Commission pay ties part of a service tech's paycheck to what they sell: under a commission plan, the shop pays a share of the ticket — the customer's invoice — on top of an hourly base or as the core of the pay itself.
This guide explains how percentage-of-ticket commission works for HVAC and plumbing service techs and drain plumbers: the plan structures you will meet, what the paycheck does week to week, and the federal wage rules that follow it.
What commission pay is
Commission is a share of the money a job brings in.
Under a commission plan, the shop pays you a set share of the ticket — the customer's invoice for the call — so your pay follows the revenue your work produces, not the hours you clock and not the number of tasks you finish.
Federal wage law treats commission broadly: the regulations describe commissions paid as a percentage of total sales, a percentage of sales in excess of a specified amount, or on some other formula, and count them as pay for hours worked whether or not they are your only pay.
The percentage itself, the ticket lines it applies to and the payment schedule are all set by the employer's pay plan — no law and no industry standard dictates them.
It is one stop on a map of pay structures: hourly pay is for time, flat-rate pay is for the finished task, and spiffs are bonuses stacked on a specific product or action.
Our guide to every tech pay structure compares them side by side; this page stays on commission.
Comfort advisors — dedicated sales roles — are a separate, commission-centric job; this page is about the service tech's and drain plumber's ticket.
Common commission structures
The plans you will meet combine two ingredients: a base and a commission rate.
Base plus commission pays a guaranteed hourly wage for every hour worked and adds a share of the ticket on top — the base carries the paycheck through slow calls, the commission lifts it when the tickets are big.
Tiered commission raises the rate as your volume crosses thresholds the plan defines — a larger share once your sales for the week or month pass a set amount.
That is the shape the wage regulations' own description covers, commissions based on a percentage of total sales or of sales in excess of a specified amount.
Draw against commission works differently: you receive a fixed advance each pay period — the draw — and the commissions you later earn repay it, so the draw steadies the paycheck without adding a separate wage on top.
Full commission — no base at all, with the plan as the whole paycheck — exists too, and so do hybrids that pay commission on part of the ticket: the full parts-and-labor invoice on some lines, nothing on others, with discounts, warranty work and callbacks each handled by the plan's own rules.
What varies is always the employer's choice: the percentage, the thresholds, what counts as a commissionable ticket line, and whether commissions are paid weekly or later — the timing matters for overtime, as the protections section below explains.
One honesty note before the paycheck section: no government source publishes typical commission percentages or thresholds for the trades — the figures quoted around the industry come from consultants and member surveys.
Judge the plan written in front of you, not a national number that has no source.
What a commission paycheck looks like
A commission paycheck moves.
The percentage is fixed by the plan, but the ticket total behind it swings with call volume, job mix and the season — and the seasons do swing: BLS notes most HVAC technicians work full time, with schedules that can include evenings or weekends, on-call rotations, and overtime or irregular hours during peak heating and cooling seasons.
A peak-season week and a slow-season week can pay very differently under the same plan.
The honest benchmark: no government agency breaks technician wages out by pay structure, so there is no published commission-versus-hourly comparison to lean on.
What the government does publish is the wage distribution commissioned earnings flow into.
In the latest federal wage data, released May 15, 2026, the median wage is $29.33 an hour, or $61,010 a year, for HVAC mechanics and installers (SOC 49-9021), and $30.67 an hour, or $63,800 a year, for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters (SOC 47-2152).
Commissions sit inside those medians — the survey includes incentive pay, commissions and production bonuses — so a commissioned tech's earnings count in the published figures, not on top of them.
Two exclusions cut the other way.
The same survey leaves out overtime pay, shift differentials, non-production bonuses and benefits, so techs of any structure who log heavy overtime hours can out-earn the medians.
And the annual figures assume a full-time, year-round schedule of 2,080 hours — a plan that pays well in season and lightly off season can match the median across a year without ever paying it in a single month.
The state-by-state tables behind the medians live on the HVAC technician salary and plumber salary pages.
Judge a plan by a season, not a week
Pros, cons and sales pressure
The case for commission is alignment: your pay rises with the value your work creates on the truck.
