Barbershops led the growth in UK hair and beauty premises in the first half of 2025, according to the National Hair & Beauty Federation. They are also under closer scrutiny than at any time before: since 1 October 2026, right to work checks extend beyond employees to workers and individual subcontractors, and the National Crime Agency has twice targeted barbershops in high street crackdowns.
No national licence is needed to open a barbershop or to cut hair for money in the UK. What a new shop meets instead is HMRC on employment status and VAT, the Home Office on right to work, and in some areas a council registration with hygiene byelaws. The tax and immigration rules below are UK-wide; council registration varies by authority. Much of the chair rental framework is shared with salons and set out in more detail in how to open a hair salon in the UK.
What is a barbershop business?
A barbershop business cuts and styles hair and grooms beards, mostly for men, from premises, and it is run either with employed barbers, with self-employed barbers who rent a chair and serve their own clients, or with a mix of the two. Compared with a salon it usually runs on shorter appointments, lower prices and more walk-in trade, often adds wet shaving with a razor, and needs less plumbing, since most services do not involve washing or colouring hair.
How to open a barbershop in the UK, step by step
The checklist, in the order openings usually run:
- Staffing model chosen: employed barbers, chair renters or both
- Right to work position checked under the October 2026 rules
- Each chair costed on cuts per day
- VAT position worked out for the model chosen
- Site found and the lease checked for chair rental
- Council registration and hygiene byelaws checked
- Shaving and tool hygiene set up
- Qualifications, pay and tips rules in place
- Written agreements matched to how the shop works
- Bookings, walk-ins and card payments organised
| Stage | What typically happens |
|---|---|
| Weeks 1 to 4 | Model chosen, chairs costed, site search, business registered with HMRC or Companies House |
| Weeks 5 to 8 | Lease agreed, council registration checked, chair rental or employment agreements drafted |
| Weeks 9 to 12 | Fit-out, booking and payment systems, barbers recruited and checked, soft opening |
| Months 4 to 12 | Walk-in and booked trade built, chair occupancy reviewed, prices adjusted |
1. Choose the staffing model
In a barbershop, the model decides who keeps the takings, who owns the client and who carries an empty chair. An employed barber cuts the shop’s customers for a wage; a chair renter pays the shop a fixed rent or a percentage, sets their own prices and keeps their own clients. HMRC’s guidance for hair and beauty, published on 9 May 2025, judges status from working practice: who sets the hours and prices, who provides the clients, who the client pays, and who supervises. A barber who works the shop’s walk-in queue at the shop’s prices is very hard to describe as self-employed, whatever the agreement says.
A common path to ownership runs through someone else’s chair first. James Harding, profiled by the trade magazine Modern Barber, took an NVQ Level 2 in barbering in 2018, qualified in February 2019, learned the trade in a local shop and opened Rogues Barbershop in Blackburn in July 2020. Asked to advise him, Johnny Baba, owner of BarberBarber in Manchester, said cutting skill and a vision for the shop are both needed, that social media followers mean nothing unless they turn into takings, and that he is in his own shop at 8 am every morning talking to customers.
2. Check the right to work position under the new rules
From 1 October 2026, the Home Office right to work scheme covers people engaged under a worker’s contract and individual subcontractors, not only employees. The Home Office code of practice excludes genuinely self-employed people who contract directly with their own clients, but states that describing someone as self-employed does not settle it; how the work is actually arranged does. For a barbershop, the line runs through the staffing model:
- Employed barbers: a right to work check before the first day, as before
- Barbers paid by the shop to cut the shop’s customers: likely to be workers or individual subcontractors, and in scope for engagements starting on or after 1 October 2026
- Chair renters serving their own clients: genuinely self-employed businesses contracting with their own customers fall outside the scheme
Good to know
The civil penalty for illegal working is up to £45,000 per worker for a first breach and £60,000 for a repeat breach within three years. A compliant check carried out before work starts gives the business a statutory excuse. For the newly covered groups, penalties apply only where the engagement began on or after 1 October 2026, so the check belongs in the onboarding of every barber who starts from now on.
