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How to Start a Beauty Business in Michigan

Michigan spreads beauty across four regulators and keeps the prices low once you find them. The Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs runs cosmetology and barbering through two separate boards under one Occupational Code, licenses massage therapists as health professionals under the Public Health Code, and leaves body art facilities, microblading included, to the Department of Health and Human Services. The licenses themselves cost less than almost anywhere in this guide set, $24 a year for most practitioners. The difficulty is structural: renewal dates that follow each license instead of the calendar, an establishment license that dies the moment the business changes hands, and a braiding trade the statute allows with no license at all, until the service menu moves. This hub maps each regulator, then links to a full guide for each business type.

Who regulates beauty businesses in Michigan

Two boards inside the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, LARA, do most of the licensing, and they sit side by side in the same statute. The Michigan Board of Cosmetology works under Article 12 of the Occupational Code and licenses cosmetologists, estheticians, manicurists, electrologists and natural hair culturists, plus the cosmetology establishments and schools they work and train in. The Michigan Board of Barber Examiners works under Article 11 of the same code and licenses barbers, student barbers, barbershops and barber colleges. The two systems run on parallel tracks with separate fee schedules, and a building that houses both a salon and a barbershop answers to both. Applications and renewals for both boards run through MiPLUS, the Michigan Professional Licensing User System.

Two trades sit outside the Occupational Code entirely. Massage therapy is a licensed health profession under Part 179A of the Public Health Code, licensed individually by LARA's Board of Massage Therapy on a three year cycle; Part 179A creates no establishment license, so Michigan licenses the therapist and never the room. Body art is a facility license under Part 131 of the Public Health Code, issued by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, MDHHS: the facility is licensed, the individual artist is not, and the local health department inspects before licensure and at least once a year after. Business formation sits with LARA's Corporations Division, sales tax and withholding with the Department of Treasury, unemployment insurance with the Unemployment Insurance Agency, and wages with the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity.

Michigan licensing at a glance

What every Michigan beauty business files

Michigan specific traps

Your renewal date is yours alone. Cosmetology and barber licenses, personal and establishment alike, expire biennially on the anniversary of the day they were issued, under rule R 339.1003. There is no statewide renewal month to remember, and no two licenses in the same shop necessarily share a date: the owner tracks every practitioner's anniversary individually, through MiPLUS. A stylist hired in March renews in March, the shop licensed in October renews in October, and the barber next door runs on a third date entirely.

Braiding needs no license, and that is exactly the trap. Section 339.1210a(3) of the Occupational Code says a person may practice natural hair cultivation for compensation, and run an establishment where only natural hair cultivation is practiced, without any license. The exemption is real and it is narrow: natural hair cultivation is hand work that puts tension on the strands, braiding, twisting, weaving, extending and locking. It does not include dyes or reactive chemicals, and it does not include cutting. A braiding shop that adds color or a pair of shears has walked out of the exemption and into the full cosmetology licensing system, practitioners and premises both.

The establishment license dies at the closing table. A cosmetology establishment license is void the moment the establishment is sold, its ownership transfers, or it moves, mobile salons aside, and the barbershop license is revoked automatically on the same events. Buying a going concern salon does not transfer its premises license: the buyer applies for a new establishment license, with the diagram and the inspection, before operating. Deals that close on a Friday and open on a Monday routinely miss this.

New students owe more hours than the licensees training them. Esthetician training rose from 400 to 750 hours, and manicurist training from 400 to 600, for anyone who begins training on or after July 1, 2024. A working esthetician licensed on the old 400 hour course is fully licensed, and a student enrolling today owes nearly double. Massage has the same shape: 625 hours for anyone enrolling on or after August 1, 2017, against the 500 hour figure that still circulates from the pre-2017 rule.

An LLC here is never dissolved, only disgraced. Michigan does not administratively dissolve an LLC for missed annual statements. Miss two consecutive February 15 statements and, after notice and a 60 day cure window, the company is simply not in good standing: no certificate of good standing will issue, the state accepts no filings from it except a $50 restoration certificate, and its name becomes available for another business to take. Meanwhile there is no late fee for a standard LLC at all; the $50 late fee on LARA's schedule belongs to professional LLCs, a distinction the secondary sites routinely blur.

Body art runs on a December guillotine, and the price is a moving target. The body art facility license expires at midnight on December 31, the renewal application is due by December 1, and a late renewal costs $250 on top of the license fee. The statutory fee is $500 a year, but the statute adjusts it annually for inflation, capped at 5 percent a year, so the amount MDHHS charges can sit above the figure in the code. The local health department's inspection fees stack on top of the state fee, lawfully, under section 333.13108.

Two account systems changed at once. LARA boards license and renew in MiPLUS, while the Unemployment Insurance Agency retired its MiWAM employer system on November 2, 2026 in favor of MiUI. An owner opening in late 2026 sets up employer accounts in a system their bookkeeper may never have seen, and quarterly Wage and Tax reports are due in it even for quarters with no wages at all.

Today's license prices are scheduled to fall. The State License Fee Act rates behind most figures in these guides, the $24 a year cosmetology license fee and its barber counterpart, are the rates in effect for payments through September 30, 2027, and the statute sets lower rates after that date. It is the rare trap that saves money, but budgets and renewal calendars built on today's numbers should know the change is already on the books.

Michigan guides by business type

Official Michigan resources

State sources last reviewed: November 3, 2026

This guide is general information researched from official Michigan sources, not legal or tax advice. Requirements, fees and forms change; verify the current rules with the agencies linked above before you file, sign or spend.