For all the best cat adjuster gear you need right now, go to adjustersupply.com. In this video, I'm going to show you how cat property adjusters get paid, what you can expect to make on your first cat deployment, and if there's actually an average fee bill amount you can count on every year. Be sure to watch until the end of this video for a special sneak preview. That's pretty huge. Starting now. This is Adjuster TV. Hey, it's Matt here with Adjuster TV, and for the best tips and tools for getting on the first call list as an independent adjuster, press 1 now. Pares Spaniel, open my own numero dos, and este momento. And thanks to Tyler who sent me an email saying, thanks again for all the words of wisdom. I'm a new adjuster and the advice I get from you and adjuster talk with Jason Heenan is tremendously helpful and appreciated. Thanks for watching Tyler, and believe it or not, there are a number of outstanding IA podcasts out there, and Jason Heenan's adjuster talk podcast is pretty much the flagship of the mall. Jason owns an IA firm by the way, and there's a link to his podcast where you're watching this video. So if you're not already subscribed to his podcast, get on it. What is an insurance adjuster salary? How and how much do adjusters get paid? Well, staff adjusters, that is, adjusters directly employed by insurance companies, get paid on a salary typically. They can certainly earn money via an hourly wage, but most major corporations will pay an insurance adjuster salary anywhere between $25,000 a year to start and possibly up to $100,000 or more for very high level employees at some companies. For independent adjusters, we generally get paid either on a fee schedule, which is what I'll be focusing mainly on in this video, hourly or what's known as T&E or time and expense. And the main way that cat property IA is get paid is by fee schedule. Since we as cat property IA is get paid per claim, we have to know what to charge the insurance company for the work that we do for them. So we will turn in a billing invoice for each claim. And the fee schedule tells us what to charge and the way it breaks down is this. The fee schedule is essentially a commission based payment system. A typical fee schedule will be based on the total dollar amount of a claim and some will have add-ons for other challenging or time consuming things like accessing two-story or seat buildings, interior damage. This is primarily for cat fee schedule since most stormed image is exterior. Sometimes contents can be an add-on as well as mileage. In general, a fee schedule will look like this. So a zero to $500 estimate total can be something like $350 to $550 that is built on the invoice. $5,000 to $10,000 maybe $700 on the invoice. $10,000 to $25,000. It could be $900 to $1200. And of course it can go on up from there. As the adjuster, you will split that invoice with your IA firm typically 6040. For example, if your invoice says $700, your part of that before taxes and expenses will be 420. There are as many fee schedules as there are carriers in IA firms and they all do this their own way. So take this information as a general overview and not as a specific pay expectation. And yes, you got that right. The higher the estimate, the more the adjuster gets paid. Sounds counterintuitive because aren't we supposed to be finding ways to not pay for stuff? Now, our job is to pay the right amount to get the insurance to their pre-loss condition within the constraints of the policy, which is the contract between the homeowner and the insurance company and the estimating guidelines. But how much can you make as an adjuster? Well, that all depends less on what the fee schedule is and more on how good you can be. And what do I mean by that? So if you take 10 equally skilled adjusters and give them all the exact same claim, you should get 10 nearly identical estimates, right? Which according to our fee schedule means that there'll be 10 nearly identical invoices that get paid. The adjusters that do really well are the ones who've optimized their claims handling workflow to get as many claims closed in a day as possible without their claim and customer service quality suffering. By the end of an adjuster's first cat deployment, he or she might be able to comfortably close around four claims a day should be able to anyway. And assuming an average of 420, their part before taxes and expenses, that's $1,680 per day, which is pretty good money. The problem is this. The new claims that come in are going to be assigned to the adjusters who have nailed the combination of speed and quality. So if this new adjuster has the exact same quality as another adjuster who is able to easily close seven claims per day, the new claims are going to mostly go to the faster adjuster. In general, certainly many factors other than this will determine who gets claims, but the way I run claims, I'm going to assume that the fastest adjuster with the highest quality will get the new claims. So that's how I roll. And in 20 years of doing this, this expectation has always been met for me. My advice to new folks is to adopt this attitude as well. So what it really all boils down to is not so much how much the fee schedule is or how much they're paying on teaming or whatever. The question I'm always asking myself is how can I close more claims this year? Because if you want to take home $100,000 in a year, you're going to have to close a lot of claims. So let's say your gross payment on your invoices is average for 20 from our example above. We'll take 25% off of that for taxes and another maybe we'll say 20% for expenses to be a little pessimistic. So in this case, your actual take home will be about $231 per claim. If you want to bring home a net of $100,000 in a year, at $231 net take home per claim, you'll need to close 433 claims. Most experienced high earning catagesters who work all kinds of cat events, not just turquins and wildfires, will tell you that they run between 400 and 600 claims per year. And again, as I've mentioned in previous videos, that's probably also being done in five to seven months depending on how fast they can close claims. So what's the high end? I've heard of adjusters closing 1,300 or more claims in a year. And my own personal best is a little bit over 1,100. That was a very long year, but it was still only nine months worth of seven days a week work. There were also zero hurricanes or wildfires that year. So is there an actual average fee bill amount that you can count on? Not really, and here's why. As a working catagestor, you'll likely do a wide variety of storm events through the year, but you might have a year where you're sent to several small storms where there is light damage or no damage or damage that couldn't be covered. Also you might get sent to Pika Kans' for a big hail storm instead of Minneapolis. And why does that matter? Some places have much higher construction prices than others, and Minneapolis can be super high, even comparable to Florida or New York. Are you serious with the sun right now? But you've got to take the claims you're given and you have to make the best of them. And this is why concentrating on building speed so that you can close claims in volume is so key to doing well in this business. If you can write a high quality file and provide white glove customer service and be super fast, you'll never go hungry as an I.A. For more information about surviving your first storm, check out the How To Not Get kicked off your first storm free webinar at adjustertv.com slash thrive. All right, question of the day. Are you ready for conference season? We've got the holidays coming right up, but after that, we've got all the conferences you could ever want. And two of the biggest ones are NACCA, which is the National Association of Catastrophe Adjusters and Elevate, which is the exact where user conference. And here's the exciting news I mentioned at the start of this video. In the coming weeks, adjustertv will be giving you an opportunity to attend these conferences free, so you better be sure to stay tuned for that. Adjustertv will be up both of those conferences, and I hope to see you there. For much more information about getting started as an independent adjuster, head on over to adjustertv.com slash start. If you got value from this video, you can help me create more videos just like this by subscribing to adjustertv right here on YouTube. Wondering what to watch next? There are tons more videos right here on the Adjustertv YouTube channel. And as always, don't forget to brush your teeth at least twice a day and try not to be a knucklehead.