How UK clients find and book a salon (2026)

This page collects what has actually been published about how UK clients find a salon, how they book it and how much notice they give. Every figure links to where it was published and carries the date it was true. Each one also keeps its own denominator, because the two platforms that publish the most disagree, and the reason they disagree is the useful part. Every source was read on 11 October 2026.

The short version

• Clients booking through a marketplace book late and out of hours. On Treatwell, 47% of appointments are booked less than 24 hours ahead and 52% outside standard working hours, per Treatwell data reported by Professional Beauty on 3 August 2026.
• Clients booking through salon software book further ahead. Across Salon Manager’s UK salons in 2025, the median gap between booking and appointment was 8 days, and 38% of online bookings came in while the salon was shut, per Salon Manager’s UK Salon Industry Benchmarks 2025.
• The newest UK figure we found on where clients look for a new salon is from 2022, and it was published without a sample size. See where clients look.

How much notice clients give

• 47% of Treatwell appointments are booked less than 24 hours ahead. Treatwell’s internal booking data covering 2025 to 2026, reported by Professional Beauty on 3 August 2026. The report does not say whether this is UK bookings only or every market Treatwell runs in.
• Nails, waxing and brows are the most common last-minute bookings on Treatwell, same report, 3 August 2026. So this is a beauty-led figure, not a hair one.
• The median booking lead time was 8 days across UK activity recorded by Salon Manager in calendar year 2025, per Salon Manager’s 2025 benchmarks. Half of the analysed bookings were made 8 days or less ahead and half were made further ahead. It is a median, not an average.

These two do not contradict each other. They describe different clients. On Treatwell’s figure, close to half of bookings are made inside a day. On Salon Manager’s, half are made more than eight days out. Treatwell is a marketplace, where a client is often choosing a venue as well as a time. Salon Manager is the software a salon runs its own diary on, so its bookings include the salon’s existing clients booking through the salon’s own link. Neither platform publishes that split, so this is a reading of who each platform serves, not a measured difference.

When clients book

• 52% of Treatwell appointments are booked outside standard working hours, with Sunday evenings singled out as a popular time to book for the week ahead. Professional Beauty, 3 August 2026, reporting Treatwell data covering 2025 to 2026. The report does not define standard working hours.
• 38% of online bookings were made while the salon was recorded as closed, across UK activity recorded by Salon Manager in 2025, per Salon Manager’s 2025 benchmarks. The denominator is online bookings only, not all appointments.

The gap between Treatwell’s 52% and Salon Manager’s 38% is mostly a difference in what is being measured. Treatwell counts against a standard working day. Salon Manager counts against each salon’s own recorded opening hours, so a salon open until 8pm on a Thursday counts a 7pm booking as made while open. And Treatwell divides by all of its appointments, Salon Manager by online bookings alone. What both say is the same thing: a large share of bookings are made outside working hours, and on Salon Manager’s measure more than a third of online bookings arrive while the salon is shut.

Do not multiply the two Salon Manager figures together. Salon Manager’s benchmarks page says plainly that its figures use different denominators and should not be combined. Taking 38% of 59% would treat online bookings and analysed appointments as the same set of records, and Salon Manager does not say they are. We do not publish that product, and it is not a share of all appointments.

How clients book

• 59% of analysed appointments were created through online booking, across UK activity recorded by Salon Manager in 2025, per Salon Manager’s 2025 benchmarks. It measures how the booking was made, not whether the client turned up.
• 41 in every 100 of those appointments were made some other way. Derived: 100 minus 59 = 41, from the same Salon Manager benchmarks. Salon Manager does not publish how those were made, so how many were by phone, at the desk or otherwise is not known from this source.
• 87% of measured visitors to Salon Manager’s online booking pages completed a booking. Salon Manager, 2025. Derived: 100 minus 87 = 13 in every 100 left without booking. This counts Salon Manager’s own booking pages only, not visitors to a salon’s main website.
• For context only, not UK: in US and Canada salons in 2024, the average (median) salon booked 30% of appointments online, the top 25% by revenue 43%, and the top 10% by revenue 59%, per Zenoti’s 2025 Benchmark Report, page dated 9 March 2026. Salon Manager draws the same comparison itself and calls it directional, which is right: different country, different year, different businesses.

