Men's Grooming Statistics 2026: Market Size, Haircuts, Barbershops

The global male grooming products market was valued at 54.38 billion US dollars in 2022 and is forecast to reach 80.06 billion by 2030, per Fortune Business Insights. The infrastructure behind it is growing just as clearly: US employer barbershops grew 43% in five years, from 5,148 in 2017 to 7,363 in 2022, on the official Census count. About a third of US men pay for a haircut at least every six weeks, and 11% currently dye their hair.

This page covers the men's grooming numbers people search for: market size, barbershop industry growth, haircut frequency, dye rates, barber earnings, spending, and the generational shift in attitudes. Every figure links to its source.

How big is the men's grooming market?

Fortune Business Insights values the global male grooming products market at 54.38 billion dollars in 2022, projecting growth to 80.06 billion by 2030 at a 4.6% compound rate, with Europe holding the leading position in 2022. An older Grand View Research release, drawing a different "men's personal care" boundary, projected 75.8 billion by 2027 with North America at 29.2% of 2019 revenue.

The two estimates are not mixable, because their scopes differ, and newer, larger figures exist on the firms' own sites but could not be opened for verification, so they stay off this page. If you need a single citable sentence, the defensible one is: the male grooming products market was estimated in the mid-fifty-billion range in 2022 and is projected to grow around 4 to 6% a year, per the two firms' public releases.

Is the barbershop industry growing?

Yes, and the cleanest growth statistic in this topic comes straight from Census County Business Patterns. Employer barbershops in the US grew from 5,148 establishments in 2017 to 7,363 in 2022: a 43% increase in five years (our computation from the two official datasets). The 2023 file extends the run to 7,789. Those shops employed 28,674 people with an annual payroll of 897.9 million dollars in 2022.

Context keeps the boom honest. Employer barbershops are the minority of barbering: the nonemployer data covered on our salon industry page counts over 140,000 solo barber businesses, roughly eighteen one-person operations for every staffed shop. And beauty salons still outnumber barbershops about 11 to 1 among employer establishments (82,964 versus 7,363 in 2022). The barbershop renaissance is real, fast in percentage terms, and small in absolute share, all at once.

The growth pattern also says something about what kind of barbershop is being founded. Employer establishments growing 43% while the trade stays overwhelmingly self-employed means the new shops are disproportionately the staffed, bookable, higher-price-point kind, the same population that shows up in booking-platform data averaging 43 dollars a cut. In the establishment data, the boom belongs specifically to shops organized enough to have employees, marketing and software: the crowd the estimates call premium male grooming.

How much do barbers earn?

The pay data favours the trade. Barbers' median hourly wage was 18.73 dollars in May 2024, above the 16.95 median for hairdressers and cosmetologists, and employed barbers show a 38,210-dollar annual median in the May 2025 BLS files. Most barbers are self-employed and invisible to those payroll surveys, a caveat that cuts toward higher, not lower, true earnings at the top of the trade.

Dividing the Census figures against each other turns the boom into a business profile (our calculations on the verified counts). The average employer barbershop runs about 3.9 employees (28,674 across 7,363 shops), and the sector's 897.9-million-dollar payroll works out to roughly 31,300 dollars per employee, before tips, which in barbering are substantial and invisible to payroll data. These are small shops with a handful of chairs, paying wages that the tip line and the self-employment escape hatch both improve.

How often do men get haircuts?

Per YouGov's May 2023 crosstabs, 10% of US men pay for a haircut every one to three weeks and another 24% every four to six weeks: about a third of men on a six-week-or-faster professional cycle, against a combined 14% of women on the same cadence. Fifteen percent of all adults cut their own hair, and 6% report never getting haircuts at all. Short styles simply expire faster, and the frequency data prices that expiry into male grooming budgets.

Real booking data agrees with the survey. Barbershop clients return every 48.5 days on average, per the booking-platform finding on our haircut frequency page.

