Salon Industry Statistics 2026: Every Number and Its Source

Scott Farmer, Licensed Master Cosmetologist (Florida). Published August 18, 2026

Every figure on this page came from a federal data file that I opened and checked on 18 August 2026. Each one links to the file that contains it. Where a number is Hair Salon Pro’s own arithmetic on published totals, I say so. Where nobody publishes a number, I say that too.

The US beauty salon industry took $27.0 billion in revenue in 2023 against $23.6 billion in operating expenses, an operating surplus of about 13%. Sole proprietors filing under personal and laundry services, the IRS category booth renters use, reported a 24.4% net margin, and 71% of them turned a profit. The median hairdresser earned $35,790. There is no published national net profit margin for salons, and anyone quoting one is quoting an estimate.

Most salon industry statistics you will find online trace back to blog posts quoting blog posts. I know because I published one of them. This page is the correction.

How much revenue does the US salon industry generate?

Beauty salons took $27.0 billion in 2023. The wider hair, nail and skin care category took $41.1 billion, and all personal care services together took $58.1 billion.

These come from the Census Bureau’s Annual Integrated Economic Survey, which replaced the Service Annual Survey and published 2023 reference-year data in February 2026. The figures below are employer establishments only, so they exclude the solo booth renter with no payroll.

Figures are in thousands of dollars, as Census publishes them, so every row reproduces exactly from the two columns beside it. Source: the file itself, AIES00EXP01.zip, from the US Census Bureau Annual Integrated Economic Survey 2023. Filter to the NAICS code, type of operation All establishments. The surplus column is Hair Salon Pro’s analysis of the AIES 2023 file. Census publishes the revenue and expense columns and does not publish a margin.

If you have seen $46 billion or $62 billion quoted for this industry, those are older Professional Beauty Association Economic Snapshot figures from 2014 and 2020, and that report has not been published since 2022.

What is the average salon profit margin?

Nobody publishes one. That is the honest answer and it is the most useful thing on this page.

The closest federal figure is the Census operating surplus above, about 13% for beauty salons in 2023. It is not a net profit margin. Census operating expenses include depreciation, so the residual sits before interest and income tax, and whether the owner’s own pay is inside it depends entirely on how that owner takes money out of the business.

I found out the hard way why a single benchmark number is not enough. When I owned JScott Salon I thought we were profitable. The place was busy. Stylists were booked solid. Retail moved every week. Then my accountant put a single page in front of me at year end. Net profit margin: 4.2%. I was running half the salon I thought I was and I had no idea. A national average, even a real one, would not have caught that. You have to run your own number.

On the 8.2% figure. It appears on most pages ranking for salon profit margin and it is usually credited to the Professional Beauty Association. I traced it to a 2021 blog post that said “our studies show” with no methodology and no sample, recycled through several larger sites until it looked researched. It is in no PBA publication I could find, and the PBA does not publish profitability data at all. It was on this site too, in the same form, and I removed it on 18 August 2026.

One thing worth knowing about the 13%. The predecessor survey reported 17.1% for 2022 on the same category. AIES and the Service Annual Survey are different instruments that collect expenses differently, so the drop is not a clean one-year decline and I would not read it as one.

What do booth renters and solo stylists actually earn?

Mean net income of $7,923 across all returns, rising to $16,758 across the ones that made money. Those numbers are lower than most people expect, and the reason matters more than the figure.

IRS Statistics of Income covers 2,957,905 sole proprietor returns in personal and laundry services for tax year 2023:

Source: IRS SOI, Nonfarm Sole Proprietorship Statistics, Table 1, TY2023. The margin and the per-return averages are Hair Salon Pro’s analysis of IRS SOI Table 1. The IRS publishes the totals, not the averages.

Read that 24.4% carefully. A Schedule C deducts no owner salary, so it is the operator’s pay, not profit sitting on top of a wage. It is not comparable to a staffed salon’s net margin.

And read the category carefully. NAICS 812 is “personal and laundry services”. Alongside salons it contains funeral services, parking garages, photofinishing, dry cleaning and pet care. Hair is a minority of those 2.96 million returns. Mean receipts of $32,431 tell you there is a very large part-time tail in there. It is directional for the solo model, not a salon number.

What is the median hairdresser salary in the US?

Google’s AI Overview for this query currently cites the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ broader Occupational Outlook Handbook figure: $35,420 a year, $17.03 an hour, for the combined “Barbers, Hairstylists, and Cosmetologists” category (2024 basis). The more precise number for hairdressers and cosmetologists specifically is $35,790 a year, or $17.21 an hour, from the BLS OEWS table, May 2025. Barbers sit slightly higher at $38,210 and $18.37. Both figures are real BLS data, they just measure different groupings: one broad occupational category versus one specific occupation code.

