Calculate tiered sales commissions with base + quota, accelerators, spiffs, clawbacks, and on-target earnings projections.
A commission plan is a contract written in percentages, and this tool executes that contract on your numbers: it walks your sales through the plan's tiers, applies accelerators to over-quota revenue only, adds base salary and spiffs, subtracts clawbacks, and reports commission, total compensation, and on-target earnings at any attainment level. The input people most often get wrong is the accelerator: it multiplies the base rate only for the portion above quota, so a 150% accelerator on a 5% rate pays 7.5% on over-quota sales, not on everything.
A concrete input and expected output from the current implementation.
Input
Base salary: $60,000 per year. Annual quota: $500,000. Commission: 5% of sales up to quota. Accelerator: 150% of base rate above quota. Sales achieved: $600,000. Spiffs: $1,500. Clawback: $2,000.
Expected output
Commission on quota portion: $25,000. Accelerated commission on over-quota sales: $7,500. Gross commission: $32,500. Spiffs: +$1,500. Clawback: -$2,000. Net commission: $32,000. Total compensation (base plus net commission): $92,000. Quota attainment: 120%. On-target earnings at 100% quota: $85,000.
The first $500,000 earns 5% ($25,000) and the $100,000 above quota earns 7.5% ($7,500), the 150% accelerator applied to the base rate. Spiffs add and the clawback subtracts, leaving $32,000 net commission on top of the $60,000 base.
Commission accrues band by band: every dollar of sales up to quota earns the base rate, and every dollar above quota earns the base rate multiplied by the accelerator, so a 5% rate with a 150% accelerator pays 5% in the first band and 7.5% in the second. Each tier is sized and multiplied on its own, then the results are summed into gross commission.
Base salary, gross commission, and spiffs are added together, clawbacks are subtracted, and the result is total compensation. On-target earnings is projected as base salary plus commission at exactly 100% of quota, which makes it a comparison point rather than a forecast. Attainment, sales divided by quota, is reported alongside so the projection can be read at the actual level.
Real plans carry clauses the inputs cannot represent: deal splits between reps, team or company attainment multipliers, payment on signature versus invoice, territory adjustments, and clawback windows that vary by plan. The tool reproduces the math of the plan you typed in. When a check differs, the gap is usually a plan detail no calculator input covers.
No - only to the portion above quota. With a $500,000 quota, a 5% rate, and a 150% accelerator, $600,000 of sales earns 5% on the first $500,000 ($25,000) and 7.5% on the remaining $100,000 ($7,500). Applying 7.5% to everything would overstate commission by $12,500, which is the most common misreading of a tiered plan.
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