Where clients look for a new salon

This is the thinnest part of the record. The newest UK figure we found that splits out where clients look is four years old, and it comes from a salon software company describing its own survey.

• Looking for a new hair salon, 45% searched Google, 30% searched social media, 13% used Google Maps and 6% used Yelp. Phorest research, reported by BarberEVO on 22 August 2022.
• Looking for a beauty salon, the order flips: 42% searched social media, 32% Google, 9% Google Maps and 2% Yelp. Same report, 22 August 2022.
• Derived from those two lines: for hair, Google led social media by 15 points (45 minus 30). For beauty, social media led Google by 10 points (42 minus 32).
• 34% said online reviews and reputation influenced their choice of their current hair salon, and 28% said they look to online reviews when choosing a beauty salon. BarberEVO, 22 August 2022.

The report does not give the sample size, the fieldwork dates, or whether people could name more than one route. Read these as a direction, not a measurement.

What a client actually finds when she does search Google for a hairdresser, counted result by result, is on who ranks when a UK client searches for a salon.

Figures this page leaves out

• The OnePoll holiday survey in the same Treatwell release. It found 54% of 2,000 UK adults aged 16 and over who had been on holiday call themselves plan-ahead travellers, against 11% last-minute, surveyed 30 June to 6 July 2026, per Professional Beauty. It is a different sample answering a question about holidays, not salon bookings, so it is not set against Treatwell’s booking data here.
• Three percentages that circulate on salon marketing pages: that 82% of salon bookings are made on a mobile, that 67% of UK consumers prefer to book beauty services online, and that 86% of salon-related searches happen on mobile. The 2026 page where we read them on 11 October 2026 lists its sources as a group at the end, with no link beside any of the three, and we did not find the measurement behind them. They are not used here. If you know where one was measured, tell us and we will add it with its date.
• Salon Manager’s recorded no-show rate and average bill. Both are on the same benchmarks page, but they answer different questions and belong on pages about no-shows and client value.

What this does not measure

• Hair on its own. Treatwell’s last-minute figures are led by nails, waxing and brows. Salon Manager covers hair, beauty, barbering and spas together. Only the 2022 Phorest figures split hair from beauty.
• Marketplace against direct. No UK source we found publishes what share of salon bookings come through a marketplace and what share through the salon’s own link or phone.
• Which client came from which search. None of these sources follows a client from where she looked to where she booked.
• Every UK salon. Every figure here is a commercial company describing its own users. None is a national survey.

Method

Each source was opened and read in full on 11 October 2026, and each figure was copied with the definition its publisher gave it. Nothing was taken from a search summary or from memory. Treatwell’s figures are linked to the Professional Beauty report that carries Treatwell’s methodology note (internal booking data covering 2025 to 2026), because that is where the figures and the note appear together.

Each figure is kept beside its own denominator. Nothing on this page is averaged, weighted or combined across sources, and where two sources measure something that sounds alike, the difference in what they count is set out rather than smoothed over.

There are three derived figures, and each is a subtraction inside a single source with the arithmetic beside it: 100 minus 59 = 41 and 100 minus 87 = 13, both from Salon Manager’s 2025 benchmarks, and the 15-point and 10-point gaps between Google and social media, from the 2022 Phorest figures. Nothing is estimated or modelled. Once Salon Ads Studio has enough of its own account data on when salon enquiries arrive and how far ahead they book, that measured data will replace anything derived here, and this page will be re-read and re-dated rather than left standing.

Where this sits

This page is part of UK Salon Marketing Statistics, where the figures this studio maintains are collected.

Two neighbours, kept separate so that no figure is published twice. What a client finds when she searches is on who ranks when a UK client searches for a salon. What Treatwell, Fresha and Booksy charge a salon for the client they send is on what UK salon booking marketplaces charge.

Corrections and additions are welcome, and this page carries the date it was last read at the top.