Nobody's got the perfect answer
Ask ten shop owners how they pay their guys and you’ll get ten answers, and half of them will tell you they’re thinking about changing it. There is no right way to pay a tech. There’s the way that fits how your shop runs, and there’s the way that’s slowly costing you money without you noticing.
Pay structure isn’t just a number. It decides what your guys chase all day. Pay a man by the hour and he’s got no reason to hurry. Pay him by the job and he’s got every reason to cut a corner. Every structure rewards something, and whatever it rewards is what you’ll get more of. So the real question isn’t which one is best. It’s which behavior you want to buy.
Hourly: the honest default
Most shops run hourly, and for good reason. It’s simple. The guy knows what he’s making, you know what you’re paying, and when a job runs long because the customer’s shutoff valve was buried behind drywall, that’s on the clock, not on him. Hourly doesn’t punish a tech for hitting a hard job. That matters more than people think.
The catch is what hourly quietly rewards: time. Not results, time. A slow tech and a fast tech doing the same work cost you the same per hour, but the fast one is done in half of it, and the slow one just billed you double for the same result. Hourly has no built-in reason for anybody to move. You cover that with how you run the crew, not with the pay.
Salary: steady, until it isn't
Salary works for the people whose job isn’t tied to a wrench. Your office manager, your dispatcher, maybe a lead who spends more time running the board than turning screws. They get a steady check, you get a steady cost, and nobody’s counting hours.
Where salary bites is when you put a field tech on it and the busy season hits. Now he’s working sixty-hour weeks for the same money he made in the slow months, and he knows it. Resentment builds fast when a guy feels like he’s handing you free hours. Salary can also run afoul of overtime law depending on how the job is classified, and that’s a mistake that gets expensive in a hurry. Fine for the desk. Be careful putting a truck on it.
Commission and bonuses: the upside and the trap
Now the one everybody has an opinion about. Pay a guy a piece of what he sells or what he brings in, and you’ve lit a fire under him. Commission crews hustle. They upsell. They don’t stall out at 2pm. When it works, everybody wins: the tech makes more, and so do you.
Here’s the trap. Whatever you pay commission on is what the guy will chase, even when it’s bad for the customer. Pay on the ticket total and you’ve just handed every tech a reason to push repairs nobody needed. That’s how you end up with the reputation the big chains have, the one you started your own shop to be the opposite of.
Commission still works. It just needs guardrails. Pay it on jobs done right, on the reviews that come back, on customers who call you again next year, the stuff that’s good for the shop long after the truck pulls away. Not just the stuff that fattens up this afternoon’s invoice.
“Whatever you pay a tech for is what he'll chase all day. Reward the thing that keeps you in business, not this afternoon's invoice.
What most shops actually land on
Almost nobody runs one pure structure. The setup that holds up over the long haul is usually a mix: a solid hourly base so a guy can cover his mortgage, plus a bonus or a slice of commission on top for the results you actually want. The base keeps him from starving in the slow months. The bonus gives him a reason to bring his best on every call.
The trick is picking what the bonus rides on. Tie it to the things that make your shop worth calling. What you reward is what you’ll get, so reward the work that earns the next job, not the work that burns a customer this once.
- Jobs that don't come back as callbacks
- Customers who leave a review or refer a neighbor
- Repeat calls and maintenance plans that renew
- Clean paperwork and photos that cover the shop later
Whatever you pick, the pay has to be right
Here’s the part that sinks more shops than the structure itself: getting the math wrong. It doesn’t matter how smart your pay plan is if the hours are guessed at, the commission is tallied off a shoebox of receipts, and half the crew figures their last check came up short. A pay structure people don’t trust is worse than a plain one they do.
That’s the boring problem good records quietly solve. When every job’s hours are tracked to the tech who worked it, every ticket is tied to who ran it, and the numbers live in one place instead of your memory, paying people right stops being a Friday-night guessing game.
That’s a chunk of what ToolbagCRM does without you thinking about it: time tracked per job and per tech, job history tied to the guy who did the work, so whatever structure you land on, the check behind it is actually right. And because we don’t charge per seat, the whole crew is on it, office and field, and the bill doesn’t budge when you hire. Founders pricing is $99/mo for your first three months, then $150/mo locked for the life of the account, everybody included.
Pick the structure that fits your shop and pay for the behavior you actually want more of. Then make sure the check is right every single time, because that’s the part your crew will never forgive you for getting wrong.