How much to pay estheticians: hourly, commission or hybrid

By the team at New Age Spa · Updated 30 August 2026 · Sources verified 30 August 2026

Pay structure is a behaviour decision

Owners treat this as a cost question. It is one, but it is mostly a behaviour question: the structure decides what your team does on a thin Tuesday, whether anyone rebooks at the desk, whether senior staff train juniors or hoard the good appointments, and who stays when a competitor opens nearby.

Choose the structure that produces the behaviour you want, then check it against the rules — not the reverse.

The three models

Hourly

A fixed rate for time worked.

Good for: predictability on both sides, roles where the value is coverage rather than sales (reception above all), and new staff who need to learn without their income depending on a book they have not built yet.

Costs you: nothing happens automatically. Nobody has a built-in reason to rebook, to sell homecare, or to care whether the hour was filled. If you use hourly, the rebooking habit has to come from management rather than from the pay slip.

Watch: your labour cost is fixed against a schedule that is not. Quiet months hurt more, which is exactly when the seasonal shape matters.

Commission

A percentage of the service revenue the person generates.

Good for: aligning income with production, senior practitioners who bring or build a following, and keeping labour cost proportional to what the clinic actually earns.

Costs you: it rewards production, and only production. Left alone it can discourage training juniors, sharing clients, doing the unbilled work a clinic needs, or turning away someone who should not be treated. Those all have to be managed explicitly.

The trap that catches clinics: commission is not an exemption from the minimum. If commission earned in a pay period works out to less than the statutory minimum for the hours the person actually worked, the employer makes up the difference. And “hours worked” is broader than treatment hours: meetings, mandated training, set-up and cleaning, and time the employee is required to be at your disposal generally count.

Hybrid

A base rate plus commission or a bonus, and the most common structure in practice.

Good for: giving a floor that makes a quiet week survivable while keeping an upside that rewards the busy one. It is usually the right answer for a new hire building a book.

Costs you: administration, and the need to define the commission trigger precisely enough that nobody argues about it in month three.

Define “revenue” before you promise a percentage of it

This is where commission disputes actually come from — not the rate, the base. Write down, before anyone signs:

• Gross or net of sales taxes.
• How discounts are treated — does the commission follow the discounted price or the list price?
• Package and prepaid redemptions. The classic dispute: is commission paid when the package is sold, when each session is redeemed, or split? Decide it explicitly, and note what prepaid balances already commit you to.
• Refunds, chargebacks and no-shows — and be careful here, because recovering them from wages is a deduction question, not a policy question.
• Retail products, if they carry a different rate.
• Who gets the commission when two people touch the same client.

If that list looks like defining a franchise royalty base, it is the same exercise — and it fails the same way when left vague.

What applies regardless of the model

In Quebec, the Act respecting labour standards sets the floor for employees, and the CNESST administers it. Whatever structure you choose, expect to deal with:

• The minimum wage for every hour worked. The rate changes — check the current one rather than the one you remember.
• Overtime beyond the standard workweek.
• Statutory holidays and annual leave, including the vacation indemnity, which for commission-paid staff is calculated on earnings rather than on a notional hourly rate.
• Pay statements and records, showing how the pay was computed — which is much harder to produce after the fact for a commission scheme you never wrote down.
• Deductions. You cannot simply deduct breakage, no-shows, card processing fees or product losses from wages. Check what is permitted before it becomes a policy.
• CNESST registration and coverage for your employees, which is a legal step and not a policy you shop for — as covered in clinic insurance.
• Source deductions and employer contributions, administered through Revenu Québec.

The most expensive mistake: calling an employee a contractor

It is common in this industry and it is decided on the reality of the relationship, not on the label, the invoice or what both parties agreed to call it. The questions that matter are practical: who controls the schedule and the method, who supplies the room and the equipment, who carries the financial risk, and how integrated the person is into your business.

If you set the hours, assign the clients, supply the devices, require your protocols and your uniform, and take the payment, you very likely have an employee — whatever the contract says. Getting it wrong is expensive in a way that compounds quietly: retroactive source deductions and contributions, interest and penalties, plus exposure on the labour-standards and workplace-coverage side.

Renting space to a genuinely independent practitioner is a real and different arrangement, with its own terms and its own risks — that is the subject of renting a room versus your own clinic, seen from the other side of the deal.

Match the model to the role, not to the clinic

You do not need one structure for everyone:

• Reception and coordination: hourly. The value is coverage and consistency, and commission distorts it.
• New graduates: hybrid with a meaningful base, until the book exists.
• Established practitioners: commission or a hybrid weighted toward it, if they carry demand.
• Anyone you want teaching others: pay for that explicitly, or it will not happen.

Then check the whole thing against the economics — what the schedule has to carry is in your break-even, and how the money actually arrives is in how clinics make money.

Before you hire anyone

1. Write the structure down in full, including the commission base and every edge case above.
2. Have an employment lawyer read it once. It is cheaper than the first dispute.
3. Confirm your CNESST registration and your source-deduction set-up are live.
4. Decide how hours are recorded, including non-treatment hours.
5. Put the pay structure in the written employment agreement, in the employee’s language.
6. Diarise a review, because a structure that fit at one clinic size stops fitting at the next.

The rest of the hiring sequence is in hiring your first esthetician.

Talk to us about a franchise

General information about pay structures and the obligations that attach to them. It is not legal, employment or tax advice, and it does not state any wage rate or commission percentage. Labour standards, minimum wage rates, permitted deductions and worker-classification tests change and depend on your circumstances. Verify the current requirements with the CNESST and Revenu Québec, and take advice from an employment lawyer before setting a pay structure, classifying a worker or writing an employment agreement. Nothing here is a representation of the financial performance of any New Age Spa location or franchise, and this is not an offer to sell a franchise; where the law requires one, an offer is made only by disclosure document.