3. Cost each chair on cuts per day
Barbering is sold in slots. The worked example uses an eight-hour day, 30-minute appointments and a £20 cut, illustrative inputs for a shop not yet registered for VAT:
| One chair, one day | Employed, half booked | Employed, three-quarters booked | Chair rented at £100 a week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cuts sold, from 16 possible slots | 8 | 12 | Barber’s own clients |
| Takings to the shop | £160 | £240 | £20 of rent |
| Wage at £13.00 an hour for 8 hours | £104 | £104 | None |
| Left before shop rent and overheads | £56 | £136 | £20 |
An employed chair pays only when it is busy: at half its slots it earns the shop less than three times what a chair renter pays, and in a quiet week it can lose money while the rented chair still pays its £100. Chair rents are set shop by shop; adverts on the Find a Job service in 2026 show £100 a week in East Ham and chairs offered to barbers in Slough who bring even a small client base.
Prices work best when set by the minute rather than copied from the shop down the road. In a barbershop, a £20 cut that takes 30 minutes earns £40 an hour of chair time; the same £20 for a skin fade that takes 45 minutes earns £26.67. Timing each service for a fortnight, then pricing longer services in proportion, stops the most popular cut from quietly becoming the least profitable one.
4. Work out the VAT position
VAT registration is compulsory once taxable turnover passes £90,000 in a rolling 12 months. On the illustrative figures, one busy employed chair taking 12 cuts at £20 for five and a half days a week over 50 weeks turns over £66,000; three such chairs reach £198,000, well over the threshold.
Where barbers genuinely rent chairs and serve their own clients, each renter’s own takings count towards their own threshold, and the shop’s taxable turnover is the rent and services it charges, plus any cutting the owner does personally. HMRC treats chair rent from a VAT-registered shop as standard-rated, and its VAT manual tells officers to test a shop’s agreements against how it actually works.
5. Find the site and check the lease
A barbershop typically takes a small unit on a high street or residential parade, and needs less plumbing than a salon: a basin or two for washing and towels rather than a row of backwashes. From 1 April 2026, hair and beauty premises in England qualify for the lower retail, hospitality and leisure business rates multipliers: 38.2p below £51,000 rateable value and 43.0p above it, and Small Business Rate Relief removes the bill entirely at a rateable value of £12,000 or less. The lease terms that matter most are whether the landlord permits subletting chairs to self-employed barbers, the length and the break clause.
The high street is not the only option. Gould Barbers, founded by brothers who trained in their father’s shop, operates around 50 barbershops inside Tesco stores, according to its founder’s 2026 statement to the National Hair & Beauty Federation; local press dates the partnership to 2016. A barbershop inside a supermarket, gym or shopping centre trades on footfall the host already generates, in exchange for the host’s opening hours and terms.
6. Check council registration and byelaws
There is no national licence for a barbershop. Some councils require barbers and hairdressers to register their premises: Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole does so free of charge for fixed and mobile operators, and Blaby District Council sends an officer to visit before registration and includes mobile barbers.
London boroughs such as Enfield register them under the Greater London Council (General Powers) Act 1967, while others, such as Tamworth, state that the requirement was removed in 1994. Where byelaws exist under section 77 of the Public Health Act 1961, they cover the cleanliness of the premises, instruments, towels and the barbers themselves.
7. Set up shaving and tool hygiene
Wet shaving is where a barbershop carries a health risk a salon does not. Lancaster City Council’s guidance for barbers states that only single-use razor blades are to be used, because reused or poorly sterilised razors risk transmitting HIV and hepatitis B and C, and Blaby’s guidance requires used blades to go straight into a sharps box. The British Barbers’ Association publishes a code of practice covering single-use items, wet shaving, blood-borne disease and contra-indications, which councils such as Lancaster distribute to barbers:
- Blades: a new single-use blade for every client, disposed of in a sharps container
- Clippers and scissors: hair brushed off, cleaned and disinfected between clients, with enough sets to allow it at busy times
- Towels and capes: freshly laundered or single-use, with neck strips
- Hands and gloves: hand washing between clients, single-use gloves for wet work and any contact with blood
Extra services in a barbershop bring extra registrations. Ear piercing, cosmetic piercing and semi-permanent skin colouring, which includes scalp micropigmentation, require both the practitioner and the premises to be registered with the council under the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982 where the council has adopted those powers, and carrying them out before registration is approved is an offence.
Fees are set locally: Stafford charges £101.45 to register premises for ear piercing and £61.30 for each person, and Chichester £180 per premises and £70 per practitioner. Tattooing anyone under 18 is an offence whatever a parent says, and in London, treatments beyond hairdressing fall under the borough’s special treatment licence.
