Sales Commission Statistics 2026: 37 Figures With Sources

We collected the sales commission statistics that hold up: each figure below links to the page where it appears, with the year of the data. Where a figure comes from a company that sells commission software, we say so. At the end we list popular statistics we left out because we could not find where they come from.

Key numbers

• Only 48% of account executives hit annual quota in 2026.
• Median AE OTE is $200,000, against a median quota of $960,000.
• 64% of commission teams had payout errors in the past year (vendor survey).
• 85% of commissioned workers recalculate their own commission at least some of the time (vendor survey).
• 82% of companies offer accelerators; only 14% cap commission.

Quota attainment

Fewer reps hit quota than most plans assume. These are the most recent independent figures.

• 48% of account executives reached their annual quota in 2026, down from 51% in 2024. Source: The Bridge Group, AE Models, Motions & Metrics 2026.
• 60% of SDRs are at quota, the lowest level in the history of the study (2024 to 2025 data). Source: The Bridge Group, SDR Models, Motions & Metrics 2025.
• 43% average quota attainment in RepVue's Cloud Sales Index for Q3 2025 (43.24%), against 53% in Q1 2022. The data is reported by reps themselves. Source: RepVue Cloud Sales Index, Q3 2025.
• 73% of reps missed quota in the second half of 2023; 31% exceeded quota across the year. Source: Ebsta and Pavilion, B2B Sales Benchmarks 2024 (vendor survey).
• 3.7x more likely to meet quota: sellers who work effectively with AI tools, against those who do not. Overwhelmed sellers are 45% less likely to reach quota. Source: Gartner, sales survey, September 2024.
• 57% vs 39% reps at quota in companies with the highest AI use, against the lowest. The authors note that this is observational data. Source: The Bridge Group, AE Models, Motions & Metrics 2026.

Pay mix, OTE and quota

How total pay splits between base salary and commission, and how much reps must sell for it.

• $200,000 median OTE for account executives in 2026, up from $190,000 in 2024 and $167,000 in 2022. Median quota was $960,000. Source: The Bridge Group, AE Models, Motions & Metrics 2026.
• 4.6x quota-to-OTE ratio for account executives in 2026, up from 4.2x in 2024. Quotas grew about 2.4% a year while OTE grew about 4.9%. Source: The Bridge Group, 2026 AE compensation, quota and AI metrics.
• 53:47 median base-to-variable pay mix for account executives at more than 170 SaaS companies (2024). Source: The Bridge Group, 2024 AE metrics and compensation benchmark.
• $80,000 median OTE for SDRs, unchanged since 2022, with a 68:32 mix ($55,000 base and $25,000 variable). Source: The Bridge Group, SDR Models, Motions & Metrics 2025.
• 45 to 55% of account executive pay is variable, and 30 to 40% of SDR pay. The quota-to-OTE "sweet spot" for AEs is 4.0x to 5.5x. Source: ICONIQ Growth, Definitive Guide to Sales Compensation (2023).

Check a role against these benchmarks in our OTE and pay mix calculator, or see commission rates by role.

Commission rates

Typical rates on new business and expansion.

• 10% median base commission rate on new-logo and expansion revenue. Account managers earn a median 9% on expansion revenue. Source: ICONIQ Growth, Definitive Guide to Sales Compensation (2023).

Errors, disputes and shadow accounting

Most of these figures come from surveys by commission software vendors, including CaptivateIQ, Salesforce, Xactly and QuotaPath. They are marked as vendor surveys.

• 64% of incentive compensation teams had payout errors in the past year; 45% had both over- and underpayments; 93% get questions from reps every pay period. Source: CaptivateIQ, State of Incentive Compensation 2026 (vendor survey).
• 85% of commissioned workers recalculate their commission themselves at least some of the time; 55% have questions about their pay most or every pay period. Source: CaptivateIQ, Pulse Survey of commissioned workers (2024) (vendor survey).
• 74% of reps agree: "I wish there were more transparency in how my compensation is calculated." 47% say their compensation does not always seem fair. Source: Salesforce, Trends in Sales Compensation (2025) (vendor survey).
• 31% of companies use spreadsheets for some part of calculating commission; 70% use spreadsheets to design plans. Source: Xactly and Benchmarkit, 2024 Sales Compensation Report (vendor survey).
• 78% of revenue leaders say reps find their plans hard to understand; 60% of reps need 3 to 6 months to fully understand their plan. Source: QuotaPath, compensation challenges report (2024) (vendor survey).

Accelerators, caps and clawbacks

How companies reward overperformance and recover commission.

• 82% of companies offer account executives accelerators; only 14% cap commission; 53% formally enforce clawbacks. Source: ICONIQ Growth, Definitive Guide to Sales Compensation (2023).
• 56% of organisations across all industries use caps on incentive pay; 41% use windfall-deal (bluebird) policies. Source: WorldatWork, sales compensation survey (2021).
• 6 to 8% of revenue lost when accelerating commission plans led reps to time deals and accept poor pricing, in a study of about 8,000 enterprise software deals. Source: Larkin, Journal of Labor Economics (2014).
• 1.5x to 3x range of upside caps on target incentive within the same country. Source: Alexander Group, 2022 Global Sales Compensation Survey.

