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Booth Rent vs Salon Suite vs Your Own Salon Calculator

The same book of clients pays for its space three different ways under the three working models in beauty. A booth turns your space into a flat weekly bill or a percentage of everything you earn. A rented suite costs more per week but the room, the door and the business inside it are yours. Your own salon trades a single rent payment for a stack of monthly obligations that keep running whether your chairs are full or empty. This calculator puts one revenue figure through all three structures so you can see what each route actually leaves you.

Every figure in this tool starts as a clearly labeled example. None of them is an industry average or a statistic. Change any of them to your own numbers. Our guides are free. We may earn a commission when you use a partner service, at no additional cost to you.

Run your numbers

Type in the revenue you realistically expect and the prices on the actual agreements in front of you. The table underneath updates as you type. The booth column follows the toggle: price it as a weekly rent or as a commission split, whichever the salon you are considering actually charges.

How to read these results

The row that matters most is the highlighted one: the estimated amount kept. It is what remains of a year of your work after the space is paid for and the product you used is paid for, and before taxes and every other cost of running a business. It is not profit, and it is not a paycheck. It is the cleanest single number for comparing the three structures, because it holds your revenue and your product cost steady and lets only the space arrangement change. When one route keeps thousands more than another on the same revenue, that gap is the price of the structure itself, not of your skill or your prices.

The occupancy row is where the three models show their personalities. A booth on weekly rent and a suite are both fixed bills, but the suite bill is usually the larger one, and what the extra money buys is control: your own room, your own hours, your own retail shelf, and a business in your own name. The commission version of the booth behaves completely differently. Its occupancy cost is a slice of your gross, so it shrinks in a slow month and grows in your best month. That makes commission the gentle route while you are building a book and the expensive route once the book is built, because the salon shares in every raise you give yourself. There is a crossover revenue where flat rent starts beating the split, and this table finds it faster than any rule of thumb: raise the weekly revenue input until the booth column flips.

Your own salon has the heaviest occupancy line because it is the only route where the meter runs twelve months a year on the whole premises. Rent is just the start of it. Utilities, insurance and the other monthly costs you enter keep billing through your vacation weeks and your slow season, which is exactly what the break even row captures. That figure is the weekly revenue your salon must produce, across the weeks you actually work, just to cover its space. Compare it honestly against your current average week. If the break even week sits close to your real week, the salon has no cushion; a route with a lower break even week is the safer business even when it keeps slightly less in a good year.

Weeks worked is the quiet input that changes verdicts. Every fixed cost in this tool is an annual figure wearing a weekly disguise, and the fewer weeks you work, the more each working week has to carry. A route that wins at fifty weeks can lose at forty six. Set the weeks to the year you actually live, holidays, slow months and all, not the year in the brochure.

Methodology and limits

The arithmetic is deliberately plain, and every result on this page is a calculation on the numbers you entered, nothing else. Gross annual revenue is your weekly service revenue multiplied by your weeks worked. Product cost is that gross multiplied by your product percentage, applied the same way on all three routes; if a commission salon supplies your color and product, set the percentage to zero for a fairer booth comparison. Booth occupancy is the weekly rent multiplied by weeks worked, or, in commission mode, your gross multiplied by the commission percentage. Suite occupancy is the weekly suite rent multiplied by weeks worked. Own salon occupancy is the monthly rent plus the monthly utilities, insurance and other figure, multiplied by twelve. The amount kept is gross minus occupancy minus product. Break even weekly revenue is the annual occupancy divided by weeks worked, shown only for the fixed cost routes, because a percentage cost has no fixed line to cross.

What the tool cannot see matters as much as what it can. It does not model taxes, license fees, payment processing, booking software, laundry, or the wages of anyone you employ, and it treats your revenue as identical across routes even though a suite or your own salon may let you sell retail, set different prices or add services a booth would not allow. Use the result as the cost side of the decision, then read the licensing side before you sign anything.

Price the space, then license it

Each route also carries its own licensing shape, and it differs by state. A suite renter often holds a separate establishment license for the room, while a booth usually works under the host salon license. Start with the salon suite license requirements by state for how suites are licensed where you live, and read the fuller comparison in Booth Rent vs. Salon Suite vs. Your Own Salon, which walks through control, risk and licensing alongside the cost structure. Then open your state guide from that hub and price the licenses next to the rent, because the cheapest room is not cheap if it is licensed wrong.

Frequently asked questions

What does break even on occupancy mean in this calculator?

It is the weekly service revenue at which your revenue exactly covers the cost of your space, before product, taxes or anything else. On the fixed rent routes it is close to the rent itself, restated weekly. On the own salon route it is the full year of rent, utilities, insurance and other monthly costs divided by the weeks you actually work, which is why taking more weeks off pushes the figure up.

Are the preset numbers averages for the beauty industry?

No. Every preset figure in this tool is a round example chosen to make the arithmetic easy to follow, and each one is labeled an example on the page. Rents, commission splits and product costs vary widely by city, salon and service menu. Replace every input with the numbers from the actual lease, booth agreement or suite contract you are considering, because the comparison is only as honest as the figures you feed it.

What costs does the calculator leave out?

Taxes of every kind, license and permit fees, booking and payment processing charges, retail product inventory, laundry, marketing, and any staff wages. The own salon route includes only the monthly costs you enter, so a salon with employees needs its payroll added on top before the comparison means anything. The result is the amount kept after space and product costs only, not profit and not take home pay.

Why does the commission route show no break even figure?

Because a commission is not a fixed cost. The salon takes the same percentage whether your week is slow or your best week of the year, so the occupancy cost scales with your revenue instead of sitting still waiting for you to cover it. There is no weekly revenue line to cross. The trade off shows up in the amount kept instead: commission is the cheaper route at low revenue and usually the most expensive route once your book is full.