You’re thinking about hiring an aesthetic nurse injector for your practice; congratulations! The next step is to think about how you might structure her compensation.  

We like to start our compensation models with some form of a compensation-to-production ratio.  Generally, in an aesthetics practice, we like to see a nurse injector compensated at about 18% – 22% of her overall production.  For easy math, that means if a provider produces $50,000/month, an appropriate take-home pay would be between $9,000 and $11,000 for that month.  

After understanding how much they should be making based off their expected production, there are several different ways to slice and dice how a provider is compensated.

Flat Wage: A flat wage is just that, a flat wage. We typically see an hourly wage, but sometimes practices do pay a salary. (Consider state labor laws when deciding between hourly and salary pay.)  The benefit of a flat wage is that it’s easy – easy to calculate, easy to understand, and easy to budget.  The downside is that the injector may not be very motivated to fill their books due to their “guaranteed” salary.  If, for example, this provider has a difficult time filling their schedule; by nature, they would have a hard time covering their own overhead.  With this compensation structure, the practice wouldn’t even begin to profit from the injector until their entire salary is covered (plus the costs of performing the service).

Hourly Wage w/Bonus Opportunity: This is our most popular compensation structure for nurse injectors and it typically looks like a $25 – $50/hour rate with a percentage bonus on top of that.  Keep in mind, that the bonuses should be based on more than just provider production in order to be compliant.   We typically see two versions of this bonus structure:

• Bonus with Floor: With this model, the bonus opportunity is only activated when a certain level of production is achieved. The production floor can be by provider, by a group of providers, or even by the entire practice.  The floor is determined as a factor of their hourly wage (we typically like the floor to be 5x their hourly rate).  When production exceeds the floor the injector has an opportunity to achieve a bonus, assuming any other nonrevenue factors are also met.  

The advantage of the floor is that we’re ensuring that the employee is truly covering their cost before they receive any additional compensation.  The disadvantage is that it can be more difficult to calculate.  We create calculators to ease the burden of the math.

• Bonus without Floor: As predicted, when we develop compensation models that don’t have a floor component, they typically are more straightforward and easy to calculate.  In this model, the injector receives their wage plus a percentage on some other (typically revenue-based) factor.  In order to remain compliant, practices should include other, nonrevenue, based factors to earning the bonus.

For more information about our compensation models or budgets, click the link below to meet with someone from our team.

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