constraint is that there are not enough jobs to pay commission on, see how we generate HVAC leads — or run the revenue and ROI calculator to size the pipeline first.