The free salon service pricing worksheet (print, fill in, raise prices honestly).

Most independent salons price their menu the same way: open the booking software, look at the prices, change one or two by 5 euros, save, move on. That is not pricing. That is hoping. This post is the one-page worksheet that ends that pattern. You fill it in once per quarter, five minutes per service, on a Tuesday afternoon when the chair is quiet. By the end of the session you have a defensible floor price on every line, the exact gap between what you charge and what the math says you should, and a list of the three services that are bleeding the most margin right now. No spreadsheet skills. No accountant. No software to install. Print the worksheet, fill it in by hand, then act on the rows that fail. That is the whole product.

TL;DR

What this worksheet gives you

A pricing audit is a strange thing to ask a working salon owner to sit down and do. There is no fire to put out. No client complaining. The till still rings. So before walking you through the columns, here is what an honest hour with this worksheet actually delivers — five concrete outputs, not vague benefits.

1. A defensible floor price for every service on your menu. Not what the salon down the road charges. Not what felt right in 2023. The number underneath which you are working for the supplier, the landlord, and your tax authority — but not for yourself.
2. The exact margin gap on every line. Current price minus suggested price, in euros, per service. You will discover that 2-4 services are quietly bleeding most of the margin loss in the salon — and they are usually not the ones you would guess.
3. A shortlist of services to raise, hold, or retire. One action per row. No "we should probably look at this." Either the price moves, the service stays as-is, or the service comes off the menu.
4. A starting position for your next price rise email. Once the worksheet is filled in, the rise itself becomes a 90-minute admin job rather than a six-month anxiety. You know what moves, by how much, and the reason behind each change.
5. A baseline to compare against next quarter. Costs drift. Stylist wages step. Suppliers hike. The worksheet only works if you redo it — that is what turns a one-off audit into a 12-month operating rhythm.

The worksheet (one service at a time)

Ten columns, one row per service on your menu. Print one copy per service if you prefer, or one landscape A4 with 8-12 rows if you want the whole menu on one page. Either works.

Three things to notice before you start filling rows. First, columns 3, 4 and 5 are the only columns that require you to look up a number — once. The rest is arithmetic. Second, column 7 (target margin) is a strategy choice, not a calculation; we will walk through how to pick it. Third, column 10 (action) is the only one that matters for the business — the previous nine exist purely to make column 10 honest.

How to fill it in — 5 minutes per service

Sit down for one hour, with a coffee, with the door closed. Eight services in an hour is realistic if you have your numbers nearby. If you do not have your numbers nearby, this becomes a two-session job: 30 minutes pulling the inputs, 30 minutes per service doing the math. Either way, it is one afternoon per quarter — not a project.

1. 01
   Pull your three inputs once, before you start any row.

   Before the first service, write down three numbers on a sticky note: (a) your loaded stylist hourly cost — gross hourly rate or salary ÷ 4.33 ÷ 40, plus 25-32% employer social charges, divided by 75% productive utilisation; (b) your overhead per chair-hour — total monthly fixed overhead including your own market-rate salary, divided by productive chair-hours per month; (c) a default target margin (start with 20% for owner-stylist independents). You will reuse all three on every row. Set them up once, do not recompute per service.

2. 02
   For row 1, write the service name and duration honestly.

   Use the service name as it appears on the menu — do not abbreviate. For duration, use door-to-door chair time, not the optimistic best-case stylist-active time. If you typically book a 90-minute slot and the colour usually runs 100-110 minutes including consultation, write 100. Under-counting duration is the most common reason this worksheet produces a floor price that is too low to actually defend.

3. 03
   Compute stylist cost (column 3) using your loaded hourly rate × duration in hours.

   Loaded hourly rate from your sticky note × duration ÷ 60. A €26.40/hour stylist on a 90-minute service = €26.40 × 1.5 = €39.60. If the stylist is on commission rather than salary, use: commission rate × suggested price (column 8) — which requires one round of iteration. Easier on first pass: use the loaded-equivalent of what you actually pay them in commission across an average week.

4. 04
   Estimate product COGS (column 4) — and weigh, do not guess.

   For non-colour services (cut, blow-dry, treatment) the answer is usually €1-€4 and you can estimate from your wholesale invoices. For colour services, owners under-count by 20-40% because partial tubes get eyeballed. Do this once: weigh in the products before a colour service, weigh the leftover after, multiply by wholesale cost per gram. Do that for three colour services and you will have an honest range for the line on the menu. If you are not weighing, write your honest best guess and then add 25% — that is closer to the real number than your guess alone.