Turnover, tenure and ramp

How long reps stay and how long they take to become productive.

• 40% median annual SDR attrition in 2024. Promotions accounted for 16% of departures, down from 34% in 2020. Source: The Bridge Group, SDR Models, Motions & Metrics 2025.
• 1.9 years average SDR tenure, the highest since the early 2010s. Average SDR ramp is 3.0 months. Source: The Bridge Group, SDR tenure and ramp time.
• 6.2 months average ramp for account executives, the highest in the study's history. Source: The Bridge Group, AE Models, Motions & Metrics 2026.
• 47% of companies expect 10% or more of new AE hires to leave during ramp; 26% do not know. Source: Xactly and Benchmarkit, 2024 Sales Compensation Report (vendor survey).
• 89% of sellers reported feeling burned out in Gartner's 2022 survey; 54% were actively looking for a new job. Source: Gartner, sales survey, August 2022.

Motivation and visibility: what research shows

Studies on how plan design and feedback change sales performance. Most are peer-reviewed; we say where they are not.

• 9% revenue increase, about $0.98 million a month, after a company redesigned its commission plan in a field implementation. Source: Misra and Nair, Quantitative Marketing and Economics (2011).
• 10% drop in revenue from low performers when quarterly bonuses were removed. Source: Steenburgh and Ahearne, Harvard Business Review (2012), via Darden.
• $1,391 vs $897 average sales in a sales contest with several winners, against a single winner. Rank-ordered prizes added nothing. Source: Lim, Ahearne and Ham, Journal of Marketing Research (2009).
• 3.9% more revenue when 164 sales staff got real-time feedback on average performance in a randomised trial. The effect came mainly from staff just below average. Conference paper, not peer-reviewed. Source: Steffen and von Bieberstein, SIOE conference paper (2019).
• Monthly beat weekly: in a study of 800 professionals, detailed monthly feedback worked best, and weekly feedback was no better than none. Source: Casas-Arce et al., Journal of Accounting Research (2017).
• 59% of commissioned workers say confidence that commission is calculated correctly improves their motivation; 53% say the same about timely payouts. Source: CaptivateIQ, Pulse Survey of commissioned workers (2024) (vendor survey).

Denmark and Europe

Few public sources cover sales pay in the Nordics. These are the best we found.

• DKK 79,505 standardised monthly earnings for Danish ICT sales professionals (DISCO 2434), private sector, 2025. Irregular payments, which include bonuses, were about 6.6% of earnings. Danmarks Statistik does not say where regular monthly commission is recorded, so this share understates total variable pay. Source: Danmarks Statistik, table LONS20.
• DKK 58,895 monthly earnings for Danish commercial sales representatives (DISCO 3322), 2025. Irregular payments were about 2.8% of earnings, with the same caveat. Source: Danmarks Statistik, table LONS20.
• 53.5% of companies in Germany involve works councils or unions in sales compensation, against 47.7% in France, 22.8% in Italy and 22.5% in the UK. Source: Alexander Group, 2022 Global Sales Compensation Survey.
• 5% or less variation in pay mix for account managers across 12 large economies. Source: Alexander Group, 2022 Global Sales Compensation Survey.
• 2027: Denmark plans to implement the EU Pay Transparency Directive by 1 January 2027. Variable pay is covered, and employers with 250 or more staff file their first report on 1 September 2028. This describes a draft bill that can still change. Source: Lockton, Denmark prepares to implement the EU Pay Transparency Directive (June 2026).

For what the directive means for commission plans, see EU Pay Transparency Directive and commission.

Statistics we left out

These figures appear in many articles about sales commission. We left them out because we could not trace them to a source.

• "Companies overpay commissions by 3 to 8%." We found no primary source.
• "80% of companies pay inaccurate commissions." Often credited to WorldatWork, but we found no WorldatWork source.
• "88% of spreadsheets contain errors." This comes from research on spreadsheets in general, not on commission.
• "Average sales rep tenure is 18 months" and "35% annual sales turnover." We could not trace either to an original study.
• "74% of reps don't trust how their pay is calculated." A paraphrase. The survey statement was "I wish there were more transparency in how my compensation is calculated," which we quote above.

How we chose these statistics

We kept a figure only if we could open the page where it appears. We prefer independent research, academic studies and public statistics, and we mark surveys by software vendors. Percentages for Danmarks Statistik are our own calculation from table LONS20. We checked all sources on 25 October 2026 and will update the page when new reports come out.

Cite this page

You are welcome to use these statistics. Please link to this page as the source: Prowi, "Sales Commission Statistics 2026", prowi.io/en/post/sales-commission-statistics.