If your salon pays "hourly vs. commission, whichever is higher," you're being paid under one of the most common structures in the grooming industry — and one of the most confusing to estimate in your head. Here's how it actually works, and why the math matters for your paycheck.
Each pay period, your employer calculates two numbers: what you'd earn at your hourly rate for the hours you worked, and what you'd earn from your commission percentage applied to the total revenue you generated from grooms. You get paid whichever number is higher. Tips are almost always separate and go to you on top, regardless of which side of the comparison wins.
The hourly side of the comparison exists as a safety net. On a slow week — bad weather, fewer walk-ins, a lighter book — your hourly rate protects you from a bad commission week. You're never paid less than your hours would have earned, even if the grooming revenue you brought in that week wouldn't have covered it on a pure-commission basis.
On a busy week, commission usually wins by a wide margin, because a percentage of real service revenue climbs faster than a flat hourly rate does. This is the incentive side of the structure: more dogs groomed, more revenue generated, more of that revenue flows to you directly instead of being capped at your hourly ceiling.
There's a specific point in any pay period where commission overtakes hourly — sometimes called "commissioning out." Below that point, your hourly rate is effectively what you're being paid, no matter how much revenue you're generating. Above it, every additional dollar of grooming revenue is worth your commission percentage of it, directly. Groomers who know roughly where that point falls in a normal week can make more informed decisions about pacing, add-on services, and which days to push harder on.
Commission percentages vary by salon and experience level, but structures in the 40–55% range are common industry-wide, sometimes tiered by certification or seniority — a newer groomer might start lower, with a path to a higher tier as they build speed and a client base. Some employers publish specific tiers; others negotiate individually.