A tech who diagnoses accurately, explains the repair clearly and earns the customer's yes is paid for that skill, and strong seasons and big jobs show up directly in the paycheck.
The case against is the same mechanism running in reverse.
Income varies week to week with call volume and ticket size; slow weeks and warranty-heavy ones pay less through no fault of the tech; and the paycheck depends on part of the job — selling the repair — that sits outside wrench-turning skill.
Sales pressure is the part of commission that gets debated inside the trade.
Because the plan ties your income to what the customer buys, the structure itself creates an incentive to sell: system replacements, add-ons and maintenance agreements all grow the ticket your percentage rides on.
That incentive can be managed honestly — a recommendation the system genuinely needs, explained plainly, is good work and good sales at once — but it can also shade into selling fear or unneeded work, and customers who feel sold pay for it in trust.
Before accepting a commission offer, learn how a shop draws that line: what its technicians are expected to recommend, what they are barred from doing, and whether diagnostics pay the same way replacements do.
Minimum wage and overtime protections
Commission does not sit outside wage law — it runs through it.
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, commissions are pay for hours worked and must be included in the regular rate used to compute overtime, whether or not they are your only pay.
For a tech paid hourly plus commission, the week's commission is added to the week's other earnings and the total is divided by all hours worked in the week; the result is your regular rate, and each overtime hour past 40 in the workweek earns an extra half of that rate on top.
Commissions paid later than the week they are earned follow a two-step rule.
The employer may pay overtime on the base rate first, but once the commission amount is known it must be apportioned back over the weeks it was earned, and each of those weeks with overtime hours gets its extra premium paid.
A monthly commission that cannot be tied to specific weeks is allocated by multiplying it by 12 and dividing by 52 — the regulation's own formula.
There is one genuine overtime exemption for commission pay, and it is narrow.
FLSA Section 7(i) covers commissioned employees of a retail or service establishment only when the regular rate is more than one-and-a-half times the minimum wage and more than half the pay over a representative period of at least one month is commissions — and only where the establishment qualifies as retail: 75% of its annual dollar sales of goods or services is not for resale and the business is recognized as retail in its industry.
Courts once read a Department of Labor list (29 CFR 779.317) as excluding air-conditioning contractors from the exemption; the department withdrew that list in May 2020, and whether an HVAC or plumbing service company qualifies today is decided case by case.
Do not assume the exemption covers your shop.
The floor itself works the same under every structure: the FLSA sets a federal minimum wage that must be met for all hours worked, and commissions count toward it as pay for hours worked.
How a specific commission plan computes against the minimum — across a week, a draw period or a deferred payout — is a wage-and-hour determination this page does not attempt.
If a commission paycheck looks short of the legal minimum for your hours, take the question to the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division or your state labor department rather than absorbing it.
Wage rules change — confirm with the enforcers
How to evaluate a commission offer
A commission offer is only as good as the plan behind it, and the plan is knowable before you sign.
Ask each question below, and get the answers in writing — the written plan is what settles later disputes about thresholds, ticket lines and timing.
- Is there a written pay plan, and does it state the percentage, what the commission applies to, and when it is paid?
- Is the base a guaranteed hourly wage or a draw — and if it is a draw, is it repayable from future commissions?
- Does the commission run on the full parts-and-labor ticket or on specific lines — and how do discounts, warranty work and callbacks affect it?
- How is overtime computed — commission folded into the regular rate, with the half-time premium for hours over 40?
- What is paid on time that does not sell — shop time, training, windshield time between calls, inspections that do not produce a sale?
- Do spiffs stack on the plan, and does the shop treat its plan as exempt under FLSA Section 7(i)?
The answers tell you what a peak week and a slow season each look like under the plan — the two halves of the year that decide whether commission beats the hourly alternative for you.
Compare the offer against the market as well as against itself: the HVAC technician salary tables and the open HVAC technician jobs on HVACHires show what shops are paying and hiring for right now.
Career information, not legal or pay-law advice — confirm your own situation with the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division or your state labor department.