The r/Esthetics post from a seven-year licensed esthetician weighing her first med spa offer asks a question most practitioners answer with a number that cannot be compared: what commission percentage are you on. She wants benchmarks for Hydrafacial, IPL, SkinPen and custom facials, and says the offer she received seems low, though she is not familiar with how med spa structures usually work.
The reason it is hard to compare is not that practitioners are secretive. It is that a commission percentage is not a price. It is a multiplier applied to something else, and in a med spa menu that something varies by a factor of several between services.
Three kinds of service, three different economics
A med spa menu typically mixes three categories, and a single headline rate hides the differences between them.
Device-based treatments — the Hydrafacial-type and IPL-class services she names — carry the highest ticket, use machine time, and consume materials on every service. Their economics are defined by the difference between the price and the consumable cost, not by the price alone.
Manual and custom facials carry a lower ticket, occupy more provider time per dollar of revenue, and consume only back-bar product. Their percentage can be lower and still pay better per hour.
Injectables and similar clinical services are usually delivered by a different licence class and sit outside the esthetician's scope, so they shape the business but not her pay. Where they matter to her is in the practice's overall pricing and in what the practice expects an esthetician to do alongside them.
The practical implication is that comparing offers by percentage is comparing the wrong unit. The comparable unit is net contribution per hour: the price of the service, minus the consumables attributable to it, multiplied by the commission rate, divided by the time the service actually occupies including turnover and consultation. Two offers at thirty per cent can differ by half on that measure.
The question that changes the most: who pays for consumables
Nothing else in the structure moves the answer as much as this. If the practice supplies the tips, ampoules, serums and solutions, the rate applies to gross revenue. If the provider buys them, every service carries a deduction that the percentage does not show, and for consumable-heavy services the effective rate can fall by a third or more. The treatment classes that carry per-service consumables are precisely the ones where this matters — hydro dermabrasion and hydrafacial-type facials, for example, run on disposable tips and solutions, so an example of the category such as this six-in-one hydro facial machine is worth pricing out in consumables before accepting any rate on the services performed with it.
Two follow-up questions belong with it. Who pays for the provider's own supplies — gloves, masks, PPE, laundry — and who pays for the practice's insurance coverage for the specific services performed. A practice that expects the provider to carry her own professional liability cover for device-based services is passing on a real cost that a commission rate will not reveal.
The list worth asking about before deciding
What the commission applies to. Service revenue only, or service plus retail, or service plus packages sold. A rate that includes retail is worth more than one that does not, if the retail is actually sold.
How packages and memberships pay. This is the most frequently misread term. If commission is paid when a package is sold, the provider earns on the sale; if it is paid only when services are redeemed, earnings trail the work and can be lost entirely if the client does not return. If commission is paid on sale and then clawed back when the package is used, the same money is being counted twice by someone. The answer determines whether months look strong and payouts do not.
What happens to the slot when it does not produce. Whether the provider is compensated for a no-show, for a device that is down, or for a consultation that does not convert. In a fully commission-based structure, all three are unpaid hours, and a practice with a weak front desk generates a lot of them.
The ramp arrangement. Whether there is a guarantee or draw while the book is being built, how long it lasts, and whether it is recoverable against future commissions. For a provider entering a new practice with no transferred clientele, the ramp terms matter more than the steady-state rate, because the first months are where the structure actually bites.
The basis of the percentage. Flat, tiered by monthly production, or tiered by service category. Tiered structures should be read for where the reset happens, because a monthly reset means the first services of every month are always paid at the lowest rate.
What is expected beyond treatments. Front-desk cover, cleaning, social media content, retail targets, marketing events. Unpaid work is part of the effective hourly rate and is invisible in a percentage.
Benchmarking, honestly
Asking other practitioners what they earn is useful, but the ranges that come back mix geographies, service mixes, employment structures and price levels, which is why comparing them often produces more confusion than clarity. The version of the question that yields comparable answers is narrower: what does a named service pay, per hour of provider time, after consumables, in a market like mine, in an employed position.
Two internal checks are more informative than any external benchmark. First, compute the effective hourly rate from what she would actually be paid in a typical week — the full commission, divided by all hours in the building including consultations, cleaning, admin and no-shows. Second, run the same calculation on the offer's weakest realistic month rather than its best. A structure that pays well only at full utilization is not necessarily unfair, but it places the entire risk of an empty schedule on the provider, which is a reasonable trade for a practitioner with an established following and a poor one for a practitioner who is new to the market and has no book to bring.
The classification question is a different question
Her edit raises whether the practice intends to treat her as a contractor, which is a separate issue from how she is paid and one that deserves its own answer rather than a spot in a commission comparison. Whether an arrangement is employment or contracting depends on the facts of the relationship — who controls the schedule, who sets the prices, who bears the risk of loss, whether the work is integral to the business — and classification rules vary by state and by agency. That is a question for professional advice, a state board or a labour authority, not for a forum, and it is worth resolving separately because a pay structure that looks acceptable can be sitting on a working arrangement that is not.
How to decide on the offer
The offer is not evaluated against a national percentage; it is evaluated against three concrete numbers: what she takes home in a full month, what she takes home in a half-full month, and what she takes home in her worst realistic month, each net of any consumables she supplies. If the weakest of those three still beats her alternatives for the same hours, the structure is workable. If it does not, the gap has to be closed by the ramp guarantee, the consumables being covered, or a market that fills the schedule quickly — and if none of those is true, a low headline rate is not a negotiating position, it is a mismatch.
One further item deserves to be part of the offer itself, because she is moving into a med spa menu for the first time. Device-based services require both training and a scope answer, and the employer should be able to say which services she will be signed off to perform independently and by whom. That should be in writing as part of the terms, because a provider whose credential grows in scope at one practice is more valuable everywhere afterwards, and it is worth more than two or three points of commission.