5. 05
   Compute overhead per service (column 5) using your sticky-note rate × duration.

   Overhead per chair-hour × duration ÷ 60. A salon with €17.04 overhead per chair-hour on a 90-minute service = €17.04 × 1.5 = €25.56. This is the line owners most often forget to include — they price stylist cost + product, call it "total cost," and skip the slice of rent / utilities / insurance / software / owner salary that the service has to carry. Without column 5 the floor is fictitious.

6. 06
   Sum columns 3 + 4 + 5 into column 6 (total cost).

   That is what one delivery of this service actually costs the salon end-to-end. Compare it mentally to the current menu price (column 9) — if total cost is more than 90% of current price, you are running below 10% net margin on this service, which is structurally not enough. Make a note and keep going.

7. 07
   Set column 7 (target margin) per service, not per menu.

   Default 20% for most lines. Push to 25-28% on master-tier services and luxury add-ons where clients are less price-sensitive. Drop to 15% on junior-tier services where the business goal is conversion to repeat. Drop to 10-12% on loss-leader services like bridal trials where the larger booking pays the margin back. Never set below 10% as a target — that is a survival number, not an operating one.

8. 08
   Compute column 8 (suggested price) — divide, do not multiply.

   Suggested price = total cost ÷ (1 − target margin %). A €80 total cost at 20% margin = €80 ÷ 0.80 = €100. NOT €80 × 1.20 = €96 (that is markup, not margin, and lands you on 16.7% margin). Round up to a psychologically friendly number (€100 → €105, €67.50 → €68, €224 → €225). The rounding adds 1-3% pure margin and is invisible to clients.

9. 09
   Write column 9 (current price) and column 10 (action) — and be specific.

   Column 9 is whatever your menu says today. Column 10 has four valid answers: HOLD (current price is within 5% of suggested), RAISE TO €X over 60 days, RETIRE (service is structurally unprofitable and unlikely to fix), or REPRICE ADD-ONS (service is fine but the add-ons attached are under-priced). Be specific in the raise note — "raise to €105 by 15 July" is actionable; "look at this" is not.

Worked examples — 4 services

To make the columns concrete, here are four common salon services worked end-to-end. The example salon has €17.04/hour overhead, a €26.40/hour loaded stylist, and a 20% default target margin. Adjust the numbers to your own salon before drawing any conclusions about your own menu.

Service 1: 90-minute single-process colour

Reading: this service is currently running about 2% net margin — essentially break-even after overhead. At €85 the salon is working for the supplier and the landlord. At €105 the math holds at the target 20%. Across 18 of these per week the lift is roughly €1,560/month of additional EBIT, with zero additional cost or hours. This is the worksheet doing its job — finding the row where the gap is structurally biggest, and putting a euro number on what fixing it is worth.

Service 2: 45-minute women's cut + finish

Reading: this is the service that is quietly subsidising the colour line above. At €48 against a €35.38 total cost, the salon is making roughly 26% net on every cut. That is fine — it tells you cuts can hold while you raise colour. The danger in salons that have not done this exercise is that owners assume the busy service (cuts) is the profitable one and raise cuts to "be safe" while leaving colour where it is. The worksheet inverts that intuition: raise the colour, hold the cut.

Service 3: 30-minute blow-dry only

Reading: a small gap (€2), an easy hold-and-raise. The bigger conversation on blow-dries is not the per-service margin — it is the chair-hour opportunity cost. A 30-minute blow-dry at €30 generates €60/chair-hour gross. A 90-minute colour at €105 generates €70/chair-hour gross. Both are reasonable, but if your menu hierarchy is letting clients book back-to-back blow-dries that crowd out higher-margin work, the per-service price is not the leak — the booking mix is. Chair utilisation rate calculator if you want to look at this side.

Service 4: 60-minute deep conditioning + bond treatment

Reading: this service has two possible answers and the worksheet surfaces both. As a standalone 60-minute treatment, the floor is €78 at a 28% target — the higher margin reflects that treatment clients are less price-sensitive and the service is a discretionary add-on. As a 0-minute add-on during a colour develop, the same product cost of €11.50 supports a €25 menu price at 54% margin with infinite margin-per-chair-hour. The honest answer for most independents is: do both. Keep the standalone for clients who book it as a service in itself, AND attach a €25 version during every colour develop. Two answers from one row.

