A practical guide to PDR technician pay

The common pay structures

Most PDR shops pay technicians a percentage of the labor revenue they produce rather than an hourly wage — it aligns tech income with shop income and rewards speed and skill. Within that model, three variants dominate:

• Flat split: one percentage on every job — simplest to run and explain.
• Tiered or job-type splits: different percentages for retail, wholesale, or catastrophe work, reflecting who sourced the job and its rate.
• Hybrid: a base amount plus a reduced split, sometimes used for newer techs or salaried lead roles.

What actually causes payday disputes

Disputes are rarely about the split percentage — techs know their deal. They are about the inputs: which jobs made this period, what each job’s value was when it closed, and what changed since the tech last looked.

That is why the fix is structural, not interpersonal: pay must be calculated from the same repair-order records the shop runs on, and every change to those records must be visible. When a tech can trace a payout to specific jobs — and see the revision history when something moved — the argument has nothing to feed on.

Closing a pay period without a spreadsheet weekend

A clean close is a checklist, not a project. The pattern that works:

• Gate jobs into payroll only after quality check and delivery — never pay on work that can still change.
• Freeze the period: agree what date range is in, and handle late changes as visible adjustments on the next period.
• Review a payroll detail report per tech — job by job — before anything is paid.
• Share the detail with each tech and archive it; the report that answers this payday’s question also answers one three months from now.

Percentages are strategy; accuracy is hygiene

What split to offer is a business decision — market, skill level, who owns the customer relationship, and who eats the referral fee all factor in. But whatever you decide, the execution standard is the same: every payout traceable to jobs, every job traceable through its history.

SalesPass Kanban implements exactly that standard: splits and commissions are computed from the repair orders on the board, payroll detail reports break each period down job by job, and the audit trail shows any post-close changes in the open.