8. Recruit, train and set the pay rules
No qualification is legally required to cut hair or shave a face. The voluntary register created by the Hairdressers (Registration) Act 1964, now run by the Hair and Barber Council, covers England, Wales and Scotland, and practising unregistered is not an offence. Pay rules apply to employed barbers in full:
- Pay: the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour at 21 and over from 1 April 2026, £10.85 at 18 to 20 and £8.00 for apprentices under 19 or in their first year
- Tips: since 1 October 2024, all tips paid through the business pass to staff without deductions, and tips never count towards the minimum wage; chair renters keep their own
- Employer costs: employer National Insurance at 15% above £5,000 a year, offset by the £10,500 Employment Allowance
An apprentice is the cheapest way for a barbershop to grow its own barbers, and the government added to the incentives in 2026. For employers that do not pay the apprenticeship levy, which covers almost every barbershop:
| Apprentice aged 16 to 18, first year | Figure |
|---|---|
| Wage at £8.00 an hour, 35 hours a week, 52 weeks | £14,560 |
| Training and assessment | Fully funded for apprentices aged 16 to 24 from August 2026 |
| £1,000 payment for hiring an apprentice aged 16 to 18 | minus £1,000 |
| £2,000 small employer hiring payment, apprentices aged 16 to 24 starting from 1 October 2026 | minus £2,000 |
| Employer National Insurance on apprentices under 25, up to £50,270 | None |
| Net first-year cost to the shop | £11,560 |
9. Write agreements that match how the shop works
For chair renters, the guidelines in HMRC’s VAT manual describe a defensible arrangement: the barber’s client records belong to the barber, takings belong to the barber whether or not the shop collects them, the barber sets their own prices and hours, insures their own business, and the rent and any services are set out in writing. A barbershop that hands walk-ins to renters in rotation, sets their prices or fixes their hours is drifting towards employment on HMRC’s indicators and towards the right to work scheme on the Home Office’s.
10. Organise bookings, walk-ins and payments
- Walk-ins and bookings: a visible queue system for walk-ins alongside online booking for regulars, so neither side waits on the other
- Booking marketplaces: Fresha’s fee for a new client found through its marketplace is reported at 20% of the first booking with a UK minimum of £4 plus VAT, so a new client on a £20 cut costs £4.80, or 24%; the fee is charged once, which makes it worth paying only for clients who come back
- Deposits: a deposit or card hold on longer services such as cut and shave protects the most valuable slots from no-shows
- Card payments: card and online payments create the transaction records that support the accounts, the VAT position and any lender’s or buyer’s review
- Search: a Google Business Profile with accurate hours, current prices and photographs of finished cuts sends local searches to the shop’s own booking page
The first weeks of a barbershop rarely look like the plan. Morgan Turner, who opened Grade A Barbershop in Inverurie at 19, told the Press and Journal he started with walk-ins only, found the queue too long by 5 pm within a couple of weeks and moved to a booking system; his shop opens 11 am to 7 pm Tuesday to Friday and 10 am to 4.30 pm at weekends.
At Doc Barnet in Gloucester, which opened with three barbers on six chairs, owner Alex Ibrahim told Punchline Gloucester the clientele has to be built up. Opening with fewer staffed chairs than the shop holds, and hours set around when local clients can actually come, keeps the wage bill in step with the diary.
Types of barbershop
| Model | How it works |
|---|---|
| Walk-in barbershop | Mostly unbooked trade at lower prices, high volume, employed or rented chairs |
| Booked or premium barbershop | Appointments, longer services such as hot towel shaves, higher prices |
| Chair rental barbershop | Self-employed barbers rent chairs and serve their own clients; the shop earns rent |
| Mixed shop | Employed barbers and renters side by side, with separate prices, tills and agreements |
| Mobile barber | No premises; the barber is self-employed, and registration still applies in councils such as Bournemouth and Blaby |
| Home or garden studio | A cabin or converted room; Cushty Cuts in Kent moved into a 3.6 metre square garden cabin after high street costs rose; business rates can apply where clients visit |
| Partnership with a brand | A barber runs a branded shop as owner-manager in partnership with an existing group, as at Jax Barbershops in Leeds |
How much does it cost to open a barbershop?
