Salon Industry Statistics 2026: How Many Hair Salons in the US?

The US had 160,726 personal care establishments with employees in 2023, plus another 1.47 million businesses with no employees at all, which means 90.1% of hair and beauty businesses are one-person operations (Census, 2023). Add the two sides together and the industry earned about 101 billion dollars in 2022.

This page covers the counts and dollars behind those headlines: how many salons and barbershops the US has, how big the industry is, how many people work in it, and how fast it is growing. Every figure links to its source.

How many hair salons are there in the US?

The answer depends on which businesses you count, and the US Census Bureau counts two different kinds in two different programs.

The first kind is businesses with employees. The 2023 County Business Patterns data, the Census Bureau's annual count of establishments with staff, shows:

Category (NAICS)	Establishments	Employees
Personal care services (8121)	160,726	764,640
Hair, nail and skin care (81211)	126,382	568,140
Beauty salons (812112)	84,176	391,064
Nail salons (812113)	34,417	148,059
Barber shops (812111)	7,789	29,017

The second kind is businesses with no payroll: a stylist renting a chair or a suite, or cutting hair in a home studio. The Census Nonemployer Statistics count 838,264 solo beauty salons and 141,769 solo barber shops for 2023, on top of the staffed shops above. IBISWorld, a market research firm, folds it all into a broader estimate of roughly 1 million hair salon businesses. A business with revenue and no paid employees is what the Census calls a nonemployer business, and in personal care they are the majority by a wide margin: 1.47 million against 160,726 in 2023.

So a sentence like "the US has 160,726 salons" is wrong twice: that figure covers all personal care establishments, and only the ones with employees. A defensible count names the program, the year and the category, which is why every number on this page does.

How many salons are one-person businesses?

Nine out of ten. For 2023 the Census counted 1,468,638 nonemployer personal care businesses against 160,726 employer establishments, which makes 90.1% of all personal care businesses one-person operations (our computation from the two Census counts).

The solo side is not small in dollar terms either. Its combined receipts came to 48.72 billion dollars in 2023. Within hair, nail and skin care specifically, 1,276,010 solo businesses booked 42.18 billion dollars. Averaged out, that is roughly 33,000 dollars in receipts per solo business, a figure that mixes full-time operators with side businesses, so read it as a floor for full-timers rather than a typical income.

The legal form is personal too. In the 2022 file, 96.2% of solo personal care businesses were sole proprietorships, not LLCs or corporations. The salon economy is not just small business; it is overwhelmingly personal business, one person filing a Schedule C.

How big is the salon industry? Market size and revenue

The cleanest total comes from combining two same-year Census programs. The 2022 Economic Census puts employer personal care firms at 54.76 billion dollars in receipts (140,553 firms), and 2022 Nonemployer Statistics add 46.24 billion dollars from solo operators. Together: about 101 billion dollars of US personal care services revenue in 2022. For hair, nail and skin care alone, the comparable combined total is about 78.8 billion dollars.

Inside hair, nail and skin care, the split produces this page's most surprising verified fact: solo operators out-earned the entire employer side, 40.13 billion versus 38.69 billion dollars. The one-person businesses are not a fringe around the salon industry. Collectively, they are the larger half of it.

IBISWorld estimates the US hair salon industry at 63.4 billion dollars in 2026, and notes the market is so fragmented that no company holds more than a 5% share. That is a modelled market estimate rather than a census count: its "hair salons" boundary differs from the Census personal care rollup, and an estimate for 2026 naturally sits above counts from 2022. Both kinds of number are useful; they answer different questions.

Popular articles disagree about industry size for the same three reasons. Which year: revenue grew through the post-pandemic recovery, so vintage matters. Which boundary: hair only, hair plus nails and skin, or all personal care. Which population: employer businesses only, or the solo majority too. A writer quoting the 54.8 billion Economic Census figure is silently leaving out 1.4 million businesses; one quoting 101 billion is including them.

How many barbershops are there in the US?

