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How much do hair stylists make?
What you take home depends less on your role than on how you are paid. See what a stylist, barber, nail tech, esthetician, or massage therapist earns on commission, booth rent, and hourly, side by side, built on real US wage data you can click through and check.
Your work
Rough numbers are fine. Everything updates as you type.
On your numbers
$54,300
a year is the highest of the three, as booth rent, for a hair stylist doing $1,200/week in services. Here is how the three pay structures compare, and what each figure really includes.
Commission
$31,200 base + $7,800 tips
You keep 50% of the $1,200/week you do in services. The salon covers product, overhead, and half your payroll tax. Before income tax.
Booth rent
$43,400 base + $10,900 tips
You keep your $1,200/week minus $200/week rent and ~8% product, less the payroll tax a salon would otherwise cover. Before income tax and your own overhead (insurance, supplies, software, fees).
Employee
National median wage
The US median wage for a hair stylist ($17/hr). The employer covers benefits and half your payroll tax. Tips vary and may already be reflected here.
For reference, the US median wage for all hair stylists (part-time included) is $35,880. These three are not quite like-for-like: commission and employee are what you are paid before income tax, with the salon or employer covering product, overhead, and half your payroll tax. Booth rent is your business income after a payroll-tax adjustment but still before income tax and your own overhead (insurance, supplies, software, card fees, no paid time off). So booth’s edge is real once you are busy, but it comes with costs and risk the others do not.
The other side of the chair
Booth renters are really running their own micro-business, and many stylists eventually open their own place. The typical salon owner takes home $40,000 to $80,000 on an average 8.2% net margin, and the difference between the strugglers and the high earners is almost entirely operations: filling the chairs, stopping no-shows, and keeping clients coming back. That is exactly the part Sheen builds and runs.
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How this is calculated (every number is sourced)
Estimates, built to be conservative: commission defaults to 50% (the low end of the sourced 50-59% band), product cost to 8% (the low end of 8-12%), and tips are modeled at ~20% of income, the level one in five stylists report. Tips are added to the commission and booth-rent figures (whose base is your pre-tip service revenue) but not to the employee figure, which is a government gross-wage median that may already reflect reported tips. Booth rent also carries a payroll-tax adjustment, because a booth renter pays both halves of the ~15.3% payroll tax while a salon covers one half for a commission or employee stylist, and it is still shown before income tax and the renter’s own overhead. Each figure links to its source on our research hub. Read the full methodology.
Commission
You keep 50% of the $1,200/week you do in services. The salon covers product, overhead, and half your payroll tax. Before income tax.
Booth rent
You keep your $1,200/week minus $200/week rent and ~8% product, less the payroll tax a salon would otherwise cover. Before income tax and your own overhead (insurance, supplies, software, fees).
Employee
The US median wage for a hair stylist ($17/hr). The employer covers benefits and half your payroll tax. Tips vary and may already be reflected here.
Estimates only, for planning. Actual pay depends on your book, your hours, your local market, and the exact terms of your arrangement. Nothing here is a guarantee.
Run your own place? See what your salon is leaking each year, or browse all free calculators.
Why you can trust the number
Real wage data, honestly modeled
Wages come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics; the commission, tip, and product-cost assumptions use the cautious end of every sourced range. Open 'How this is calculated' in your result to see each number link straight to its source.
Questions
Stylist pay, answered
How much do hair stylists make?
Do stylists make more on commission or booth rent?
Do salon workers really make most of their money on tips?
How accurate are these numbers?
Is my information stored or shared?
I want to open my own salon. Where do I start?
Ready when you are
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