No official UK average start-up cost exists for a barbershop. What can be stated is what the statutory lines cost, what chair rents are advertised at and what one franchisor publishes:
| Cost line | Published figure |
|---|---|
| Council registration | Free where required, for example in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole |
| Business rates, England | Rateable value × 38.2p below £51,000; Small Business Rate Relief removes the bill at £12,000 or less |
| Chair rent, example | £100 a week, East Ham advert on the Find a Job service, February 2026 |
| Franchised shop | Gentlemen Barber Club: typical investment of £75,000 to £100,000 per shop, on a franchise page last updated in August 2022 |
| Staff | £12.71 an hour at 21 and over; employer NI 15% above £5,000, less the £10,500 Employment Allowance |
The lines that move a start-up budget most are:
- The lease, including any premium and the rent deposit
- Barber chairs, mirrors, stations and lighting
- A basin, hot water and towel laundry
- Clippers, trimmers, scissors and enough duplicate sets to disinfect between clients
- Booking and payment systems and professional fees
- Insurance: employers’ liability is compulsory once anyone is employed; public and treatment liability cover the chair, and chair renters insure their own business
- Working capital for the weeks before regulars build up
What real barbershop openings have cost
| Opening | What was reported |
|---|---|
| Grade A Barbershop, Inverurie | A five-figure sum on flooring, chairs, furniture and decoration, by a 19-year-old self-taught barber |
| Craft Barber Shop, Banbridge | £50,000 investment and six new jobs |
| Doc Barnet, Gloucester Quays, March 2026 | £135,000 investment for a six-chair shop opening with three barbers and one stylist |
| Cushty Cuts, Kent | High street costs rose 30%, to more than £2,000 a month before any profit; the owner moved into a garden cabin |
What the kit costs
| Item | Published price |
|---|---|
| Barber chair, range at one specialist supplier | £599 to £3,360 excluding VAT, Aston & Fincher |
| REM Emperor Select barber chair | £1,155 excluding VAT, £1,386 including VAT, Ellisons |
| REM barber chairs, British-made range | £1,390 to £1,680, Natural Living, an approved REM retailer |
| Card reader | Square Reader £19 plus VAT; SumUp readers from £25 |
Card fees are small per cut but large over a year. SumUp publishes 1.69% for in-person card payments, or 0.99% on its £19 a month plan, and Square charges 1.75%. At £5,000 a month on cards, that is £84.50 with SumUp, £87.50 with Square, or £68.50 on the monthly plan, which pays for itself above roughly £2,700 a month in card takings.
A month in a three-chair shop
The worked example takes an owner cutting in one chair and two chair renters paying £100 a week each, with illustrative overheads for a small unit qualifying for full Small Business Rate Relief:
| Monthly line | Figure |
|---|---|
| Rent | £1,500 |
| Utilities, insurance, booking software and card fees | £510 |
| Consumables, laundry and marketing | £350 |
| Overheads | £2,360 |
| Chair rent from two renters at £100 a week | minus £867 |
| Left for the owner’s chair to cover | £1,493, or 75 cuts at £20 |
| Owner’s takings at 60% of slots over 22 days | £4,224 |
| Owner’s income before tax | £2,731 |
The owner’s chair carries the shop: about three and a half cuts a day cover the overheads, and everything after that is income. On these figures the shop also stays below the VAT threshold, since the owner’s takings and the rent together come to about £61,000 a year.
Opening a barbershop on a low budget
The lowest-cost routes avoid a fit-out. A barber can rent a chair in an existing shop to build a following, work mobile, which still means registering where councils require it, or take over a trading barbershop with the chairs and stations in place. Start Up Loans lends up to £25,000 per applicant at a fixed 7.5%, unsecured, which also covers much of the entry range for the low cost franchises in the UK.
Barbershop franchise opportunities in the UK
Franchising in the UK is governed by general contract law, with no franchise statute and no statutory disclosure, so entry figures are taken only from each brand’s own pages, as explained in what a franchise is. Few UK barber franchisors publish figures on their own sites; investment numbers attributed to them elsewhere come from directory listings and are not used here.
