A lot of pricing starts with a look at what everyone else charges, and that's worth knowing. It just won't tell you whether a price covers your rent, your product and your tax, or how much of your week you're with clients, and that's what decides whether a price works for you.
The government's business site suggests coming at it from three directions: what it costs you to provide a service, what others charge for similar work, and the most your clients are willing to pay. Whichever you lead with, it says, "your prices need to be profitable or at least, break-even" (business.govt.nz). The calculator below does the first of those properly, then puts typical Auckland prices beside your results, which covers the second.
It's built for people working for themselves. If you're employed and wondering whether going out on your own would pay, our pay calculator compares the options side by side. And if you employ staff, this isn't the right tool; wages, commission and holiday pay change the sums too much.
The price calculator
Fill in your work, then take it one step at a time. Nothing you enter leaves this browser, unless you choose to add it to your Natty profile.
Your services
The services you offer, and how many minutes the client's with you for each. It starts you off with a few common ones for your profession, so rename them, change the times, or add and take away until it's your list. How each one gets its price.
No services yet. Add one to carry on.
Typical client frequency
Roughly how many weeks until a regular comes back for each one. Leave it empty for one-off bookings, like most makeup. It's only used to estimate how many regular clients would fill your week.
Products
What one appointment uses in product, including GST. It's added to that service's price at what it costs you. If you're not sure, skip this and they'll stay at $0, or work it out from your invoices: a month's product divided by the services you did.
Share of bookings
Roughly how your bookings split between your services. Slide each one until it looks like a normal week. Until they add up to 100%, they're scaled up to fill your week. Where the starting split comes from.
How this is worked out
- Your hours with clients are your hours a day × days a week × weeks worked, times how booked you are: about 50% for Quiet, 65% for Steady and 80% for Busy. Mobile work starts at Quiet, because driving between clients takes up part of the day, and so does makeup, which is mostly event bookings.
- Bookings: your hours with clients are shared out between your services by their share of bookings and their minutes. If the shares add up to less than 100%, they're scaled up to fill the week.
- Prices keep the same differences as each service's typical Auckland price. For each service, the calculator takes what the market pays per minute (its typical price over its starting length), then scales every service by the same amount until your take-home is covered after costs, income tax, ACC and any GST. Services without a typical price use the average. When you type a price in, the others stay where they were, and the difference goes to your take-home or to needing fewer clients, whichever you pick. With fewer clients, the calculator works out how much of your week the bookings need to fill to reach your take-home. Prices you type in stay as they are until you change something that moves every price, like your take-home, your costs, how booked you expect to be or your services' minutes and shares. Then they go back to worked-out ones.
- Products are added to each price at what they cost you, so they pay for themselves. They start at $0.
- Regular clients are each service's bookings a year, times its typical client frequency in weeks, over 52, added up. It assumes each client books one kind of service; if yours often book two at once, you'd need fewer.
- Income tax uses IRD's rates for 2026–27, with the independent earner tax credit if you tick it. ACC CoverPlus levies are $2.42 per $100 of income for hairdressing and beauty and $2.06 for massage therapy, including GST, on at least $50,501 if you work 30 hours a week or more.
- GST starts once takings reach $60,000 a year, or when you tick the box. Prices then include it; 3/23 of what clients pay goes to Inland Revenue, less the GST in your costs. Chair rent is entered before GST and charged with it.
- Starting figures change with your profession and where you work. The take-home is what an employee would get working 40 hours a week at the middle of Tahatū's most common pay range (a beauty therapist's for lash and brow technicians, who don't have their own). Typical prices and lengths are Auckland medians from Fresha (lengths rounded to 5 minutes), except leg waxing and makeup, which come from independent Auckland businesses' own price lists, and 90-minute massage, which uses both. Booking shares come from the US Census Bureau for hairdressers, barbers and nail technicians, and start even for everyone else. Client frequencies come from NZ salons' price lists and the surveys below where we have them, and are our estimates otherwise. Chair rents are advertised Auckland day rates. Set-up, running and other costs are rough estimates, the same ones our pay calculator uses. Driving is our estimate for a day of mobile appointments within 10 km of home.
- Not included: travel to a rented chair (you'd have that employed, too), KiwiSaver, student loan repayments, and when tax and levies fall due.
- It's an estimate to help you decide, not tax or financial advice.
How each service is priced
Every service on the list keeps the same price differences as Auckland's typical prices. Clients pay more for a Brazilian than an eyebrow wax for the time it takes, and the calculator keeps it that way, moving all of them up or down together until your take-home is covered. Products go on top at what they cost you.
