HVAC and plumbing technicians are paid under a handful of structures: an hourly wage, a salary, flat-rate pay (a set amount per finished job), commission on sales, and spiffs or bonuses stacked on top — often in combination.
Which one an employer uses decides how your paycheck moves from week to week, and federal overtime law computes each pay structure differently.
This guide walks through every structure and shows how to compare two offers.
The main pay structures at a glance
Every structure on this page answers one question: what exactly is the money for?
Hourly pay is for time on the clock.
Flat rate is for finished jobs.
Piece rate is for units — an install, a changeout.
Commission is for what you sell.
Spiffs and bonuses are incentives layered on top of any of the others.
The structure matters twice.
It decides how steady your paycheck is week to week, and it decides how overtime is computed under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the federal wage law that covers HVAC and plumbing shops.
The FLSA computes overtime from a "regular rate" — total pay for the week divided by hours worked — and bonuses, commissions and piece earnings fold into that rate rather than sitting outside it.
Here is the map:
| Structure | What it pays for | Overtime under the FLSA |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly | Each hour on the clock | Time-and-a-half the regular rate for hours over 40 |
| Salary | A fixed amount per pay period | Runs through the FLSA's own exemption tests — a separate topic this page does not cover |
| Flat rate | Each completed job | Owed — half-time on top of job pay for hours over 40 |
| Piece rate | Each unit finished | Owed — half-time top-up over 40 |
| Commission | What you sell | Counts in the regular rate; a narrow 7(i) exemption may apply |
| Spiffs and bonuses | Specific incentives, stacked on base pay | Count unless truly discretionary |
Where the dollar figures come from is a separate question — the programmatic salary pages hold the wage tables.
This page is the how; the salary pages are the how much: see the HVAC technician salary data and the plumber salary data.
The overtime rules here are federal law — verify before you rely on them
Hourly pay
Hourly pay is the simplest structure: a set rate for each hour on the clock, with overtime owed at time-and-a-half your regular rate for every hour over 40 in a workweek.
You know what any given week is worth before it starts, and slow stretches are the shop's problem, not yours.
The wrinkle is extras.
Under the FLSA, a production bonus paid on top of an hourly wage must be added into the regular rate before overtime is computed.
The regulation's own example: $12 an hour for 46 hours earns $552; add a $46 bonus and the week totals $598, which divides out to a $13 regular rate — so the overtime hours are owed at $19.50, not $18.
That example is the whole rule in miniature: when an employer attaches any incentive to an hourly week, the incentive raises the base the overtime is computed from.
If a bonus-heavy paycheck arrives computed at the plain wage rate, it is worth asking about.
For what hourly wages actually run — nationally and state by state — the salary tables live on the HVAC technician salary and plumber salary pages.
Flat-rate pay
Flat-rate pay replaces the clock with the job list: the shop's service pricing assigns each task a value, and you are paid that amount when the work is done.
Only the priced jobs produce pay, so a fast week of well-run jobs can beat the same hours at an hourly rate — and a week of slow, unpriced work can fall behind it.
Federal law follows you here too.
A common shop-floor belief says flat-rate techs are not owed overtime; the FLSA says otherwise.
For job-rate and day-rate workers, the regular rate is the week's total job pay divided by the hours actually worked, and the tech is owed an extra half-time on that rate for each hour over 40.
The divisor is every hour actually worked in the week — not just the hours the job list paid for — which is what keeps a slow flat-rate week from erasing the overtime premium.
The half-time lands on top of the job pay already earned, because the flat-rate earnings count as having covered straight time.
Piece rate is flat rate's cousin on the installation side: pay per unit finished — an install, a changeout.
It computes the same way under the FLSA: total piece earnings plus other pay for the week, divided by all hours worked, plus an extra half of that rate for each hour over 40.
Where piece-rate pay already covered straight time for all hours, only the extra half-time is owed — the regulation's example: $523 of earnings for a 50-hour week works out to a $10.46 regular rate, so the 10 overtime hours add $52.30.
How a shop builds its rate card is the employer side of this topic; this page stays on the worker's side of the table.
Commission
Commission pays a share of what you sell — equipment changeouts, service tickets, maintenance agreements — instead of, or alongside, an hourly rate.
It is the structure behind dedicated sales roles, and it rides on top of technician pay in shops that reward attached sales.
What percentages are typical is a question with no government answer.
No primary source — government or credential body — publishes typical commission percentages for techs or sales roles; the figures quoted around the industry come from consultants and member surveys.
Treat every "typical percentage" you hear accordingly, and judge a commission offer on its own written plan.
The FLSA folds commissions into overtime the way it folds in bonuses: commissions are pay for hours worked and must be included in the regular rate.
A commission paid weekly is added to that week's other earnings, divided by the total hours worked, and each hour over 40 is then owed an extra half of that combined rate.
A commission paid monthly or later can wait: the employer may pay overtime on the hourly rate first, but once the amount is known it must be apportioned back over the weeks it was earned, with extra overtime for each week that had any.