Barbering is the most independent corner of the industry. The 2023 Census counted just 7,789 barber shops with employees (29,017 employees between them) against 141,769 solo barber businesses: about eighteen solo operations for every staffed shop. The solo barbers collectively earned about 4.5 billion dollars in receipts.

Beauty salons show the same pattern at a gentler slope: 84,176 employer establishments plus 838,264 solo businesses, close to a ten-to-one ratio, with solo beauty salons booking about 25.5 billion dollars. Nail salons invert it: 34,417 employer establishments against a much smaller solo segment relative to beauty, meaning nail care runs disproportionately through staffed shops.

Those ratios are structural facts with practical consequences. They shape who is counted in wage surveys (employees only), who shows up in establishment counts, and why "how many barbershops are there" produces answers that differ by a factor of twenty depending on which Census program a writer had open.

How many people work in salons and barbershops?

Employer personal care establishments had 764,640 employees in 2023, with 568,140 of them in hair, nail and skin care specifically. On top of that sit the roughly 1.47 million solo operators, businesses of one, so total participation in the industry runs well above the payroll count.

The staffed shops are tiny. Dividing employees by establishments gives an average of 4.8 employees per location across personal care, and the sub-industries run even smaller: employer barber shops average about 3.7 employees, nail salons about 4.3, and beauty salons about 4.6 (our divisions of the verified counts). No sub-industry in the group averages even five people per location. When a headline mentions "salon chains", it is describing a rounding error in a sector where the typical staffed shop is a handful of chairs.

What do salon employees get paid?

Annual payroll for the full personal care group was 23.36 billion dollars in 2023, which averages out to roughly 30,500 dollars of payroll per employee (our division of the two verified figures). That is payroll as employers report it, before tips, and in this industry tips are a major part of take-home income that establishment data barely sees.

The number matters when you compare business models. A solo operator keeps receipts minus costs; an employee earns payroll plus tips. The Census can see the first group's receipts and the second group's payroll, and neither figure captures tips well, so comparing "what salon workers make" across the two populations from establishment data alone gives a distorted picture. That is why our career statistics page uses the Bureau of Labor Statistics wage surveys for the pay question instead.

Is the salon industry growing?

Modestly, on both available measures. Employer establishments rose about 2.6% from 2022 to 2023 (156,578 to 160,726), per County Business Patterns. IBISWorld estimates business counts growing 2.1% a year over 2021 to 2026. The clearest structural trend inside the numbers is not growth at all: it is the sheer size of the solo segment relative to traditional employer salons. No 2024 or 2025 count has been published yet in any of the Census programs, so treat any newer-sounding figure with care.

What the numbers mean for stylists and clients

For anyone entering the trade, the data says the default career is self-employment: nine of ten businesses have no payroll, and the career statistics page shows the same pattern from the worker side, with 76% of barbers self-employed. For clients, the fragmentation explains the market you experience: with no dominant chains, price and quality vary shop by shop, which is why what a haircut costs has such a wide answer, and why finding a stylist you trust matters enough that 38% of Americans never switch. Kurli's find-a-stylist tool exists for exactly that search, and the try-on tool helps you walk in knowing what to ask for.

Methodology and numbers we left out

The counts above come from three Census programs with precise meanings, and mixing them is the standard mistake in salon industry articles. County Business Patterns counts establishments with employees, annually, from payroll records (latest vintage: 2023). Nonemployer Statistics counts businesses without employees, from tax records, also annually (latest: 2023). The Economic Census runs every five years (latest: 2022) and measures employer revenue properly. No 2024 or 2025 count exists yet in any of them. The Census category is "personal care services" (industry code 8121), which contains hair, nail and skin care (81211), and inside that barber shops (812111), beauty salons (812112) and nail salons (812113); hair dominates the group, and the code beside each figure above lets you check the rows yourself. All Census dollar figures were converted from the files' thousands-of-dollars format, every computed share or ratio is labelled as our computation on top of the verified rows, and IBISWorld's figures are quoted separately and labelled as modelled estimates because their methodology is not public.