- Gentlemen Barber Club, which runs shops in Solihull, Knowle and Shirley, states a typical investment of £75,000 to £100,000 per shop, depending on the site, and describes a membership model. The page was last updated in August 2022, and its description of the model refers to a cutting system associated with another brand, both reasons to confirm every term directly before relying on it
Editor’s tip
Buying an existing barbershop now calls for more checking than it used to. The National Crime Agency’s Operation Machinize targeted barbershops and other cash-heavy high street businesses in April 2025, visiting 380 premises, and a second phase in October 2025 reached 2,734 premises across the UK. Card payment records, bank statements matched to the till, the right to work file and the chair rental agreements are what show whether the takings a seller quotes are real.
The practical difficulties operators report
- Empty chairs cost twice: an employed barber is paid in a quiet week, and a chair renter who leaves takes their clients with them
- Status drifts: giving renters walk-ins, set prices or set hours moves the arrangement towards employment for HMRC and into the right to work scheme for the Home Office
- The VAT threshold arrives quickly: two or three busy employed chairs can pass £90,000, while renters each stay below it
- Cash draws attention: barbershops have been named in national crackdowns on cash-intensive businesses, which makes clean records part of the shop’s credibility
- Competition is close: growth in the sector has been led by barbershops, so new shops often open within sight of others
- Shaving carries hygiene risk: a single reused blade is the kind of failure an inspection or a complaint finds first in a barbershop
The bottom line
Opening a barbershop in the UK needs no national licence and modest capital, but the staffing model now carries two tests rather than one, which is why a ready-made model is part of what the beauty and wellbeing franchises sell. HMRC judges employment status from how the shop works, and since 1 October 2026 the Home Office right to work scheme reaches workers and individual subcontractors, with penalties of up to £60,000 per worker.
On illustrative figures, an employed chair earns the shop £56 a day at half its slots and £136 at three-quarters, against £20 a day from a chair rented at £100 a week, so occupancy, not price, decides which model pays.
Frequently asked questions about opening a barbershop in the UK
There is no national licence. Some councils require barbers to register their premises, often free of charge, and apply hygiene byelaws under section 77 of the Public Health Act 1961; others removed registration in 1994. Registration can cover mobile barbers too, as in Bournemouth and Blaby.
No qualification is legally required to cut hair or shave a face. The Hairdressers (Registration) Act 1964 created a voluntary register, now run by the Hair and Barber Council, for England, Wales and Scotland, and practising unregistered is not an offence.
Since 1 October 2026 the right to work scheme covers workers and individual subcontractors as well as employees. Genuinely self-employed barbers who rent a chair and contract with their own clients fall outside it, but the Home Office looks at how the work is arranged, not the label, and barbers paid by the shop to cut its customers are likely in scope.
No national average is published. Adverts on the government’s Find a Job service in 2026 show a barber’s chair at £100 a week in East Ham, and other shops charge a percentage of takings instead. A VAT-registered shop adds VAT to the rent it charges.
Yes, where the shop is VAT-registered. HMRC treats chair rental as a standard-rated supply because the shop provides more than the space, such as basins, reception and a waiting area.
Council guidance says no. Lancaster City Council’s guidance for barbers states that only single-use razor blades are to be used, because reused or poorly sterilised razors risk transmitting HIV and hepatitis B and C, and used blades go straight into a sharps container.
No official UK average exists, but reported openings show the range: a five-figure sum for a small shop in Inverurie, £50,000 for Craft Barber Shop in Banbridge and £135,000 for a six-chair Doc Barnet shop in Gloucester in 2026. Barber chairs alone cost from about £600 to over £3,000 each excluding VAT at UK suppliers.
On illustrative hours, an apprentice aged 16 to 18 working 35 hours a week at the £8.00 apprentice rate costs £14,560 in wages in the first year. For barbershops that do not pay the apprenticeship levy, training is fully funded for under-25s from August 2026, a £1,000 payment applies for 16 to 18 year olds and a £2,000 hiring payment applies to apprentices aged 16 to 24 starting from 1 October 2026, bringing the net cost to about £11,560.
The cheapest routes avoid a fit-out: renting a chair in an existing shop to build a following, working as a mobile barber, or taking over a trading barbershop. Start Up Loans lends up to £25,000 per applicant at a fixed 7.5%.
Card payment records, bank statements matched to the till, the right-to-work file and the chair rental agreements. Barbershops were among the cash-intensive businesses targeted by the National Crime Agency’s Operation Machinize in 2025, which makes verifiable takings central to any purchase.
