Tiered Commission Calculator
Commission on a sales figure under your own tier plan — marginal bands or whole-amount cliffs — with each tier’s share, effective rate, base pay and team split.
What a rep earns under the plan you define, with the two tier conventions kept apart and the jump at the next cliff shown, so plans and payouts can be checked line by line.
Example: 3 % up to 50,000, 5 % to 100,000 and 8 % above, on sales of 130,000: marginal tiers pay 1,500 + 2,500 + 2,400 = 6,400 (4.9 % effective); a whole-amount plan pays 8 % on everything, 10,400.
Brackets or cliffs:
the same tiers pay very differently.
The two tier conventions, why the difference matters, and what the page leaves to the plan document.
Marginal tiers
Under marginal tiers each rate applies only to the sales inside its band, exactly like income-tax brackets: the first 50,000 earns the first rate, the next 50,000 the second, and so on. Commission rises smoothly with sales, the effective rate is always below the top rate reached, and there is no incentive to hold a deal back to the next period. The table shows the sales and commission in each band.
Whole-amount (cliff) tiers
Under a whole-amount plan the rate of the tier reached applies to all sales, so crossing a threshold re-rates everything below it and commission jumps. The page shows the next threshold, the sales needed to reach it and the commission there; when the jump is large relative to the extra sales it flags it, because that is where deals get pulled forward or sandbagged. Which convention a plan uses is a matter of its wording — many plans that look tiered are cliffs.
What is not modelled
Quotas and accelerators expressed as percentage of quota, caps, clawbacks on cancelled deals, draws against commission, product-specific rates and timing of payment are all plan terms this page does not carry; base pay and an equal team split are the only extras. Enter thresholds and rates from the plan document and check the wording for which convention applies. Nothing leaves the browser; the same four anonymous usage counts as the rest of the site apply.
SOURCES
- Marginal (bracket) versus whole-amount (cliff) tier conventions as used in sales compensation plans — arithmetic only; the plan is the user’s
Last reviewed 19 September 2026. How results are checked: How we verify.