If more of your bookings are services clients pay well for, the rest don't have to bring in as much. The starting mix for hairdressers (about 55% cuts and blow-waves, 30% colour, 15% blow-dries) comes from the US Census Bureau's figures on how much American salons take for each kind of service, turned into bookings using Auckland prices (US Census Bureau). It was the best we could find. It covers salons with staff, though, so your own week could look quite different. Barbers start at mostly cuts, from the same figures, and nail technicians at about half manicures and a third pedicures. For everyone else we couldn't find anything worth using, so the shares start even.
The typical prices are medians from Fresha's Auckland listings, and we checked them against about twenty independent Auckland businesses' own price lists. Mostly they agree. Makeup is the exception: freelance artists charge $170 to $200 for occasion makeup, around twice what salons list on Fresha, so makeup uses the freelance prices. Leg waxing uses the independents too, because Fresha's listings mix half and full legs.
How many clients that means
Each service has a typical client frequency, roughly how many weeks until a regular comes back for it. From that, the calculator works out about how many regular clients it would take to fill your week, which is a useful thing to know before you go out on your own.
Where we could, the figures come from what NZ salons say on their own price lists: colour retouches every six to eight weeks, a regular Brazilian every four to six, lash and nail infills every two to three (The Collective, Le Beauty, Blinkroom, Nail Garden). A 2025 survey of American women found 43% of salon-goers had a manicure every two to four weeks (GCI Magazine).
Haircuts are trickier. Hairdressers usually suggest every six to eight weeks, but in a 2023 YouGov poll of Americans, fewer than one in five women who pay for haircuts went that often, and half went only every six months or less. Men were more regular, with nearly half going every six weeks or more often (YouGov). One salon software company puts the average client at 4.88 visits a year, about every 11 weeks, without saying where that comes from (Meevo). A cut starts at every ten weeks, somewhere in between. The rest are our estimates, so change them to match your own clients.
Not everyone you see will turn into a regular, either. In Zenoti's figures for US and Canadian beauty businesses on its system in 2024, 58% of clients came only once that year (Zenoti). So the number in the calculator is the regulars you'd want on your books, and you'd likely meet a fair few more people than that along the way. Makeup is different again; most bookings are one-offs, so there's no estimate unless you add your own.
How booked you are
Of everything in the calculator, this moves the result most. Your rent and insurance and the rest get paid out of the hours you spend with clients, so every hour you're not with one (a gap between bookings, cleaning up, answering messages, the drive to the next house) has to be covered by the hours you are.
So how booked are people, typically? The only large set of figures we found comes from Zenoti, a company that sells salon software, which looked at more than 30,000 salons using its system in 2025. At the median full-service salon, staff were with clients for 49% of their available hours, and at specialty salons (brows, lashes, blow-dry bars and the like) 47%. The top quarter got to 63 or 65%, and the top tenth 76 to 79% (Zenoti). Zenoti doesn't say where those salons are, and it's a vendor talking about its own customers, so take the figures as a rough guide.
You'll often see 75 to 85% given as what a healthy book looks like. One version of it comes from a 2014 article for Aveda salon owners, which gives "booked 75-85% of scheduled work hours" as its benchmark (Aveda Means Business). Most of the salons in Zenoti's figures were a long way off that. It's a good goal to have, but don't lose any sleep over it.
The calculator's three settings are rough steps along that scale. Quiet is about half your working hours with clients, close to Zenoti's typical salon. Steady, where it starts, is about two-thirds. Busy is about four-fifths, which fewer than one salon in ten managed in Zenoti's figures.
Switch between Quiet, Steady and Busy in the calculator and watch the prices move, and you'll see how much the gaps cost. Filling them can matter as much as the price itself, and no-shows count against you too; our guide to the cost of no-shows works out what they come to.
What goes into your costs
Where you work decides the biggest one. Renting a chair, it's the rent, usually quoted plus GST; our rent-a-chair guide has advertised Auckland rates and what they tend to include. A home studio swaps rent for the cost of setting up, spread over a few years, and the power, water and laundry that come with it. Nails, waxing and some other beauty services in Auckland also need a council licence, at $329 a year for one low-risk service or $441 for several (Auckland Council).
If you're mobile, it's the driving. The calculator uses Inland Revenue's 2025–26 running-cost rate for a petrol car, 37 cents a kilometre, which covers fuel and upkeep but not insurance or depreciation (Inland Revenue). Its full rate for the first 14,000 km a year, which does cover those, is $1.20, so put that in if the car's mainly for work.
