Business Data & Benchmarks · United States
Hair Salon Revenue and Continuation Benchmark
Cutting, coloring and styling hair, often alongside broader beauty services, in chair-based studios.
Average Hair Salon Revenue per Year 2022 Economic Census
The 2022 Economic Census publishes employer establishment counts and combined receipts for hair salons, listed as beauty salons in the census tables. One divided by the other is the average below.
≈$310,000 /year
Average annual gross revenue per employer establishment
83,392
Employer establishments in the United States, 2022
as published $25.7 billion
Combined annual gross revenue of employer establishments, 2022
How this is calculated: about $25.7 billion in combined annual revenue divided by 83,392 employer establishments works out to $310,000. This is an average per establishment, and averages get pulled up by large, busy operations, so a typical business may sit below it.
Scope: Beauty Salons (NAICS 812112). Category is beauty salons, which can include broader beauty services. Employer establishments only: owner-operated businesses with no paid employees are not in these figures.
Salon economics are labor first: the payroll share below is high for a service business, because revenue scales with stylist hours. Note that many stylists rent chairs as independent contractors or work solo, and those businesses are outside these employer figures.
Chair rental blurs the picture: many salons earn part of their revenue as rent from independent stylists, income that looks nothing like service sales.
Source US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Summary Statistics (ECNBASIC): ESTAB, RCPTOT and PAYANN by NAICS · Vintage 2022 Economic Census · Calculation BusinessNES · Accessed July 2026
Where these figures come from
Data Source Notice
This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.
Figures above are from the 2022 Economic Census reference year, released by the Census Bureau in 2024 and 2025; markets have moved since.
Employer Establishments at Year Five Industry group
Personal care services, NAICS 8121, the 2018 starting count compared with the count of five-year-old establishments in 2023.
57.0%the year-five count as a share of the starting count
Across the 2014 to 2018 cohorts, five-year results ranged from 52.8 to 57.0 percent. This benchmark covers Personal care services, NAICS 8121, as a whole. It is not a survival rate for beauty salons on their own: they are 83,392 of the 155,827 employer establishments in that group, about 54 percent of it. How this is measured
Payroll as a Share of Revenue Official data
In salons the payroll line follows the chair count; the verified share below shows how much of each revenue dollar it takes.
| Cost line | Share of receipts |
|---|---|
| Annual payroll share of receipts, United States | ≈44% |
Payroll share of receipts, Beauty Salons, United States, 2022 Economic Census.
Approximately 44.0 percent of every revenue dollar in this category goes to annual payroll. As the census defines it, payroll includes wages, salaries, reported tips, commissions and bonuses; it excludes employer-paid benefits, employer payroll taxes, contractor payments and owner compensation. Treat it as one verified anchor, not a full labor cost breakdown. Commission splits send a large part of every ticket back to the stylist who earned it; a salon is closer to a talent agency with plumbing than to a retail store.
This is not total labor cost or profit margin.
How to read this number
Position Within Its Comparison Group Computed from official data
Where this category sits among 5 beauty and personal care categories in the same 2022 Economic Census release. Ranks and the group median are computed on exact values, before the rounding used above.
| Measure | This category | Group median | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue per employer establishment | $307,752 | $342,237 | 4 of 5 |
| Payroll share of receipts | 44.28% | 35.47% | 2 of 5 |
| Employer establishments | 83,392 | 29,692 | 1 of 5 |
Position among 5 beauty and personal care categories, 2022 Economic Census, employer establishments only.
This category ranks 4th of 5 by average annual revenue per employer establishment. It ranks 1st of 5 by employer establishment count and 2nd of 5 by payroll share. Payroll equals 44.28 percent of receipts here, 8.81 percentage points above the group median of 35.47 percent. A higher or lower position is not a measure of profit or of business quality: the census reports receipts and payroll only.
Compared With Similar Business Types Computed from official data
The 4 categories closest to this one by average revenue inside the same comparison group.
| Census category | Revenue per establishment | Payroll share | Establishments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beauty Salons (this page) | $307,752 | 44.28% | 83,392 |
| Nail salons | $342,237 | 31.92% | 33,212 |
| Barber Shops | $236,749 | 47.68% | 7,025 |
| Other Personal Care Services | $460,633 | 35.47% | 29,692 |
| Diet and Weight Reducing Centers | $951,916 | 15.30% | 2,506 |
Nearest categories by average revenue, 2022 Economic Census, employer establishments only.
This category reports lower revenue per employer establishment than Nail salons, Other Personal Care Services and Diet and Weight Reducing Centers, and higher revenue than Barber Shops. It contains more employer establishments than all four of them. Every figure in this table comes from the same 2022 Economic Census release and the same employer establishment population, so the columns are directly comparable.
Beyond the Benchmark BusinessNES analysis
What the census figures leave out about beauty salons, and what to look at instead.
What the numbers do not show
A salon's receipts depend on whether stylists are employees or chair renters, and the census cannot tell you which. A room full of renters reports only the rent as revenue, while an employer salon reports every service, so two identical looking businesses sit at opposite ends of this figure.
Retail product sales are counted with services here, although they carry different margins and require different working capital.
Operator lens
- Rebooking drives repeat demand and chair utilization. A client who leaves with the next appointment already booked is far more likely to return than one who intends to call, and that difference leaves no trace in a revenue figure.
- Payroll takes an unusually large share of receipts here. That leaves commission structure and chair utilization as the two levers an owner actually controls.
Questions to ask before starting or buying
- Are the stylists employees or renters? This single answer changes the revenue model, the payroll, the legal exposure and what you are actually buying.
- Whose clients are they? Ask what happens to the book if a senior stylist leaves, and whether any non-solicitation terms exist and are enforceable locally.
- What is the chair utilization? Empty chairs cost rent whether or not anyone is sitting in them, and utilization is rarely mentioned in a sale listing.
- How current is the equipment and plumbing? Wash stations, water heating and ventilation are the expensive parts of a salon fit out.
- How much revenue is retail? Product sales carry inventory risk and can mask a soft service business if they are counted together.
Models worth considering
- Sell the calendar, not the cut Memberships and prepaid packages convert irregular visits into scheduled ones, which is what makes staffing predictable.
- Specialize where the technique is hard Color correction, textured hair and extensions command different pricing because the skills take years to build.
- Use the quiet mornings Weekday mornings are the lowest-cost capacity in the building and suit clients who cannot make a Saturday.
Explore More on BusinessNES
More BusinessNES guides and rankings, plus neighboring benchmark pages built from the same verified data.
Sources and Methodology
Every figure on this page is bound to a published source, and each figure's own source line names that source precisely: the 2022 Economic Census for counts, receipts and payroll, and the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics for the industry continuation benchmark. Where a page shows a sector survival curve instead, that series comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
BusinessNES performs the arithmetic on those published figures and nothing else. Receipts are divided by establishments, and payroll by receipts. The age-five establishment count is divided by the age-zero establishment count for the same four-digit industry group, then repeated across five age-zero cohorts to give a reference and a range. This category's share of its industry group, along with the ranks, medians and nearest peers in the comparison sections, comes from the same published tables. Every one of them is recomputed from the sealed source files at each release and blocks publication if it does not match. Results are rounded and marked approximate. The reference year is 2022 for revenue and payroll; treat every figure as a baseline, not today's market.
Category scope matters: these figures cover Beauty Salons (NAICS 812112), employer establishments only. The scope note near the top of the page explains what that includes and excludes for this business type. The employer-only scope excludes booth renters, a large share of working stylists.
Full method, sources and limits
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