Technician pay: hourly, commission, or the hybrid everybody ends up at

The three models, honestly

• Hourly. Predictable, easy payroll, zero drama. Also rewards nothing: your fastest tech and your slowest tech cost the same, and both of them know it.
• Pure production or commission. Rewards hustle, punishes route luck, and quietly taxes quality, because speed pays today and the callback is next month's problem.
• Hybrid: a base plus a production and sales bonus. A floor to live on, upside to chase. This is where most multi-truck shops end up after trying one of the other two first.

You will notice this guide quotes no dollar figures or percentages. Ask five owners what they pay and you get five numbers, every one of them shaped by their market and their price book. The structure is the part that transfers. The numbers are yours to set.

What commission does to quality

Pay per stop and you have priced speed. You have not priced quality, which makes quality the free variable, and free variables get spent. The tech who learns to run nine-minute stops earns more this month, and the reservice rate pays for it next month, one free truck roll at a time.

The fix is not abandoning performance pay. It is a quality gate: the bonus only unlocks when the tech's reservice rate is under your line. Now speed and quality are both priced, and the tech who is fast AND clean is the one who gets paid like it. The reservice rate guide covers where to set the line.

The route-luck problem

Raw production pay has the same flaw as raw production rankings: the tech with the dense in-town route wins, the tech with the windshield-time route loses, and neither outcome has anything to do with skill. Pay on raw stops and you are paying for geography.

The repair is the same one scorecards use. Weight the work: an initial counts more than a quick recurring stop, and pace gets judged per hour actually worked, not per day. Once the measuring is fair, hanging money on it stops being dangerous.

Bolting pay to numbers without a mutiny

The rules that keep a performance plan from blowing up the room:

• Stable for a season. A plan that changes monthly is a casino, and techs treat it like one.
• Math visible to the tech, daily. A bonus computed in a back office spreadsheet and revealed quarterly is a morale problem with a payout attached.
• Weighted, not raw. Stop-type weighting and per-hour pace, so the hard route is not a pay cut.
• Quality gated. Reservice rate under your line unlocks the bonus. Speed alone never should.
• Sales credited to whoever actually sold it, not whoever ran the route afterward. Misattributed sales commission is the fastest way to teach a team the numbers are rigged.

All five rules share one requirement: numbers the tech can check and believe. A pay plan built on numbers nobody trusts does not motivate anybody. It just moves the argument from pay day to every day.

Common questions