Kitchen Remodel Sales Commission Calculator
High ticket, long cycle, and a price that moves after the contract is signed. Enter your average kitchen, your margin, and your commission rate to see what the plan pays out and what it leaves you on a job that rarely finishes at the price it started at.
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 $28,000 kitchen remodel job
At a 35% gross margin, a $28,000 job earns $9,800 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 | $2,800 | $980 |
| You keep on the job | $7,000 | $8,820 |
| Share of the gross profit | 28.6% | 10.0% |
| Across 2 jobs a month | $5,600 | $1,960 |
Written as “10%”, the first plan costs 28.6% of the gross profit on every kitchen remodel 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 $2,940 per job in the rep’s pocket.
Change orders break revenue-basis commission
A kitchen is not sold once. It is sold, then selected, then revised — and the contract value at completion is often materially different from the contract value at signing. That single fact is why the basis question matters more here than in trades that quote and install at one price.
On a revenue-basis plan, every change order enlarges the commission automatically, including the ones that carry little or no margin: a client upgrading to a stone you supply at near cost still grows the rep’s cheque. On a profit-basis plan, the commission grows only when the change order actually earned something. In a trade where selections routinely add tens of percent to contract value, that difference compounds far faster than the headline rate suggests.
The second kitchen-specific factor is who is selling. When the designer is the salesperson, some of what the commission is buying is design labour you would otherwise pay for directly. That is a legitimate reason to run a higher share of gross profit than a pure closer would earn — but it should be a decision you priced, not a rate you inherited.
Common questions about kitchen remodel commission
- Should change orders be commissionable?
- If they carry margin, usually yes — you want the rep motivated to serve the client through selections. The distinction worth writing into the plan is between change orders that add profit and pass-throughs that do not. A profit-basis commission draws that line automatically; a revenue-basis one has to draw it with exclusions you will then have to police.
- What does a designer-salesperson change?
- It bundles two costs into one number. If the commission is also paying for design time, compare it against what you would pay a designer plus a closer separately, rather than against a pure sales commission rate. The calculator gives you the dollars; the comparison is yours to make.
- Why is the default job value $28,000?
- It is the average kitchen value this site plans with across its calculators, so the numbers you see here match the ones you will see elsewhere on the site. It is a planning default — replace it with your own average contract value at completion, not at signing.
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 kitchen remodel leads — or run the revenue and ROI calculator to size the pipeline first.