business · booth rental
A clear-eyed breakdown of what booth rental and commission actually cost a beauty pro — the math, the break-even point, and the hidden trade-offs beyond the split.
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Claim your nameEvery beauty pro faces the same fork in the road at some point: keep a commission seat at a salon, or rent your own booth and run the business yourself. The pitch for each is loud, but the actual economics are quieter — and they hinge on numbers most people never sit down and run.
So let's run them.
Under commission, the salon owns the chair. You take a cut of every service you perform — commonly 40–60% — and the house keeps the rest. In exchange, the salon covers rent, utilities, front-desk staff, product, and usually marketing and booking software.
Under booth rental, you pay the salon a flat fee for the chair — weekly or monthly — and keep 100% of what you charge. Everything the house used to cover is now yours: product, supplies, your own booking system, your own clients, and the empty weeks when you're on vacation.
Commission trades upside for stability. Booth rental trades stability for upside. Neither is "better" — they're priced for different volumes.
Here's the whole decision in one calculation. Booth rental wins the moment your commission take exceeds your booth rent plus your own overhead.
Break-even monthly revenue = (Booth rent + Product/overhead) ÷ (1 − Commission take rate)
Say your salon pays 55% commission (they keep 45%), a booth in your area runs $1,200/month, and you'd spend about $300/month on product and supplies you'd otherwise get for free:
Break-even = ($1,200 + $300) ÷ (1 − 0.55)
= $1,500 ÷ 0.45
≈ $3,333 in monthly service revenue
Below ~$3,300 a month in services, commission puts more money in your pocket. Above it, every extra dollar is worth far more under rental, because you keep all of it instead of 55 cents.
The same stylist, the same prices, three different booking levels:
| Monthly service revenue | Commission (keep 55%) | Booth rental (keep 100% − $1,500 costs) |
|---|---|---|
| $2,500 | $1,375 | $1,000 |
| $3,333 | $1,833 | $1,833 |
| $6,000 | $3,300 | $4,500 |
At $2,500 the salon seat wins. At the break-even point they're identical. At $6,000 the booth renter takes home $1,200 more every month — $14,400 a year — for the exact same work.
The table is only the visible half. Renting a booth means you inherit costs and responsibilities that commission quietly absorbed:
That last point is where a lot of the "I'll just go independent" math quietly falls apart — not because the split is wrong, but because rebuilding your client base and your tooling from scratch is the real cost.
A rough rule of thumb:
The one thing that changes the math in your favor no matter which side you land on: owning your clients and your reviews so they follow you between chairs, salons, and cities. That's the asset the split never puts a number on — and the one worth building from day one.