A monthly commission that cannot be tied to specific weeks is allocated by multiplying it by 12 and dividing by 52.
One genuine exemption exists.
FLSA Section 7(i) leaves commissioned employees of a retail or service establishment out of overtime — but only when the regular rate is more than one-and-a-half times the minimum wage and more than half the pay is commissions, and whether an HVAC or plumbing shop qualifies is decided case by case.
The establishment test has its own definition: a retail or service establishment is one where 75% of annual dollar sales of goods or services is not for resale, and that is recognized as retail in the industry.
Do not assume the exemption applies to you; ask how the shop classifies its pay plan.
Union shops run on a different structure again — negotiated scale rather than a per-job or per-sale plan.
Our guide to plumbers and pipefitters unions covers how union pay is set.
Spiffs and bonuses
A spiff is a short-term incentive tied to one specific action — selling a maintenance agreement this month, attaching an accessory to a changeout — while a bonus is the broader category: production, quality, attendance, retention, year-end.
Both sit on top of a base structure rather than replacing it.
The sourcing problem from commission applies here too: no primary source publishes typical spiff amounts, so any dollar figure quoted for "a spiff on a maintenance agreement" comes from industry consultants and member surveys, not government data.
Judge the spiff plan in front of you, not a national average that has no source.
What federal law does say is precise.
An announced spiff or bonus plan is not a discretionary bonus: a bonus stays out of the overtime math only when the employer decides both whether to pay and how much at or near the end of the period, with no prior promise.
A spiff schedule announced in advance is a promised payment.
Production, quality, attendance and stay-until-payment bonuses must be included in the regular rate, and calling a payment "discretionary" does not make it so — the facts decide.
The exclusions are narrow but real: a bonus that is truly discretionary, or a gift for a special occasion, can stay out of the overtime computation.
And a bonus that covers several weeks — a quarterly install bonus, say — may be left out until its amount is known, but must then be apportioned back over the weeks it was earned, with extra half-time owed for the overtime weeks.
Which structure pays more — and for whom
The direct answer is that no government source compares pay by structure — not typical flat-rate rates, not commission percentages, not the share of shops running each plan.
BLS publishes wage estimates by occupation, not by pay plan, so there is no official hourly-versus-flat-rate-versus-commission table.
What BLS does publish is a national median that every structure's earnings flow into — and what those medians include and leave out tells you how to read them.
The May 2025 medians, released on May 15, 2026, are $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).
Those figures include base pay, commissions, production bonuses, incentive pay and tips; they exclude overtime pay, shift differentials, non-production bonuses such as sign-on or holiday money, and benefits — so a tech whose earnings lean on overtime can out-earn the published figures.
The state-by-state tables behind them are on the HVAC technician salary and plumber salary pages.
What the structure itself changes is the shape of the money, and the FLSA math shows where: two techs with the same annual total can be paid very differently hour to hour.
Hourly pay plus overtime pays time-and-a-half on the late hours.
Flat-rate and piece-rate pay carry a half-time top-up above 40 hours.
Commission-heavy pay may carry no overtime at all where the 7(i) exemption genuinely applies — and bonuses raise the rate the overtime is computed from.
Structure also moves risk: per-job pay rewards fast, well-run work and shares slow weeks with the tech; hourly shares them with the shop; commission tracks what customers buy.
Which structure fits which role follows from what each one pays for: a role whose day is finished jobs runs naturally on flat rate or piece rate; a role whose day is time and judgment runs on hourly; a role whose output is revenue — selling the changeout rather than installing it — runs on commission.
Many shops mix the layers rather than pick one.
Which of those fits you is the comparison the next section turns into questions.
How to compare two offers
An hourly offer and a flat-rate offer cannot be compared on headline numbers alone — the same week of work pays differently under each, and the overtime treatment differs.
Convert both to the same shape first.
The FLSA regular-rate math on this page doubles as the math for your own estimate: weekly pay divided by hours worked, with the overtime premium added on top.
BLS annualizes hourly wages at 2,080 hours a year, which is a workable yardstick for turning an hourly offer into an annual figure.
Then ask the questions that decide what the offer actually pays:
- Which structure is the base — hourly, flat rate, or a mix — and is there a written pay plan?
- How is overtime computed, and do commissions, spiffs and bonuses fold into the regular rate?
- Is the spiff or bonus plan announced in writing in advance? A promised payment belongs in the overtime rate.
- What counts as hours worked — drive time, callbacks, warranty work, training?
- Is there guaranteed pay for slow weeks, and how is it computed?
- On commission: does the shop treat the plan as 7(i)-exempt, and is more than half the pay commission?
Compare offers against the market as well as against each other: 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. The overtime and bonus rules described here come from the FLSA and the Department of Labor regulations that interpret it, and state wage-and-hour laws can add rules on top. Confirm your own situation with the U.S. Department of Labor or your state labor department before you rely on any computation here.