Hairstylist and Barber Salary Statistics 2026: Pay and Outlook

American barbers, hairstylists and cosmetologists held 651,200 jobs in 2024 and earned a median 35,420 dollars a year (17.03 dollars an hour), with employment projected to grow 5% by 2034, faster than the average occupation, per the BLS. Barbers out-earn stylists at the median: 18.73 versus 16.95 dollars an hour.

This page covers pay, job counts, self-employment, who does the work, the ten-year outlook, and how long cosmetology school takes. Every figure links to its source.

How much do hairstylists make?

Median pay for barbers, hairstylists and cosmetologists was 35,420 dollars a year, or 17.03 dollars an hour, in 2024, per the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook. The wage-and-salary survey (OES, May 2025 data file) adds the detail a single median hides. The first row below comes from the 2024 handbook; the rest come from the May 2025 wage-and-salary file.

Measure	Barbers (39-5011)	Hairstylists and cosmetologists (39-5012)
Median hourly wage (May 2024, OOH)	$18.73	$16.95
Wage-and-salary employment (May 2025, OES)	15,000	305,710
Mean hourly wage (OES)	$22.63	$21.13
Mean annual wage (OES)	$47,070	$43,960
Median annual wage (OES)	$38,210	$35,790

Two things stand out. Barbers out-earn stylists at both the median and the mean. And the mean sits well above the median in both occupations, meaning a well-paid top end pulls the average up while the typical worker earns less: the classic shape of a trade built on tips and clientele, where a full book at premium prices and an empty Tuesday afternoon can belong to two chairs in the same shop.

One caution for any wage comparison: these figures exclude the self-employed, which in this trade excludes most of the top of the market. Booth renters with full books, and shop owners, do not appear in OES data at all.

Where do hairstylists earn the most?

Among wage-and-salary hairstylists in May 2025, the District of Columbia had the highest annual mean at 70,320 dollars, with Washington (63,800) and Oregon (57,220) next. The biggest employment states are California (27,080), Florida (23,530), Texas (22,440), New York (20,740) and Pennsylvania (19,350).

The usual cost-of-living caveat applies in both directions: DC's 70,000-dollar mean buys DC housing, and a stylist in a cheap Texas suburb at the national median may keep more of their income than the coastal averages suggest. All of these are wage-and-salary figures from the May 2025 OES state file, so the same self-employment caveat applies to them.

How many hairstylists and barbers work in the US?

About 651,200 people held barber, hairstylist or cosmetologist jobs in 2024, per the BLS: roughly 575,200 hairdressers, hairstylists and cosmetologists plus 76,000 barbers. Those counts include the self-employed, which matters, because surveys that leave them out tell a very different story.

The OES wage survey, which counts only employees, finds just 305,710 hairstylists and 15,000 barbers. The CPS household survey counts 747,000 stylists. Three surveys, three definitions, three defensible numbers; the gaps between them are mostly the self-employed, counted or not. With most barbers working for themselves, the distance between the wage survey's 15,000 and the handbook's 76,000 is the self-employment statistic seen from another angle, and the next section shows how large that group really is.

What share of hairstylists are self-employed?

The defining statistic of the trade: 76% of barbers and 48% of hairdressers, hairstylists and cosmetologists are self-employed, per the Occupational Outlook Handbook's work-environment data. The remainder work mostly in personal care services establishments, with a small slice (5% of stylists) in retail.

This mirrors the business-side data exactly. As our salon industry statistics page shows from Census data, 90% of personal care businesses are one-person operations. From either direction, the numbers describe the same economy: the typical "salon job" in America is actually a business of one, renting space in someone else's shop. Renting a chair or a suite is the standard career path in this trade, not the exception.

The survey-count gap proves the point numerically. The wage survey finds just 15,000 barbers; the handbook, which includes the self-employed, counts 76,000. Four out of five barbers are invisible to the paycheque survey.

Who cuts hair in America?

The BLS household survey (CPS, 2025 annual averages) breaks the occupation down by demographics, and the split is among the sharpest of any US occupation pair.

