Ask ten salon owners what they pay and you'll get ten percentages. Ask what those percentages cover and the conversation gets interesting, because the rate on its own means almost nothing.
A 40% split where the salon buys every bottle of gel is not obviously worse than a 55% split where the technician buys their own. Whichever number is larger, the one that matters is what lands in the technician's account at the end of the week.
The four structures, and who carries the risk
Straight commission. A fixed share of what the technician rings up. Simple to explain, simple to calculate, and the salon absorbs quiet weeks. Most common at 40–60%.
Sliding scale. The rate rises as revenue does — 40% up to $1,000 a week, 45% above it, 50% above $2,000. It rewards the people building a book and it costs you nothing on the weeks they don't. The catch is that it needs accurate per-technician revenue to compute at all, which is where most salons quietly give up and go back to a flat rate.
Booth rent. A fixed weekly amount for the chair. The technician keeps everything and buys everything. All the upside and all the risk move to them, which is why busy technicians ask for it and quiet ones don't.
Hourly plus commission. An hourly floor with a smaller share on top. It's the structure that survives an audit most comfortably and the one most likely to satisfy wage-and-hour rules, and it's worth understanding your state's position rather than mine.
The pattern underneath: each structure is a different answer to who eats the empty week. Commission says the salon. Booth rent says the technician. Sliding scale splits it by volume. Hourly-plus says the salon, with a cap.
Why the rate argument is really about supplies
When a technician asks for a higher percentage, the honest reply is usually a question: which costs move with it?
Product is the big one, and it's rarely all-or-nothing. Plenty of salons supply the staples and charge back the specialist items, or supply everything and take a backbar deduction per service. Both are defensible. What isn't defensible is a rate negotiated without either side stating what it includes, because that's the conversation that gets reopened angrily in six months.
Write down what the house share buys: product, the chair, laundry, booking, the front desk, card fees, the marketing that fills the column. Then the percentage becomes a price for a specific list rather than a number to haggle over.
The number that ends the argument
Sooner or later a good technician works out that booth rent might pay them more, and they're often right. It depends entirely on volume, because rent is fixed and commission isn't.
The crossover is one line: (rent + product) ÷ (1 − commission rate). At a 50% split with $300 rent and $90 of product, it lands at $780 of services a week. Below that they keep more on commission; above it they keep more renting.
Worth knowing before they do. If someone is consistently above the line, the conversation is coming — and it goes considerably better when you already know the number and can talk about what the house share actually buys. The calculator runs it for your figures.
Tips don't change it, incidentally, which surprises people. They pass to the technician under both structures, so they add to both sides equally and cancel out.
The part that quietly breaks all of this
Every structure above assumes you know who did what.
That sounds trivial and it isn't. A ticket with three services on it, performed by two people, one of whom also sold the retail — reconstructed at the end of the month from a paper ticket and a memory. That's where commission disputes actually come from. Not the rate. The attribution.
If services are assigned to whoever performed them as the ticket is rung up, commission is a total you read. If they're assigned afterward, it's a total you argue about. Sonorch POS does the former, which is less a feature than the precondition for any of these structures being fair.
Pick whichever structure fits your salon. Just make sure you can prove it at the end of the week.