There is no standard number, and the base the percentage is taken from decides more than the percentage does. On a job sold at $20,000, ten percent of the sale pays $2,000. Twenty percent of gross profit pays $1,200 if the job finishes at 30 percent, and $1,800 if it finishes at 45 percent. Ask three questions before you believe any figure: percent of what, paid when, calculated by whom.
Written by JD Davenport, who still sells for a living. Updated 4 November 2026.
Roofing in the question because that is where the examples come from. The arithmetic is the same for any business that quotes the work, does the work and sends an invoice: landscaping, fencing, decking, power washing, painting, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, remodeling.
There is no standard number. Anybody who gives you one without asking what it is a percentage of is answering a different question than the one you asked.
Take a job sold at $20,000. Ten percent of the sale is $2,000, whatever happens afterward. Now take twenty percent of gross profit on the same job. If it finished at 30 percent gross profit, that is $1,200. If it finished at 45 percent, that is $1,800.
Same salesman, same job, same month. The spread between those two numbers is not a rounding difference. It is the whole argument about how to pay, and it only shows up after the job is done.
So when somebody tells you what roofing reps make, ask three questions before you believe it. Percent of what. Paid when. Calculated by whom.
Percent of the sale. Simple, fast, and the rep knows what he earned the day he signs. It also pays the same on a job sold at the floor as on a job sold well, which means your best pricing and your worst pricing cost you identically. Everybody understands it and it teaches nothing.
Percent of gross profit. Pays for the thing the business actually needs, which is margin rather than volume. It also means the rep cannot know what he earned until the job is costed, and that puts your job costing on the critical path for payroll. If your costs land late, your pay lands late, and that is not a reporting problem anymore.
A floor with a split above it. Nothing below a set margin, a higher share above it. Cleanest of the three in theory. It also produces the hardest conversations, because the job that lands a point under the floor is the one that gets re-argued.
None of those is correct in the abstract. The one that is wrong is the one your business cannot calculate on time.
On signing, on collection, on completion, or on final check. Every one of those is defensible and they are not the same job.
An insurance job can run a month past completion before the final check arrives. A rep paid on final check carries that month in his own household budget. He will not say so in the interview. He will say so in month four, and by then you have taught him that the business pays late, which is a thing he will mention to every other rep in the market.
Pick the trigger you can actually hit and say it out loud before he starts. The trigger matters more than the percentage to the man living on it.
This is the part nobody puts in the job posting and it is the part that ends employment.
If the rep cannot reproduce his own commission from documents he can see, he is being asked to trust a number. Most will, for a while. The first time a figure comes back lower than he expected and nobody can show him the arithmetic, you have not had a pay dispute. You have had a trust failure, and it arrives with the next three paychecks attached to it.
A commission statement that a rep can check himself is not a courtesy. It is the only version that survives a bad month.
Published figures for roofing commission move across a wide range and most of them do not state their base, their trigger or their window, which makes them a number without a denominator. A survey that does not say whether it measured percent of sale or percent of profit has not measured anything comparable.
What you can do instead is work it backward from the only two figures you control. Decide what a producing rep should earn in a year. Divide by the volume or the gross profit you expect him to produce. That ratio is your percentage, and it is defensible because you can show the arithmetic that produced it.
Set it that way and the number is yours. Copy it off a forum and you are paying a rate somebody else's cost structure can carry and yours may not.
The plan structure, the arithmetic, the statement a rep can check himself and the paperwork that goes with it are The Commission Standard. If the issue is that job costs land too late to pay off them, that is The Job Cost Standard. More answers on the questions page.