Landscaping Sales Commission Calculator
Landscaping sells two things with one sales team: one-off installs and recurring maintenance. Enter your numbers to price a plan for each — they are not the same question, and one rate rarely fits both.
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 $7,000 landscaping job
At a 35% gross margin, a $7,000 job earns $2,450 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 | $700 | $245 |
| You keep on the job | $1,750 | $2,205 |
| Share of the gross profit | 28.6% | 10.0% |
| Across 5 jobs a month | $3,500 | $1,225 |
Written as “10%”, the first plan costs 28.6% of the gross profit on every landscaping 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 $735 per job in the rep’s pocket.
Recurring revenue breaks a per-job commission
A design-build install is a single transaction with a single margin, and an ordinary per-job commission prices it correctly. A maintenance contract is not: it is a stream of revenue that may run for years, and paying a percentage of the first year’s value against a cost that recurs indefinitely produces a very different economic picture.
Both common answers are defensible, and they are worth pricing rather than assuming. Paying a one-time commission on the first year’s contract value is simple and caps your exposure, but it gives the rep no reason to care whether the client renews. Paying a smaller percentage for as long as the client stays aligns retention but creates a permanent cost on revenue you may later service with an entirely different crew. Use the calculator to price the install side and the first-year contract side separately; the residual question is a policy decision the arithmetic can inform but not settle.
The seasonal shape matters too. In most markets install work concentrates into a few months while maintenance revenue is comparatively flat, so a commission plan tuned to peak-season job counts can leave a rep unpaid through the shoulder months. Run your monthly numbers at an off-peak job count as well as a peak one before committing to a rate.
Common questions about landscaping commission
- How should I pay commission on a maintenance contract?
- Price the two options rather than defaulting. A one-time commission on first-year value is simple and bounded; a smaller ongoing percentage rewards retention but never ends. Model the first-year value here, then decide which behaviour you are actually trying to buy.
- Should install and maintenance share a rate?
- Usually not, because their margins and their revenue shapes differ. Run each through the calculator with its own average value and margin — if the affordable rates diverge, that divergence is the argument for two plans.
- How do I handle seasonality?
- Run the monthly view at both a peak and an off-peak job count. A plan that only works in June is a plan that loses you a salesperson in February, and that is visible in the monthly figures long before it is visible in turnover.
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 landscaping leads — or run the revenue and ROI calculator to size the pipeline first.