Product is harder to pin down. We couldn't find reliable figures for how much a service uses, so the calculator starts everything at $0 and lets you skip that step. Your own invoices will tell you: add up a month's product and divide it by the services you did.
Card fees are worth a look if most clients pay by card. Stripe, for example, charges 2.65% plus 30 cents for a New Zealand card online, and from 2.6% plus 5 cents in person (Stripe).
Then there's tax. Working for yourself, you pay your own income tax and ACC levies, and if you average 30 hours a week or more, ACC charges its levies on at least $50,501 of income for 2026–27, even in a quiet year (ACC, CoverPlus calculator). The government's business site suggests charging at least 20% more than a similar salaried job, which it says covers "things an employee would pay if you had a salaried job, like ACC, holidays and sick leave" (business.govt.nz). The calculator works those out directly instead. It adds your ACC, and your weeks off are unpaid, so make sure they leave room for the odd sick day as well as holidays.
GST
Once your takings reach $60,000 over 12 months, or you expect them to, you have to register for GST (Inland Revenue). From then on 3/23 of what clients pay goes to Inland Revenue, less the GST in your own costs. Your prices have to account for it too. The Commerce Commission says prices "must include or be clear about the 15% Goods and Services Tax (GST)" (Commerce Commission), so the prices the calculator gives you include it whenever you'd be registered.
That's also why a small change can make the prices jump. Just past $60,000 you'd take home less than just under it, so the calculator finds the lowest price that still gets you there, which is sometimes the one that keeps you under. If you're already registered with lower takings, tick the box under More settings.
When your figures come out above the going rate
Sometimes what your figures come to is more than most people around you charge. It happens, and it isn't necessarily a problem. The typical prices here come from other Auckland listings, but someone else's price list doesn't tell you whether it's actually working for them.
If it does, a few things can shift it. Filling more of your week usually makes the most difference, as the Quiet, Steady and Busy figures show, and some costs can be trimmed, like a rent that's more than you need. Some people price above the going rate and are open with their clients about why, which tends to go down better with people who already know their work. The government's guide also suggests keeping track of how long each job takes (business.govt.nz), and it's a good habit to get into.
If yours comes out well under the going rate, you've got some room to move, and what you do with it is up to you.
Sources
Checked between 26 September and 3 October 2026.
- business.govt.nz (MBIE), How to price a job (last reviewed 25 June 2025)
- Zenoti, The complete salon revenue management guide (13 July 2026), staff utilisation benchmarks for 2025
- Aveda Means Business, Must-have reports (and practices) to grow your business (10 November 2014)
- Inland Revenue, Registering for GST
- Commerce Commission, Pricing
- Inland Revenue, Kilometre rates 2025–2026
- Tax and ACC: Inland Revenue, Tax rates for individuals, Independent earner tax credit, ACC earners' levy rates and KiwiSaver changes; ACC, Calculating your levies (minimum and maximum liable income), the CoverPlus calculator and Estimate your levy (self-employed hairdressing and massage therapy, 2026–27)
- Auckland Council, Health and beauty licence fees
- Stripe, Pricing and fees (New Zealand)
- Tahatū Career Navigator, Hairdresser and barber, Nail technician, Beauty therapist, Make-up artist and Massage therapist
- Starting prices, lengths and chair rents: the Auckland figures behind our pay calculator, from Fresha's Auckland listings, salon price lists and advertised rents, checked 26 September 2026
- More typical prices, checked 3 October 2026: Fresha's Auckland listings for pedicures, acrylic nails, children's haircuts, beard trims, brow lamination, eyebrow tinting and massage (relaxing, deep tissue, full body, therapeutic)
- Independent Auckland price lists, checked 3 October 2026: The Collective, FMK Hair Design, Ponsonby Hair, Hair by Toni, Aube, Fadezone, The Gentry, Crystal's Nails and Beauty, Nail Garden, Le Beauty, Brazilian Beauty Therapy, iGlow Spa, Blinkroom, Lalalashes, The Beauty Merchant, Fresh and Flawless, The House of Makeup, Jinal Jasani, Remedy Home Massage, The Massage Studio and Metta Massage
- US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Selected Sectors: Industry by Products for the U.S. and States: 2022 (beauty salons, barber shops and nail salons), and the NAPCS product list for personal care services
- YouGov, Hair Debates survey (1,000 US adults, 23–30 May 2023)
- Meevo, The 6 Most Important KPIs Every Salon or Spa Should Track
- Zenoti, Beauty and Wellness Industry Statistics 2025 (2024 data)
- The Benchmarking Company in GCI Magazine, Obsessed with Nail Care (27 June 2025)