Every partner program has tiers, and every agent has an opinion about them that is usually formed from the headline percentages alone. The percentages are the least interesting part. What determines your income is the qualification rules, the timing of a change, and what happens to commission that accrued before you moved, and those three things vary far more between programs than the rates do.
The three tiers, and what each is for
Most schedules follow the same shape. Entry is where every agent starts: a share of net revenue on the accounts you write, with no minimums beyond being active. Growth is the working tier for a producing agent, usually gated on both a revenue threshold and a minimum count of active merchants. Sub-ISO is the top, typically by approval rather than by formula, for agents operating like a business, recruiting, servicing, taking on more of the relationship.
The merchant-count gate on the growth tier is deliberate and worth understanding. A program could gate purely on revenue, but that would reward an agent with one enormous account, which is the least stable book shape there is. Requiring a count of active merchants pushes agents toward diversification, which protects both sides.
Commission keeps the rate in force when it accrued
This is the rule agents most often get wrong, and it costs them a quarter of expectation.
When you move up a tier, the new rate applies to commission that accrues after the change. It does not retroactively reprice commission that already accrued at the old rate, even if that commission is still sitting in a hold window and has not been paid to you yet. Money that earned in March at the entry rate pays at the entry rate, whenever it lands.
The corollary is reassuring: a tier change downward, if your book shrinks below a threshold, does not claw back commission that earned at the higher rate either. The rate travels with the accrual, in both directions.
Changes start the next full month
Tier changes almost never take effect mid-cycle. If you cross the threshold on the eighteenth, the new rate typically starts on the first of the following month.
That has a practical scheduling implication for a big signing. An account that goes live on the twenty-eighth contributes almost nothing to the current month’s qualification, and if it is the account that would tip you into the next tier, the tier change lands a full month later than you might assume. Agents who model income around a specific close date should build that in.
Read your own schedule for four things
- The qualification metric, is it net revenue, gross margin, volume, or a combination with a merchant count?
- The measurement window, a single month, a rolling three-month average, or a trailing quarter. Rolling averages smooth seasonality and delay both promotions and demotions.
- Whether tiers can move down, and after how many months below threshold.
- How software and add-on commissions are treated, usually a separate line at a rate that does not vary by tier.
Those four answers, written down, are worth more than any conversation about headline percentages. They are also the questions a good program answers plainly and a bad one answers with “it depends.”
What actually moves you up
Not volume. Net revenue per active merchant is the lever, and it responds to deal quality rather than deal size.
Three things move it. Write merchants whose card mix leaves normal margin rather than merchants who have already been repriced to the bone. Attach add-on products, because software commission is additional and does not depend on interchange. And reduce attrition, because a book that loses four accounts a quarter spends its growth replacing itself.
That last one is the least glamorous and the most effective. An agent writing six accounts a quarter with low attrition passes an agent writing ten with high attrition inside a year.
Sub-partner overrides interact with tiers
If your program has overrides, know whether recruiting affects your own tier qualification. In most structures the override is a separate income line based on the platform’s retained share from your sub-partners’ portfolios, and it does not count toward your personal tier threshold, which matters if you are building a team and expecting the volume to promote you.
Ask specifically. Two programs with identical tier tables can treat this opposite ways, and it changes whether recruiting is a complement to your own production or a substitute for it.
What to take away
Tiers are rules, not just rates. Learn your qualification metric and measurement window, remember that accruals keep the rate in force when they earned and that changes start the next full month, model your income at your current tier rather than the one you are approaching, and grow net revenue per active merchant rather than volume. That is what moves you up the table and, more importantly, keeps you there.
Michelle Hope
Payments Editor, Paydigo
Michelle Hope writes about payment economics for the businesses that live on them, trade contractors, route-based service companies, and the agents who sell to them. Her work focuses on the unglamorous mechanics: effective rates, recurring-billing recovery, dispute ratios, and the difference between a rate sheet and a statement.