See where every tech on your payroll lands against 2026 market pay.
Add your roster, pick your state, and get each tech placed on the pay curve for their trade. You’ll see who sits in the bottom quartile, what the gap to the median costs per year, and what performance pay would have to cover to close it.
How a tech earns more while your labor rate goes down.
An hourly tech gets paid for the hours whether the day went well or not, so the only lever they have is time. Put a share of the outcome in front of them and the day changes shape: the route gets tighter, the job gets finished right the first time, the membership conversation actually happens. Here is what that does to your books.
Tie the payout to what the tech controls
Revenue per call, sold hours, membership adds, callback rate. Not company profit, which a tech can't move, and not tenure, which pays for time instead of output.
The tech's earnings rise with the work they generate
More completed calls, fewer return trips, more memberships on the book. The tech's pay goes up because output went up, so the increase funds itself out of the work that created it.
Labor rate falls even though the tech takes home more
Labor rate is labor cost divided by revenue. When revenue per call climbs faster than the payout attached to it, the ratio drops. That's how a tech gets paid more while your labor rate improves.
One tech, one day, before and after.
A tech costs you $300 for the day whether they finish three calls or four. Say they run three at a $300 average ticket. That’s $900 of revenue against $300 of labor, a 33% labor rate.
Now the plan pays them a share of what they produce. Tighter routing and finishing on time free up a fourth call. Fewer callbacks mean no return trip eating tomorrow’s slot. Memberships and the options they actually walk the customer through lift the ticket 5%. The day costs you the same eight hours.
Round numbers, chosen to be conservative. Most of the lift here is the fourth call, not the bigger ticket. This is arithmetic on one day, not a measured result.
The tech takes home $38 more that day, roughly $9,500 across a working year. Your labor rate drops 6.5 points. Both of those are true at once, and that’s the whole mechanism.
None of this is “charge more.”
A plan that only rewards ticket size teaches techs to push customers, and it shows up in your reviews within a quarter. The plans that hold pay on a handful of things a tech genuinely controls, so the money follows work the customer is glad they bought.
The base of most plans. Pays on work finished and collected, not work sold and left open.
The direct efficiency lever. Rewards the tech who finishes the job right the first time.
Usually a bonus for a zero-callback month. A return trip costs a slot you can't sell twice, so the plan pays for getting it right the first time.
Turns one visit into recurring work. Pays the tech for revenue that lands months later.
The tech is your marketing at the door. Reviews compound into calls you never paid for.
Protects the schedule the rest of the plan depends on. Late techs cost everyone else calls.
A $750 monthly payout adds about $9,000 a year.
That’s the median HVAC payout per tech per cycle across the 108 companies in our data, and most of them run monthly. Against the $61,010 national median HVAC salary it works out to roughly a 15% raise, funded by performance instead of a price increase. Plumbing runs higher at a $1,500 median per cycle. Across all trades the median is $607.
Aggregated and anonymized across ShareWillow customers as of July 2026. Only cohorts of 5 or more companies are reported.
How the numbers work
Where does the market pay data come from?
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, May 2025 release, published April 2026. Percentiles cover all employed workers in each occupation and state. Annual figures assume full-time, year-round work at 2,080 hours.
What if my state is missing for a trade?
BLS suppresses percentiles in some states where the sample is too small, which happens most often with solar, appliance repair, and sheet metal. When that happens we benchmark against the national curve for that trade and mark the row so you know.
How is the percentile calculated?
BLS publishes five points: the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles. We place each tech by interpolating between the two nearest published points. Anyone below the 10th or above the 90th is reported as a bound rather than a made-up number.
Does this account for bonus and overtime?
No. Enter base pay only. The point of the check is to separate what you guarantee from what you reward, because those two levers behave differently on your books. The results panel shows what the bonus side typically adds.
Do the payout medians apply to my trade?
We publish payout medians for plumbing, HVAC, and electrical, the cohorts with at least 5 companies reporting. Any other trade on your roster is scored against the all-trades median of $607 per tech per cycle.
Bring your numbers. We’ll build the plan math.
Twenty minutes, against your actual revenue and roster. You leave knowing which metrics fit your trade, how companies your size structure their plans, and what the return works out to in dollars.
Book a demoBase pay: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 release (published April 2026). Percentiles are for all employed workers in each occupation and state; annual figures assume full-time, year-round work. Some small-state percentiles are suppressed by BLS and fall back to national figures here.
Performance pay: aggregated, anonymized payout distributions across 108 ShareWillow customer companies with confirmed payouts as of July 2026. Only cohorts of 5+ companies are reported.
Survey and industry data: Payscale 2024–25 Salary Budget Survey via ServiceTitan (n=1,550 organizations); ServiceTitan State of the Trades (Jan 2026); ADP Research 2025; Indeed 2025; BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook 2025. Vendor estimates are labeled as such.
Worked examples: the before-and-after call above is arithmetic on round numbers, not a measured result. Risk ordering in the results is ShareWillow’s, based on size of gap and tenure, and is not a BLS output.