That cycle is the financial engine of men's grooming, and the verified numbers let us cost it out (labelled calculation). A man on the six-week cycle that a third of US men report makes about 8.7 professional visits a year; at the 43-dollar barbershop average from the booking data, that is roughly 370 dollars a year before tips, and over 450 with a consistent 20% tip. Multiply across roughly one-third of adult men and the barbershop boom stops needing explanation: the recurring revenue arrives every six weeks, recession or not, in a way most retail categories can only envy.

It also explains why the market estimates keep growing faster than male vanity plausibly is. Much of the measured growth is infrastructure catching up to a habit that already existed: shops with booking software capture and formalize visits that used to happen at the kitchen table or the walk-in counter. The 43% climb in employer barbershops and the 15% of adults still cutting their own hair are two ends of the same migration, and the survey and Census data caught it mid-move.

Do men dye their hair?

Mostly not. Hair colouring stays a minority male habit: 11% of US men currently dye their hair, 23% have in the past, and 67% never have, per YouGov's 2023 crosstabs. The BMJ-cited estimate for men over 40 in the US and Europe is about 10%, versus 50 to 80% of women the same age, and two independent sources landing on the same figure is the kind of agreement that earns a statistic trust.

In the culture-war question nobody asked for, 44% of Americans say a man who dyes his head should dye his beard to match, 21% disagree, and 35% have wisely declined an opinion.

How do men's grooming habits compare to women's?

Habit	Men	Women	Source
Pay for a haircut at least every 6 weeks	34%	14%	YouGov 2023
Currently dye their hair	11%	37%	YouGov 2023
Use shampoo or conditioner	79%	93%	YouGov 2025
Always tip the stylist or barber	45%	62%	Bankrate 2025

The pattern across the table is consistent: men lead on haircut frequency and trail on everything else, from product use to dye to tipping.

Spending is the odd one out. LendingTree's 2023 commissioned survey produced the topic's strangest finding: men self-reporting 2,256 dollars a year on beauty against 1,283 for women. That inverts most category data, self-reported spending is notoriously loose, and single commissioned surveys do not overturn priors, so we present it as what it is: one named survey's result, sponsor attached, worth a raised eyebrow and a second study.

Are young men more interested in grooming?

The claim that young men care more about appearance than their fathers did is usually asserted; YouGov's panel data lets it be measured. Consideration of skincare and cosmetics brands among 18-to-34-year-old men rose from 7.3% in 2020 to 8.8% by the end of 2023, a small-sounding shift that represents a fifth more of the cohort entering the category in three years.

The attitude numbers behind it are not small at all: 70% of young US men say it is important to them to look physically attractive, 66% to feel attractive, and 51% report using beauty products to prevent skin aging. Half of a generation of men using anti-aging products would have been an implausible survey result twenty years ago; today it passes without comment. Whatever the products, the self-presentation norm has moved, and hair sits at the centre of it: a haircut remains the highest-frequency, highest-spend grooming ritual most men have, on the six-to-seven-week cycle the data documents.

What the men's grooming numbers show

The synthesis is a market moving on two speeds. The infrastructure, barbershops, grew 43% in five years and pays its trade above the stylist median. The behaviour is steady and cyclical: a third of men on a six-week cut cadence, four-fifths using shampoo, one in nine dyeing. And the attitudes are shifting fastest of all, led by young men who treat appearance investment as unremarkable. For the styles all this cadence maintains, our men's hairstyles guide covers the cuts by face shape and hair type, and Kurli's try-on renders any of them on your own selfie before the next six-week appointment comes due.

Methodology and numbers we left out

The figures above come from Census establishment counts, BLS wage files, market estimates quoted from the firms' own public releases with base years named, and consumer surveys with published crosstabs and stated sample sizes; where a number is our own division of verified counts, the text labels it as a calculation. Several circulating figures were checked and dropped: the newer men's-grooming market sizes visible only in search snippets from blocked pages, any dedicated poll on men colouring their hair beyond the two sources quoted, IBISWorld's barbershop revenue estimate (paywalled), and beard-care spending statistics, which appear only in secondhand press without an openable original. Their absence here is deliberate, and any article quoting them owes its readers a working link.