Roofing Sales Commission Calculator
Enter your average roof price, your margin, and the rate in your pay plan. The calculator shows what the rep earns, what you keep, and the number most roofing pay plans hide — what that commission actually costs as a share of the gross profit on the job.
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 $12,000 roofing job
At a 35% gross margin, a $12,000 job earns $4,200 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 | $1,200 | $420 |
| You keep on the job | $3,000 | $3,780 |
| Share of the gross profit | 28.6% | 10.0% |
| Across 4 jobs a month | $4,800 | $1,680 |
Written as “10%”, the first plan costs 28.6% of the gross profit on every roofing 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 $1,260 per job in the rep’s pocket.
Why roofing pay plans drift
Roofing runs more of its selling on commission than almost any other trade — canvassers, storm crews, and retail closers are often paid almost entirely on a split. That makes the basis of the split the single most consequential number in the business, and it is usually the one written down most casually.
The specific trap in roofing is that the job price is frequently not set by your salesperson. On insurance work the scope and the price come from the carrier, so a rep paid on a percentage of revenue is paid on a number they did not negotiate — while supplements, overhead, and material escalation land on you. A profit-basis split moves the rep onto the same side of that as you: if the job comes in tight, the split comes in tight with it.
The second issue is timing. A roof sold today may not be collected for weeks once the claim, the supplement, and the final invoice clear. A plan that pays commission on signing rather than on collection converts a cash-flow problem into a payroll problem. The calculator here prices the plan; when you decide it, decide the trigger too.
Common questions about roofing commission
- Should roofing commission be paid on revenue or on profit?
- Both are used. The practical difference is who absorbs a bad job. On revenue, the rep earns the same whether the job made money or not, and your margin takes the whole hit. On profit, the rep shares the outcome. Run both in the calculator at rates that pay the same on a normal job, then re-run them with the margin dropped ten points — that second comparison is the real decision.
- What does 10% of revenue cost me on a roof?
- On a $12,000 roof at a 35% gross margin, 10% of revenue is $1,200 against $4,200 of gross profit — 28.6% of what the job earned. The same $1,200 written as a profit-basis plan would read as a 28.6% split. Identical money, very different-looking pay plan.
- Does the commission come out before or after overhead?
- This calculator works in gross profit, so commission is priced before overhead — what the job earns before your fixed costs. That is deliberate: overhead is a company number, not a job number. Decide what share of gross profit you can hand a rep, and cover overhead out of what is left.
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 roofing leads — or run the revenue and ROI calculator to size the pipeline first.