How much do home-based travel agents earn in the UK?
Employee salary averages and recruitment claims measure different things. Here is the commission arithmetic that sits underneath both, worked through with real splits from the directory.
Two kinds of number circulate here, and they do not measure the same thing. Salary sites publish averages for employed travel consultants — people on a wage, in a shop or a call centre, with holiday pay and no business costs. Recruitment pages publish what a successful self-employed agent can earn, which is a different figure with a different shape and a different risk attached.
We are not going to republish a salary average we have not sourced ourselves. What we can do is show the arithmetic that sits underneath every self-employed claim, using splits taken live from the directory, so you can put any number anyone quotes you into context.
Where the money comes from
A tour operator pays commission on what the customer spends. Your host takes a share of that and passes you the rest. So three things decide your income: how much you sell, what the supplier pays, and your split. Only the last of those appears in recruitment marketing.
Supplier commission rates vary by product and by how much business the host places, which is one genuine advantage of a large network. For the sums below we have used a flat 10% on a £3,000 package holiday, because it is a round number that makes the mechanism visible — not because it is a promise.
One booking, worked through
A £3,000 package holiday at 10% supplier commission generates £300 of commission in total. That is the pot to be divided.
| Company | Recorded split | You keep |
|---|---|---|
| Travel Counsellors | 60% | £180 |
| Your Travel Company | 80%, no thresholds | £240 |
£60 of difference on one sale. Across the directory the published splits run from 20% to 100%, so the spread can be wider still — though the highest figures usually sit at the top of a performance ladder, or belong to companies that charge you in some other way instead.
A year, worked through
Now scale it. Say two bookings a month at the same value: 24 holidays in a year, a modest but real first-year business built mostly from people you already know. Fees come off the top, using each company’s recorded joining cost and monthly fee.
| Company | Commission to you | Year-one fees | Left over |
|---|---|---|---|
| Travel Counsellors | £4,320 | £691 | £3,629 |
| Your Travel Company | £5,760 | £780 | £4,980 |
Before tax, before VAT where it applies, before your phone bill, your marketing and the trip you took to look at a hotel. It is not a salary, and the number that matters to you is the one at the end of the row, not the percentage at the start of it.
What the sums leave out
- Timing. Many hosts pay after the customer travels. Your year-one cash can lag your year-one commission by months.
- Per-booking charges. Some companies take a few pounds per booking or a percentage of turnover on top of the split. See the fees guide.
- Leads. Where the host finds the customer, the split is usually lower. A smaller share of a booking you did not have to win can be worth more than a larger share of nothing.
- Supplier rates. 10% is our illustration. Real rates differ by operator, product and the host’s own agreements.
- Cancellations. Commission on a cancelled holiday usually goes back too.
How to read an earnings claim
When a recruitment page quotes a figure, ask three questions: is it turnover or commission; is it before or after fees; and is it a median or a best case? Turnover of £250,000 sounds transformative and might be £2,500 in your pocket after a bad split. The master comparison table at least lets you check the split against everyone else’s.
Two of the comparisons on this site work the same arithmetic through for specific pairs: Travel Counsellors against Not Just Travel and Independent Travel Experts against Vertical Travel Group, where the difference between a cheap monthly and a better split is the whole decision.
Any figure quoted here is read live from the directory records and was last reviewed on 2026-09-22. Nothing on this page is financial, legal or business advice, and none of the companies mentioned has paid to appear. See the methodology note for where the data comes from.