Tree service sales commission, explained honestly

It varies more than most trades, and the percentage alone tells you almost nothing until you know what it is a percentage of. Straight-commission sales arborists and canvassing closers commonly land somewhere in the high single digits to low teens on sold revenue, while reps carrying a base salary usually sit lower, often in the mid single digits, because the company is already paying them whether they sell or not. Plans paid on gross profit rather than revenue carry a higher headline rate because the pool is smaller. Treat every number you hear as typical, not standard: two companies quoting the same percentage can pay very differently once you know the basis, the timing and the clawback rules.

Ask this in the interview, because it is the biggest single difference between two plans that look identical on paper. Paid-on-sold means the commission is earned when the customer signs, which is great for cash flow and terrible for the company when invoices go unpaid — so those plans almost always come with a clawback if the money never arrives. Paid-on-collected means you get paid after the job is produced and the invoice clears, which in tree service can be weeks after the handshake. Neither is wrong, but they produce very different first months, and reps who assume the first and get the second end up borrowing to cover rent.

Instead of paying you a percentage of the invoice, the company pays a percentage of what is left after direct job costs — crew hours, equipment time, disposal, sometimes subcontracted crane time. The rate looks generous compared to a revenue plan because the pool it draws from is much smaller. The honest upside is that it aligns you with the business: bidding a job properly makes you money, and discounting to win it costs you directly. The honest downside is that you inherit costs you may not control, so ask exactly which costs are loaded in, whether overhead is included, and who eats it when a crew has a bad day.

Not monitoring cancellations like alarms — the clawbacks here are operational. The four common ones: the job is cancelled before production; the customer never pays and the invoice ends up in collections; you underbid and the crew burns far more hours than the estimate assumed, so commission is recalculated on actual cost or you eat part of the overage; and scope you promised verbally that never made it onto the estimate, such as stump grinding, full haul-away or fence removal, which comes out of the job margin and often out of your number. Some companies also charge back on damage claims traceable to a bad access plan. Get every one of these in writing before you sign.

There is no true RMR the way alarms have it, but plant health care is the closest thing. PHC programs — seasonal treatment plans, deep-root fertilization, borer and disease injections on a multi-year cycle — renew annually, and a company that sells them well builds a book that comes back every year. Some employers pay a smaller renewal commission on that book, some pay first-year only and keep the renewals, and plenty have never thought about it. It is worth asking about specifically, because a PHC book is the only part of a tree sales job that compounds. If you are also handling applications, note that your state very likely has record-keeping requirements for that work which live in your company system, not a sales app.

Track it yourself, in parallel, at the moment the job sells — not from the pay stub. Log the sold amount, your basis and rate, and the date it was produced, then net every clawback against your running total as it lands so the number you see is what you will actually bank. If you are 1099, add automatic mileage capture at the IRS rate and a quarterly tax set-aside, because a day of six estimates across a county is a real deduction that disappears if you reconstruct it in April. FieldStacker keeps all of that in the same app you canvass in, so you are not maintaining a spreadsheet you stop updating in week three.