How to Start a Hair Salon in Massachusetts

Who licenses hair salons in Massachusetts

Hair salons answer to the Board of Registration of Cosmetology and Barbering, a combined board inside the Division of Occupational Licensure that licenses the cosmetology, barbering, manicuring, aesthetics and electrology trades under M.G.L. c.112, sections 87T to 87KK. The Board licenses two different things that new owners constantly merge into one. The cosmetologist license belongs to the person: it proves she finished 1,000 hours of training and passed the written theory examination. The salon license belongs to the location: it proves the premises were inspected and approved for the services offered there. A salon needs both layers before the first paying client, applications and renewals run online through the Division's eLIPSE platform with a notarized CORI form in the file, and every license in the building can be checked by anyone through the Division's license lookup.

The scope behind the license is defined in the statute itself. Section 87T defines cosmetology as the practice of aesthetics, manicuring and hairdressing, which is why a Massachusetts cosmetologist can legally offer skin and nail services that in other states would each need their own license. Two boundaries matter for a salon menu. Cosmetology expressly does not include barbering, so the straight razor shave work on a barbershop menu stays with licensed barbers. And cosmetology does not include make-up artistry, which means makeup only services sit outside this board's licensing entirely.

Massachusetts hair salon at a glance

The cosmetologist license, step by step

Start with school. The cosmetologist license requires a 1,000 hour course at a Board approved cosmetology school, and the Board's published breakdown of that course includes 50 hours of manicuring and 80 hours of aesthetics inside the 1,000, which is the training basis for the wide scope described above. When the hours are done you apply through eLIPSE, upload the notarized CORI form, and wait for Board approval before you can schedule the exam: the Board uses PSI to administer a written theory examination, and there is no practical examination to schedule. An incomplete application is held open for 180 days and then treated as abandoned, so an unfinished file quietly expires instead of pending forever.

The license itself costs $68 under the Board's fee schedule. It expires every two years on your birthday and renews for another $68, with a $57 late renewal fee if you miss the date. Board records classify the license by type class, and the cosmetologist record is the HD 1 class, Registered Cosmetologist, which is the code you will see on the Division's fee and renewal schedules. One reinstatement rule is worth knowing before you ever let the license lapse: under section 87GG, a license that has gone unrenewed for more than three years comes back only on a new application, the renewal fee, and a practical examination, so a long lapse means testing again.

Keep the license current and posted. Massachusetts salon rules at 240 CMR 3.00 require services to be performed in a licensed salon by licensed personnel, apart from the mobile services the Board authorizes by policy, and inspectors check the licenses on the wall against the people holding the tools. If you trained in another state, the Board's transfer route reviews your hours against the Massachusetts 1,000, and coursework completed to a shorter standard can come up short.

The cosmetology salon license and your premises

The salon itself is licensed as a cosmetology salon, the first of exactly three salon license types the Board issues. On the Board's own salon forms the types carry numbers, and the cosmetology salon is Type 1, the full service salon. It is the only salon license that covers hair, skin and nail services under one roof; a shop without hair files the narrower manicuring and aesthetics types instead, covered in those guides. The application fee is $136, the license renews every two years for $82 expiring December 31 of even years, and the Board's application page is blunt about the sequence: if your salon is a new business or is changing locations, you must remain closed until you are approved for a license after inspection.

The application package is specific. You submit an 8.5 by 11 inch floor plan showing the entire layout with every station, chair, manicuring table and aesthetics room labeled and the square footage shown. The plan has to show additional sinks that are not located in a bathroom and are not a shampoo bowl. Each owner files a 2x2 photo, a copy of a government ID and a notarized CORI form. Plumbing and electrical inspection forms go in if work was done, or the No Work Required form if none was. An entity applicant attaches its formation documents, and every salon files a price list of all services offered, with one Massachusetts rule printed on the application itself: gender pricing is prohibited, so the same service carries the same price for men and women.

Three premises rules shape the business after opening day. The license is not transferable and covers only the named location and space, so moving to a different space, even at the same address, means a new application, and a salon that has moved files a new application rather than renewing the old license. Changing the layout runs through an expansion or renovation application, after your town permits and inspections. And when a salon is sold, the owners must notify the Board, the buyer files a new application, and the salon may remain open for 30 days after the ownership change before the new license is required. Your salon's name also passes a Board screen: names suggesting healing or medical benefits, including the words healing, medical, med and clinical, are prohibited.

Forming your business entity

Most Massachusetts beauty businesses form as an LLC, and Massachusetts prices the form at the top of the national range. The Certificate of Organization, filed with the Secretary of the Commonwealth's Corporations Division, costs $500. The fee is not a division policy that can drift; the LLC statute itself, M.G.L. c.156C, section 12(d), sets it: five hundred dollars for the certificate of organization and five hundred dollars for the annual report. The certificate names your resident agent, the person designated for service of process, whose consent the filing requires, and it describes how the company is managed.

