How commission works
The split isn’t the hard part. Trusting it is.
Most people on commission understand percentages fine. What they don't have is their own record of what went into the number they were handed.
The basic mechanic
What a split percentage actually means.
A commission split is the salon’s share of the service price, taken before anything reaches you. A 60/40 split, with you at 60, means the salon keeps 40 cents of every service dollar and you keep 60. On a $70 service, that’s $42 to you and $28 to the salon, before tips enter the picture at all.
Tips are not part of that split. They belong to whoever did the work, in full, however they were paid. A salon that folds tips into the same pool as the service price is doing something different from taking a commission, and it’s worth being able to tell the two apart on your own numbers, not just on paper.
Where it gets less simple
60/40 is rarely the whole story.
Back-bar charges, product fees, a supply deduction taken off the top before the split is even applied: these are where a clean percentage stops being a clean number. Two techs on the same 60/40 arrangement can take home different amounts on identical services, because one salon deducts $8 in product cost first and the other doesn’t say a word about it.
None of that makes a split dishonest by itself. Plenty of salons are upfront about what gets taken out and why. But it does mean the percentage on your pay stub is an input, not the answer, and the only way to know the answer is to have worked it out yourself, service by service, on your own terms.
The actual problem
It was never really about the percentages.
Almost everyone doing this work can do the arithmetic. What most people don’t have is an independent log of every service, every split, every tip, kept the moment it happened rather than reconstructed later from memory or a pay stub. Without that, a question about your own take-home turns into a dispute you have no way to win, because you’re arguing from recall against someone else’s paperwork.
A record you keep yourself, at the moment you’re paid, doesn’t need to catch anyone doing anything wrong to be worth having. It just needs to exist, so the number in your head and the number on paper have somewhere neutral to meet.
For nail techs specifically