What should I charge for a haircut in New Zealand?

Why "what everyone else charges" is the wrong place to start

Another salon's prices are built on their rent, their wages and their product bill. You can't see any of those. Their price might work because they own the building, or it might be quietly losing them money too. Copy it and you copy a business you know nothing about.

Is a $100 haircut really $100?

Not even close. Before you see a cent, GST takes its share if you're registered, then card fees, product, the salon's running costs for those minutes, and the wage cost of the person holding the scissors. In a typical Kiwi salon, a 45 minute $100 cut can leave around a third of the price once all of that is paid. Before income tax.

The minutes matter more than the price

Here's the part most owners never see. Let that same $100 cut run 15 minutes over, and what's left can drop by about half. Nothing changed on the menu. The cut just took longer than the price allowed for, and every minute in the chair carries wages and running costs with it.

Multiply that across a week of cuts and colours, and a busy salon can be paying to be busy without knowing it.

What a good price is built on

Your real wage cost per client hour, not the hourly rate on the payslip. What your salon costs to run for every hour a chair is booked. Honest times for each service. Product. Card fees. GST. And the margin you actually want to keep, decided on purpose rather than left to whatever's over.

Every one of those is different for your salon, and most of them move every year. That's why a price that was right two years ago probably isn't now.

General information, not financial or tax advice.