What it costs a UK salon to get a new client (2026)

If you are writing about starting, running or lending to a UK salon, this is the figure you cannot find: what one new client costs to buy. Nobody publishes it for the UK, so this page builds it from public inputs, shows every step of the arithmetic, and says plainly which numbers were measured by someone else and which were derived here.

What a new client costs, by route

Route	What it costs	Measured or derived	Source, read 6 September 2026
Search advertising	£29 to £33 per enquiry	Derived from US benchmark medians, converted	WordStream and LocaliQ 2026 benchmarks
Treatwell marketplace	35% plus VAT, so 42% of the new client’s first booking	Read off the company’s own page	Treatwell partner pricing
Fresha marketplace	20% of the new client’s first booking, one time	Read off the company’s own page	Fresha pricing
Direct bookings on either platform	Nothing	Read off the companies’ own pages	Treatwell, Fresha

The two halves of that table are not in the same unit, and the section below on enquiries and clients explains why that matters more than any single number here.

The search route

Three figures do the work, all from the same table, all read on 6 September 2026. In the beauty and personal care cut of the WordStream and LocaliQ 2026 search advertising benchmarks, the average cost per click is $4.62, the average conversion rate is 10.35%, and the average cost per lead is $39.25. That report states its own limits: it covers 13,474 US-based search campaigns running between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026, the averages are medians rather than means, and all values are in US dollars.

Converting needs a dated rate. The Bank of England daily spot rate read on 6 September 2026 was £1 = $1.3518, for 3 September 2026, the most recent day on the database.

There are two honest routes through the arithmetic and they do not agree.

1. Start with the click. $4.62 divided by 1.3518 is £3.42 a click. At a 10.35% conversion rate it takes 9.66 clicks to produce one enquiry. 9.66 clicks at £3.42 is £33.02 an enquiry.
2. Start with the published cost per lead. $39.25 divided by 1.3518 is £29.04 an enquiry.

The gap is £3.98, and it is not a mistake in either chain. Each of the four published numbers is a separate median taken across the same 13,474 campaigns, and medians do not divide into one another the way means do. So the defensible output is a band, £29 to £33, not a single confident figure.

Two things this band is not. It is not a UK measurement: the campaigns are American, and search prices are set by local competition. It is not hairdressing: “beauty and personal care” is one of 23 industry cuts in that report and it is wider than a hair salon. It is the best available public starting point, and it is labelled as such rather than dressed up as a British figure.

The marketplace route

The other way to buy a new client is to let a booking marketplace introduce her and take a share of what she spends first time. Both companies publish that share on their own pages.

Treatwell’s partner pricing page says it charges “a 35% commission on first bookings made by new clients we bring you from the marketplace”, that repeat bookings are 0%, that a 2.5% plus VAT processing fee applies only if a client pays online in advance, and that “All commissions and fees are subject to VAT”. The UK standard rate of VAT is 20%, so 35% plus VAT is 42% of the booking in money that leaves the salon. On a £30 first booking that is £12.60. On £60 it is £25.20. On £120 it is £50.40. The same page says nothing is charged on bookings made directly with the salon, including calls, texts and WhatsApp messages, clients the salon adds itself, and the Book Now button on its own website and social accounts.

Fresha’s pricing page, read the same day, lists marketplace new clients at “20% one-time commission” with a “Minimum fee of $6 per client”, returning clients at no fee, and direct booking links, Facebook, Instagram and Google bookings all free. Two notes on reading it. The page served to us prices everything in US dollars and says rates are exclusive of local sales taxes, so the percentage is quoted here and the minimum fee is not converted into pounds. And Fresha’s own help centre states the fee also applies to clients who view the marketplace profile first and then book through the salon’s own website or social pages, which is worth knowing before treating an own-website booking as free.

At 20%, the same three bookings cost £6.00, £12.00 and £24.00.

Enquiries and clients are not the same unit

This is the reason the question has no clean answer anywhere, and it is worth stating before anyone quotes a figure from this page.

Search advertising is billed and measured in enquiries. The marketplace commission is charged per new client who actually books. To turn one into the other you need the share of enquiries that become booked clients, and no UK source publishes that for salons.

So here is the arithmetic with that share left as a stated assumption rather than a claim. These are scenarios, not measurements.

If this share of enquiries books	Cost per new client
100%	£29 to £33
70%	£41 to £47
50%	£58 to £66

Where the two routes cross

Treatwell’s 42% equals £29.04 on a first booking of £69.14, and £33.02 on a first booking of £78.62. So on the most generous possible reading, where every enquiry becomes a client, the marketplace is the cheaper way to buy a first-time client below a booking value of roughly £69, and the dearer way above roughly £79.

That crossover moves fast once the generous assumption goes. If 70% of enquiries book, search costs £41 to £47 a client and the crossover moves to a first booking of roughly £99 to £112.

The honest summary: for a cheap first appointment the marketplace commission is small in money terms, and for an expensive one it is the largest single acquisition cost a salon pays. The commission is charged once per new client either way, including on the ones who never come back.

What our own account shows

We count calls, form enquiries and booking click-outs, not bookings, because the marketplaces do not share booking data and no advertising platform can tell a salon which client came from which search.

From our own reporting, one salon, one month: £300 spent, 21 enquiries, about £14 an enquiry.

That is one account over one month. It is not a benchmark and it is not a correction to the band above, but it is real, it is ours, and it sits well below the derived £29 to £33. As more accounts accumulate, this page will be updated in place with a measured UK figure and the derivation will be retired rather than quietly left standing.

Method

Every derived figure on this page was built as follows, from inputs read on 6 September 2026.

The cost per enquiry starts from the beauty and personal care row of the WordStream and LocaliQ 2026 search advertising benchmarks: cost per click $4.62, conversion rate 10.35%, cost per lead $39.25, from 13,474 US-based campaigns running 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026, published as medians in US dollars. Dollars were converted at the Bank of England daily spot rate of $1.3518 to the pound for 3 September 2026, the most recent rate on the database when it was read. Chain one: $4.62 divided by 1.3518 gives £3.42 a click, and one enquiry at a 10.35% conversion rate takes 9.66 clicks, so £33.02. Chain two: $39.25 divided by 1.3518 gives £29.04. Both are reported, as a band.

The marketplace figures are not derived. They are quoted from each company’s own pricing page on the date shown, and the only arithmetic applied is VAT at the UK standard rate of 20% to Treatwell’s stated 35%, giving 42%, and that percentage applied to three example booking values. The example booking values are illustrations chosen to span a typical range of first appointments, not measurements of what UK salons charge.

The crossover figures divide the derived cost per enquiry by 0.42, and the scenario table divides it by the stated share of enquiries that book. Both carry the same caveat: an enquiry is not a client, and any figure that treats them as equivalent flatters the advertising route.

Nothing on this page is our own measurement except the single account month named above, and that is labelled where it appears.

What would change these figures

A UK-specific cost per click for hair services, measured rather than converted. A published share of salon enquiries that become booked clients. A change to either marketplace’s commission, which is why every figure here carries the date it was read. This page is maintained at one address and updated in place rather than reissued each year, so a citation made today keeps working.

For the wider set of UK salon marketing numbers this figure sits inside, see UK Salon Marketing Statistics.