Source: hourly medians are on BLS OEWS Table 1, May 2025. Annual medians and percentiles are not on that table; they are in the OEWS data file, series OEUN0000000000000395012 and OEUN0000000000000395011. BLS computes an annual wage as the hourly wage times 2,080 using the unrounded hourly figure. Note that bls.gov blocks some browsers and may show an access error.

Here is the part almost nobody quoting that figure mentions. BLS wage data covers wage-and-salary workers only and excludes the self-employed entirely (BLS OEWS FAQ). BLS separately reports that as of 2024, 48% of hairdressers and cosmetologists, and 76% of barbers, were self-employed (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook).

So the most-quoted income figure in this industry comes from a survey that leaves out roughly half the people in it, and three quarters of the barbers. Quoting it at a booth renter is close to meaningless.

How many hairstylists are there in the US, and is the field growing?

651,200 jobs in 2024, projected to grow 5% through 2034, which BLS classes as faster than average. That is about 35,300 additional jobs over the decade.

Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Barbers, Hairstylists, and Cosmetologists.

The Handbook figure of $35,420 and the OEWS figure of $35,790 are both correct. They are different reference years and slightly different occupation groupings. If you are quoting a wage, say which one you mean.

What is the salon failure rate?

There is no salon-specific failure rate published by anyone. What exists is all-industry establishment data, and it is worth knowing rather than guessing.

Roughly one in four to one in five new US establishments closes inside twelve months, and about half are gone by year five.

Source: BLS Business Employment Dynamics, Table 7, all US private-sector establishments.

The SBA Office of Advocacy publishes the same underlying data on a slightly different basis: 67.7% survive two years, 49.2% survive five, 33.9% survive ten (FAQs About Small Business, February 2026).

Where the widely-quoted “20% fail in the first year” comes from. It is a rounding of the BLS figure that has been repeated so often it now gets attributed to the SBA as if they published it as a standalone finding. They did not. Use the numbers above and name the table.

Which salon industry statistics does nobody actually publish?

This is the section I most wish had existed when I started looking. If you are writing about this industry, these are the figures that do not exist in any official source, no matter how confidently you see them quoted.

Nobody publishes a national salon net profit margin. Not Census, not the IRS, not BLS, not any trade association I could find.

Nobody publishes national booth rent data. Not the government, not a trade association. Every range you see, including mine, is somebody’s observation.

Nobody publishes salon owner income. BLS wage data explicitly excludes the self-employed, and most salon owners are self-employed. Any figure you see attributed to BLS for what a salon owner earns is misattributed.

Nobody publishes salon client retention or rebooking rates. No federal source measures it and no trade association publishes it.

Nobody publishes retail-to-service ratio benchmarks. The commonly quoted “10 to 15% is the industry target” has no published source I could find.

Nobody publishes salon-specific failure rates. Only all-industry establishment survival.

Nobody publishes clients-per-day or booked-versus-paid-hours for stylists. BLS does not measure occupational throughput.

If a page quotes any of the above and names a federal agency or a trade association, check the link. In my experience it will either go to a homepage or to another article that also does not have the source.

How to check every number on this page

Every figure above links to the file it came from. Three of them are worth knowing how to open.

Census AIES. The tables page links a zipped data file. Inside, filter to NAICS 812112, type of operation “All establishments”, and read the revenue and operating expense columns.

IRS SOI. The link downloads a spreadsheet. Table 1, the row labeled “Personal and laundry services”. Columns 1, 2 and 8 are all returns; columns 9 and 16 are the profitable ones.

BLS OEWS. The Table 1 news release carries median hourly wages only. Annual medians and percentiles are in the time-series data file, under the series IDs given above.

If you find an error on this page, tell me and I will correct it and say what changed.

Where to start with your own numbers

These salon industry statistics tell you the shape of the business. They do not tell you about yours.

Run the free Salon Profit Calculator with your own revenue and expenses, and put a market wage for yourself in the expense column. That single line is the difference between the margin most owners believe and the margin they actually have.

Related: what a healthy hair salon profit margin looks like | how much salon owners take home | what booth rent costs and what it should cost

General information from my years running and reviewing salons. Not tax, legal or accounting advice. The federal figures on this page are quoted as published, and every calculation on top of them is labeled as Hair Salon Pro’s analysis.