You hire a solid appliance repair tech, train them for three months on your process, your parts vendors, your customers' quirks — and then eight months later they're gone, working for the shop across town for what looks like the same money. It's rarely about the money on paper. It's almost always about how that money gets calculated, and whether the tech feels like the pay structure is working with them or against them.
The quick version: hourly pay gives techs stability but kills their incentive to move fast or upsell; straight commission maximizes output but pushes techs toward corner-cutting and burnout, especially in slow seasons; a hybrid model — base pay plus a percentage on completed work — tends to retain techs longest because it protects them from bad weeks without capping their upside on good ones. There's no universal right answer, but there is a right answer for your call volume, your average ticket, and your seasonality, and most shops pick their pay model once at founding and never revisit it.
Hourly pay: predictable, but it rewards slowness
Straight hourly is the easiest model to run payroll on and the easiest for a new tech to understand. The problem shows up after month three: a tech who takes 90 minutes on a dishwasher repair earns the same as one who does it in 40, so your fastest, most skilled people start to feel like they're subsidizing your slowest ones.
Hourly also tends to underpay your top performers relative to what they could earn elsewhere, which is exactly the group you can least afford to lose. In a trade where a seasoned tech carries years of model-specific troubleshooting knowledge in their head, hourly pay structures often become a slow leak — not dramatic resignations, just steady attrition of your best three or four people every 18 months.
Commission pay: fast techs love it, until they don't
Commission-only or commission-heavy models — say, 40–50% of labor and parts markup per ticket — reward speed and volume, and they attract techs who are confident in their skills. In a busy summer with AC crossovers and steady appliance calls, a strong commission tech can out-earn a salaried counterpart by a wide margin, and that's a real selling point when recruiting.
The failure mode is winter. Appliance repair call volume dips in January and February in a lot of markets, and a commission-only tech watching their paycheck shrink 30% for reasons entirely outside their control starts looking at job boards. Commission also creates pressure to upsell parts or recommend replacement over repair, which can quietly erode the trust that keeps customers calling you back.
- Best fit for: high-volume shops with consistent year-round demand and techs who prefer variable income.
- Watch for: techs padding tickets, rushing diagnostics, or steering customers toward unnecessary replacements to hit numbers.
- Retention risk: highest in the industry during seasonal slowdowns — this is when your commission techs start taking calls.
Hybrid pay: base plus percentage, and why it's gaining ground
The hybrid model pairs a modest base — enough to cover a bad week without panic — with a commission percentage on completed jobs above a threshold. A common structure looks like $18–22/hour base plus 8–15% of ticket revenue once a tech clears a set number of calls per week. It costs you slightly more in flat overhead during slow months, but it buys stability that shows up in your retention numbers.
The reason hybrid works so well specifically in appliance repair is the ticket variability. A refrigerator compressor job and a dryer belt replacement can take wildly different time and skill, and a hybrid model lets techs feel fairly paid for both without the anxiety of a fully variable check. Techs on hybrid pay also tend to be more comfortable recommending an honest "this isn't worth fixing" verdict, because their income isn't solely tied to selling the repair.
Techs don't leave because of the number on the check — they leave when the pay structure makes them feel like their skill and their slow weeks are being punished equally.
What actually drives the decision to leave
In exit conversations with appliance repair techs, three themes come up far more often than "I found a higher rate": unpredictable take-home pay, feeling penalized for slow-call days that dispatch caused, and lack of visibility into how their pay was actually calculated. That last one matters more than owners think — a tech who can't easily see how many jobs they closed, what they earned per job, and how that adds up to their paycheck starts to distrust the math, even when it's correct.
This is where the tools around pay matter as much as the structure itself. If your dispatching is inconsistent — some techs get the easy, high-ticket calls and others get stuck with low-value service calls — no pay model will feel fair, because the inputs are uneven before the math even starts. Solid field service management features that log job history, time on site, and completed tickets per tech give both you and your team a shared source of truth, which removes a huge amount of the resentment that builds around commission and hybrid pay specifically.
How to choose (and how to switch without a mutiny)
If you're running under 15 calls a day with real seasonal swings, hybrid is almost always the safer long-term bet. If you're in a dense metro with steady year-round demand and techs who want to run hard, commission with a strong base floor can work. Pure hourly makes sense mainly for apprentices and techs still building diagnostic speed.
- Audit your current attrition. Pull the last 18 months of departures and check whether they cluster around seasonal slow periods — that's a signal your current model isn't buffering income swings.
- Model the switch on paper first. Run last year's ticket data through the proposed hybrid structure and show techs exactly what they'd have earned — real numbers beat promises.
- Phase it in with a guarantee period. Offer 60–90 days where techs can choose their old structure or the new one, whichever pays more, to build trust before making it permanent.
Whatever model you land on, consistency in how it's tracked and communicated matters more than which model you pick. Techs will tolerate a lower percentage they understand over a higher one they don't trust.
If you're rethinking pay structure and want it to actually stick with your team, get in touch with lınq — we work with appliance repair shops every day on dispatching, job tracking, and the reporting that makes any pay model feel fair and transparent.
Frequently asked questions
What's the average commission rate for appliance repair techs?
Most shops pay between 8% and 20% of ticket revenue, depending on whether it's a hybrid model with a base wage or a straight commission structure. Higher percentages typically come with lower or no base pay.
Does hourly pay hurt technician retention in appliance repair?
Not on its own, but it often underpays top performers relative to commission or hybrid models, which pushes your best techs to look elsewhere once they build speed and reputation.
How do I switch my team from commission to hybrid pay without losing techs?
Run last year's job data through the new hybrid structure so techs can see real dollar comparisons, and offer a 60–90 day trial period where they can revert if the old model paid better.