A binary plan places every new person into one of two teams beneath you — a left leg and a right leg. You get paid when the volume in those two legs hits a set ratio, commonly 2:1 (often written 50:25). The important part: the ratio isn't tied to "left" or "right" — it's tied to whichever leg is ahead that period. If your right leg pulls ahead this week, it takes the 50-share; if left pulls ahead next week, left takes it instead.
50 + 25 = 75 units per cycle. So 150 total units, split correctly, is exactly 2 cycles — regardless of which physical leg supplied the 50 and which supplied the 25. Volume that doesn't fit the ratio isn't lost — it carries forward to the next period.
Set what the product is worth and how many units it generates toward a cycle, enter how many sold in each leg this period, and see how many cycles you'd earn — plus what carries forward.
Capped at illustrative sizes (up to 200 units/product, 1,000 sales per leg) so the cycle math stays exact and instant.
These are real sales to real customers — that volume is what cycles and earns the payout below, not headcount or recruiting activity. The customers themselves don't earn cycles or commission on it; that goes to whichever affiliate is in the sponsorship chain. More on that on Rank & Activity.
Illustrative example only — not a guaranteed outcome.
When one leg pulls way ahead, the surplus doesn't vanish — it's the "volume carried forward" row above. That banked volume is real future potential, but it pays nothing on its own until the other leg catches up. Someone who's built a single leg way out of balance can be sitting on a huge number that looks like wealth while actually being paid close to zero.
This assumes banked volume stays available indefinitely. Many real plans cap cycles per day or week, or expire unmatched volume after a set time. "Potential" isn't "earned," and it isn't guaranteed to convert at all.
Illustrative calculator only. No specific company, product, or income outcome is implied — real plans often add minimum "active" volume requirements, capped daily cycles, or leg-specific compression rules.
Binary and Unilevel are two of several shapes real comp plans take — see other common structures.
You can personally sponsor as many people as you want — there's no cap on recruiting. But the binary tree itself only has two open positions directly under you. Your first two go there. Anyone beyond that has to go somewhere else in the tree, since your own two slots are taken.
That person "rolls over" — they get placed further down, still credited to you as your personal recruit, but physically attached beneath one of your first two. Where exactly depends on the company's placement rule. Two real conventions, in particular, produce very different-looking trees:
Every new person is routed to whichever of the two legs below currently has fewer people in it, over and over, at every level. Keeps both sides growing at roughly the same rate.
One leg (the "power leg") automatically fills with spillover from you and your whole upline. The other leg (the "profit leg") only ever grows from that person's own direct recruiting — no spillover ever reaches it.
Both are real, commonly used conventions — companies also alternate placement, or let the sponsor manually choose a leg. Toggle below to see how differently the same recruits land.
A tree diagram like this can look pyramid-shaped — but position in the tree isn't what determines a legitimate plan. See why this isn't a pyramid or Ponzi scheme, or go straight to the FTC's consumer guide.
A mechanics risk worth naming — not a claim about any real company's practice: because placement is what determines who occupies a tree position, it's possible to try gaming that with fake or "dummy" accounts — no real person, no real purchase, nothing behind them — created purely to manufacture cycle-qualifying volume. It doesn't create real money; it just obscures where the volume is actually coming from. That's exactly the kind of gap the FTC's real-retail-sales test (see Rank & Activity) is designed to catch — a plan whose own numbers can't tell a placement from a paying customer has a real structural weakness, whether or not anyone's currently exploiting it.