The same figure comes back every year. The annual report is due on or before the anniversary date of the filing of your original certificate, and it costs another $500, carrying the same information as the certificate with any changes. Budget $500 a year as a fixed cost of the Massachusetts LLC form, because a missed report puts the company on the road to administrative dissolution, and reinstatement after dissolution costs $100 on top of filing every owed annual report. Smaller changes have their own fees: amending the certificate costs $100, and a statement of change for the resident agent or office costs $25 on paper and nothing filed electronically. None of these filings replaces the licenses above: the Secretary of the Commonwealth registers your entity, and the Board licenses your people and your premises, and the two systems do not talk to each other.

Business names and the business certificate

Massachusetts has no state level trade name filing at all. Under M.G.L. c.110, section 5, anyone conducting business under a name other than their real name files a business certificate with the clerk of every city or town where the business is located. That reaches further than most owners expect: a sole proprietor trading as a salon name files one, a partnership files one, and an LLC or corporation operating under a name different from its legal entity name files one too, after the entity itself is registered with the Secretary of the Commonwealth. The certificate is signed under oath, runs for four years, and then renews, and it is a public notice filing, not a license and not a trademark.

Each city and town sets its own fee, so the only honest statewide statement is the structure, with Boston as the labeled example: the City Clerk at 1 City Hall Square charges $65 to file, adds a $35 surcharge for non residents, charges $50 for a change of business address, and renews the certificate every four years for $65, with late renewal penalties that can reach $100 a month up to a $300 cap. Boston takes the filing in person or by mail and offers no online filing. Price your own town's fee with a call to the clerk before you budget, and keep the name on the certificate, the salon license application and your signage telling one consistent story, because clients, inspectors and your bank all read them side by side.

Federal tax ID and business banking

Apply for an Employer Identification Number on IRS.gov. It is free, it issues online in one session, and any site charging you for an EIN is selling you a form you can file yourself. You need the EIN to open the business bank account, to run payroll once you hire, and to register the employer accounts described below. A single member LLC can technically operate on the owner's Social Security number for some purposes, but banks, payment processors and the state employer registrations all run more cleanly on an EIN, and handing your personal number to every vendor is a habit worth avoiding from day one.

Open the business bank account as soon as the entity and EIN exist, and run every license fee, product order and rent payment through it. Massachusetts salon economics turn on records you keep yourself: the Department of Revenue registrations, the unemployment wage reports and the LLC annual report all assume the business can show its own books, and a clean account is the cheapest compliance tool in this guide.

Sales tax through the Department of Revenue

Massachusetts keeps sales tax simpler than most states, and the simplicity cuts in a salon's favor. The statewide rate is 6.25 percent and there is no local sales tax anywhere in the Commonwealth. M.G.L. c.64H taxes retail sales of tangible personal property and a short list of services the statute names, and beauty services are not named, so you do not collect sales tax on haircuts, color, styling or any other service receipt. Product is different: shampoo, styling products and anything else you sell off the shelf is a retail sale taxed at 6.25 percent, so itemize services and products separately at checkout.

The Department of Revenue's own service enterprises regulation, 830 CMR 64H.1.1, names beauticians expressly, and it resolves the gray area in the middle. A service transaction escapes the tax where the real object of the transaction is the service itself and any property transferred is inconsequential and not separately stated on the bill. The trap runs the other way: if you buy product under a resale certificate and then use that product in services without separately stating a charge for it, the Department treats the tax as yours to pay on the product you consumed. Buy backbar product as a taxable purchase and retail product under the resale certificate, and the two streams stay clean. Registration itself runs through MassTaxConnect, and DOR's registration procedure, AP 616, is explicit that a business registers to collect before the business actually opens, for sales tax and for the withholding account you will need when you hire.

Booth rent and chair rental in Massachusetts

Massachusetts has no booth renter license, and the Board says so on the salon application page in one sentence: the board no longer issues or requires booth renter or booth shop licenses. A renter therefore works inside your licensed salon on her own cosmetologist license, under your salon license for the premises. There is no renter paperwork to file with the Board, no second license for the chair, and no version of the arrangement in which a renter holds her own premises license for a corner of your salon. If she wants her own licensed space with her own name on the license, she needs her own premises and her own salon license application, which is the salon suite model covered in that guide.

