Windows & Doors Sales Commission Calculator
Windows is the classic in-home, one-call-close sale — and the trade where discounting authority does the most damage to a badly-based pay plan. Enter your numbers to see what your plan costs at full price, and what it costs after a discount.
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: an $11,000 windows and doors job
At a 35% gross margin, a $11,000 job earns $3,850 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 | $1,100 | $385 |
| You keep on the job | $2,750 | $3,465 |
| Share of the gross profit | 28.6% | 10.0% |
| Across 4 jobs a month | $4,400 | $1,540 |
Written as “10%”, the first plan costs 28.6% of the gross profit on every windows and doors 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 $1,155 per job in the rep’s pocket.
Discounting is the whole question
Almost everything distinctive about a windows pay plan follows from one fact: the rep sets the final price in the living room. Whatever the price book says, the number on the contract is the number the rep agreed to, often after a discount used to close that night. A pay plan has to be designed around that authority rather than pretending it does not exist.
Here is why the basis matters so much. Take an $11,000 job at a 35% margin: $3,850 of gross profit. A 10% revenue commission pays $1,100 and leaves you $2,750. Now let the rep discount 10% to close. Revenue falls to $9,900, so their commission falls to $990 — down 10%, exactly proportional. But your gross profit falls to $2,750, and after the $990 commission you keep $1,760. The rep gave up a tenth of their cheque; you gave up a third of your net. That asymmetry is not a rounding error, and it recurs on every discounted job.
On a profit-basis plan the same discount hits the rep in the same proportion it hits you, which is the only version of the incentive that is actually aligned. If you keep a revenue basis, the alternative is a tiered rate that steps down as discount deepens — more complex to administer, but it at least puts the cost back where the decision was made.
Common questions about windows and doors commission
- What does a 10% discount really cost me?
- Far more than 10%. The discount comes entirely out of gross profit, not out of cost, so on a 35% margin job a 10% price cut removes close to 29% of the profit on that job — and on a revenue-basis plan you also keep paying commission on the discounted price. Run both scenarios in the calculator; the second number is usually the one that changes the pay plan.
- Should reps have discounting authority?
- Usually yes — in-home closing depends on it. The question is who pays for it. A gross-profit basis makes the rep a proportional partner in every discount without needing an approval step, which is why it tends to survive contact with a real sales floor better than a discount policy does.
- How do tiered commission rates fit in?
- A tier is just a different rate at a different margin, so price each tier separately here and compare the outcomes. If the tiers are set so that a deeply discounted job pays the rep roughly what a profit-basis plan would have paid, the tiers are doing their job.
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 windows and doors leads — or run the revenue and ROI calculator to size the pipeline first.