Among hairdressers, hairstylists and cosmetologists (747,000 employed in the household count): 92.0% are women. By race and ethnicity, 78.8% are White, 12.2% Black, 4.7% Asian, and 17.9% Hispanic or Latino of any race.

Among barbers (141,000 employed): 17.7% are women, meaning 82.3% are men. 29.0% are Black and 43.4% Hispanic or Latino; 65.1% are White and 2.6% Asian. Both counts come from the household survey, so they include the self-employed.

Two adjacent trades, near mirror-image gender compositions, and meaningfully different racial and ethnic profiles. Barbering is one of the most Hispanic occupations in the household survey and carries more than double the Black share of the stylist trade. The barbershop's role as a community institution, especially in Black and Latino neighbourhoods, is usually described culturally; the CPS numbers show it demographically. For anyone hiring from, marketing to, or writing about "the hair industry", these are two workforces, not one.

Is cosmetology a good career?

The BLS projects 5% employment growth from 2024 to 2034, faster than the average occupation, adding about 35,300 jobs, with roughly 84,200 openings per year across the decade.

That openings number deserves a second look. It is more than twelve times the net growth, which means the vast majority of openings replace people leaving the trade. Hairstyling is a high-turnover occupation with a permanently open door: easy to enter by job-market standards, and exited often. For a student weighing cosmetology school, that reads two ways. You will almost certainly find work, because chairs need filling constantly. And the constant turnover is itself information about how many people try the trade and move on: high replacement demand in a licensed occupation with a year of required schooling suggests the economics work better for some practitioners than others, with self-employment, location and clientele deciding which side of the median you land on.

Put together, the statistics sketch an honest recruitment poster. Steady demand: 5% projected growth and 84,200 openings a year mean work exists. Modest median pay with wide upside: the median sits near 35,000 dollars, but means run well above medians, top states pay double the typical wage, and the best-earning operators are self-employed and uncounted. Real entry costs: a year of training and a licence, everywhere. And autonomy as the norm: most careers in this trade end up self-employed, which suits some people perfectly and others not at all.

How long is cosmetology school?

The typical entry credential is a postsecondary nondegree award, meaning a state-approved cosmetology or barbering program, with no prior work experience and no on-the-job training requirement, per the BLS. Every state also requires a licence and at least one exam, which makes the licence effectively the entire barrier to entry.

Program length is set by state law and varies a great deal. The Institute for Justice's License to Work study (3rd edition, 2022 data), which measures licensing burdens across 102 lower-income occupations, finds for cosmetology:

• Licensed in all 51 jurisdictions (50 states plus DC), with at least one exam everywhere.
• Estimated training time lost ranging from 233 days in the five lightest states to 490 days in Iowa, which requires 2,100 clock hours.
• Fees from 60 dollars (Oklahoma) to 450 dollars (Alaska).
• A combined breadth-and-burden rank of 5th worst out of 102 occupations studied.

The requirements are heavy relative to the trade's median pay, which is why cosmetology licensing gets debated at all. For someone weighing the career, the practical reading is simple: expect roughly a year of school, a licence exam, and requirements that change if you move states.

For the client-side economics of all this, see what haircuts cost and how often people actually get them. And if you are a stylist whose clients arrive unsure what they want, Kurli's try-on gives them a rendered preview to point at, which is a faster conversation than a mood board.

Methodology and numbers we left out

The government measures this occupation from three angles, and the differences explain most of the conflicting stylist counts online: the Occupational Outlook Handbook estimates total jobs including the self-employed (651,200 in 2024), the OES wage survey counts wage-and-salary jobs only (305,710 hairstylists and 15,000 barbers, May 2025), and the CPS is a household survey whose 747,000 stylist figure includes the self-employed under a different definition again. On licensing, the Institute for Justice is an advocacy organization that argues licensing is excessive, so its framing has a viewpoint; its state-by-state requirement data, however, is compiled with a published methodology, and the underlying hour requirements are state law. Two related figures were deliberately left out: the often-quoted "386 days average training" comes from an older edition of the same study and should not be mixed with the current edition's range, and no single verified table of every state's clock-hour requirement was available on a page we could open, so we quote the verified range and Iowa's 2,100 hours rather than rebuild a fifty-row table from memory.