The licensing answer is the easy half. The classification answer is where Massachusetts chair rental gets dangerous, because the state's worker classification statute, M.G.L. c.149, section 148B, presumes that anyone performing a service for your business is your employee unless you can prove all three of its conditions: the worker is free from your control and direction in contract and in fact, the service is performed outside the usual course of your business, and the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade of the same nature. Chair work is the usual course of a hair salon's business, so the second condition fails on the face of almost every salon rental, and the statute backs the presumption with the remedies in section 27C, personal liability for officers who manage the entity, and unemployment and withholding exposure. Many Massachusetts salons respond by employing their stylists outright. If you rent chairs anyway, get the structure reviewed against section 148B before the first renter sits down, and give every separate business in the building its own business certificate and tax registrations.

Hiring employees in Massachusetts

Your first hire registers you as an employer in two places. The Department of Revenue takes your withholding registration through the same MassTaxConnect account as your sales tax registration, and the Department of Unemployment Assistance runs your unemployment insurance account. Unemployment liability attaches when you have one or more employees working at least one day a week for a minimum of 13 weeks in the calendar year, or when you pay $1,500 or more in wages in any calendar quarter, thresholds a working salon crosses almost immediately. For 2026 the Department's published new employer contribution rate is 2.42 percent, charged on the first $15,000 of each employee's wages, a wage base set in M.G.L. c.151A, section 14. Established employers move to individually calculated rates with an annual rate notice by January 31, wage reports and contributions come due quarterly on April 30, July 31, October 31 and January 31, and late payments bear interest at 12 percent.

The wage floor is state law, not federal. The Massachusetts minimum wage is $15.00 an hour under M.G.L. c.151, section 1, where it has stood since January 1, 2023. Stylists who regularly receive tips can be paid the service rate of $6.75 an hour under section 7, but only with the arrangement explained to the worker in writing, and only if tips bring each pay period up to the full $15.00; when a slow week falls short, the salon makes up the difference dollar for dollar. Paid family and medical leave contributions also run through your MassTaxConnect registration. None of this is optional paperwork layered on the business: the hiring decision and the booth rent decision in the previous section are the same decision seen from two sides, and the Commonwealth tests the substance of the arrangement, not its label.

City, town and local rules

The local layer starts where your business certificate is filed, at the city or town clerk's office, and it continues through zoning, a building or occupancy permit for the buildout, and fire and life safety sign offs, none of which the state board handles. The Board's own sequence stacks on top of the town's: salon rules expect the premises' electrical and plumbing installations to be approved by the local inspector of wires and plumbing inspector before the Board's inspection, which is why the salon application asks for those local forms. A salon run from a home is a special case in the Board's rules: the salon must occupy a separate room or rooms licensed for the purpose, with a separate entrance leading directly from the front or immediate side of the home and clearly visible from the street, on top of whatever your town's zoning says about home businesses.

Local rules are also where signage, parking and hours live, and they differ enough between a Boston storefront, a Worcester strip center and a Cape Cod home studio that no state guide can price them for you. Get the clerk's certificate, the zoning answer and the inspection schedule in writing before you sign the lease, because every state license in this guide is issued for a specific address and a move restarts parts of the stack.

Insurance for a Massachusetts hair salon

The Board's rules do not publish a required insurance amount for a cosmetology salon, so treat insurance as a risk decision and a lease decision rather than a licensing line item. In practice, a landlord will name the coverage he expects in the lease, and a business working on hair and skin should carry professional liability for the services themselves, general liability for the premises, and property coverage for equipment and retail stock. If other licensees work inside your salon under your premises license, your policy and theirs should both name the arrangement, because the salon license holder is the name the Board and an injured client find first when something goes wrong in any chair in the building.

Your Massachusetts renewal calendar

Official sources

• Board of Registration of Cosmetology and Barbering: training hours, application fees and the PSI theory exam
• Board of Registration of Cosmetology and Barbering: salon license application, floor plan and inspection rules
• Board of Registration of Cosmetology and Barbering: renewal fees and renewal schedule
• M.G.L. c.112, section 87T: definitions and scopes of cosmetology, hairdressing, aesthetics and manicuring
• M.G.L. c.149, section 148B: the employee classification test
• Secretary of the Commonwealth, Corporations Division: limited liability company information and annual reports
• M.G.L. c.156C, section 12: certificate of organization and the $500 filing fees
• Business certificates (DBA) in Massachusetts: filing with the city or town clerk
• City of Boston, City Clerk: how to apply for a business certificate, $65 filing fee
• Department of Revenue, 830 CMR 64H.1.1: sales tax treatment of service enterprises, including beauticians
• Department of Revenue AP 616: registration for sales tax and withholding through MassTaxConnect
• M.G.L. c.151A, section 14: unemployment contribution rates and the $15,000 taxable wage base

Massachusetts hair salon FAQ