Service mix audit

Once every row on the worksheet is filled in, do one more pass. Look at the suggested-price column (8) and the duration column (2). Compute suggested price ÷ duration × 60 to get suggested margin per chair-hour for each service. Rank the menu from best to worst. The top of the list is your booking software's priority slot; the bottom is the line you should be quietly de-emphasising — not removing, just no longer featuring on the homepage of your menu.

Reading this table, the cheapest service per visit (the add-on at €25) is actually your highest-margin chair-hour because it uses zero of the constrained resource. The most expensive service (the colour at €105) is mid-pack on chair-hour return because it eats 90 minutes. This is the mix-versus-price distinction owners almost always miss: pricing each service well does not produce a well-priced salon if the booking mix funnels chair-hours into the bottom of the priority list. Push add-ons on every colour; feature treatments on the menu; make blow-dries available but not visible. The mix discipline pays back roughly as much as the per-service pricing discipline — sometimes more.

Two related tools if you want to dig into mix and utilisation specifically: salon service profitability calculator ranks your menu by margin per chair-hour; booth rent vs commission calculator shows the same chair under both compensation models. Both complement the worksheet — the worksheet sets the floor prices; the calculators stress-test the operating model the floor prices feed into.

How to raise prices without losing clients

The worksheet will produce a list of rows that need to raise — usually 2-4 services per menu, sometimes more. The execution of the raise matters as much as the math. Small-and-regular beats big-and-rare. Four rules, in priority order, that have produced clean raises on independent salons across multiple cycles.

1. Stagger by service line, not by date. Do not raise the entire menu on one day. Raise the colour line first, hold cuts and blow-dries for 60-90 days, then raise cuts at the next cycle. A client who comes in twice a year for colour and four times for a cut sees a smaller average increase than the headline number — and the staggered cadence avoids the "everything went up 12% overnight" optic that drives cancellations.
2. Announce by email 14 days before the change. Two weeks before the new prices go live, email every regular client with a short, neutral message: "From [date], our colour services will move from €X to €Y. Reflecting [reason — supplier costs, wage steps, ongoing investment in stylist training]. Your next colour booking will be at the new menu price." Tone is neutral; reason is honest; no apology. Most clients will not reply at all — the silence is acceptance, not rejection.
3. Anchor with a new top tier instead of moving the middle. If you have any room to introduce a "master stylist" or "signature service" tier at a 25-30% premium to your senior price, do that on the same day you raise the senior. The new anchor reframes the senior price as mid-range rather than expensive. This is the highest-impact tactic and the safest — no existing client pays more unless they choose to upgrade.
4. Round up to friendly numbers. €65, €85, €105 land softer than €63, €82, €107. The rounding adds 1-3% pure margin and is invisible to almost all clients. Combine with the increase — €82 → €88 feels like a small adjustment; €82 → €85 feels like nothing. Suggested prices from the worksheet that fall just below a round number (€103.95, €76.31) should always round up to the next friendly tier, never round down.

What to expect. A correctly executed 8-12% raise on an independent salon typically loses 1-4% of clients in the first quarter, recovers most within 6 months, and lifts gross revenue 6-9% — with contribution margin uplifting more because the cost base did not move. Salons that have done this cycle once stop fearing the next one. Longer treatment of the pricing formula itself and the four-input math on a single haircut if you want to go deeper on the underlying numbers before sending the email.

When you outgrow this worksheet

The worksheet works for as long as you can sit down once a quarter and run through eight services in an afternoon. It stops working when one of three things happens. First, when costs move faster than 90 days — a supplier hike in month 2 of the quarter invalidates rows you wrote in month 1, and re-running the whole sheet for one price change is a chore most owners will not do. Second, when you have more than 15-20 services on the menu and the audit stretches into two or three sessions instead of one. Third, when you want margin visibility per stylist or per chair rather than per service — the worksheet sums across all stylists, and that hides the tier difference that often matters most for hiring and pay decisions.

At that point the worksheet becomes a daily operating layer rather than a quarterly audit. The math is the same — stylist cost, product COGS, overhead per service, target margin, floor price — but it runs every evening on every service that actually sold that day, with the snapshot of product cost the salon paid on that day rather than a quarter-old average. That is what nouz for salons does. You enter the four inputs per service once; the system computes the floor price; every closed transaction lands against it; today's real margin per service per stylist appears on the home screen by close of day.

Three specific things that change when you move from worksheet to daily layer:

• Snapshot product COGS at the moment of sale. Change a product cost next month — historic margins do not retroactively shift. The margin you saw on Tuesday's colour is the margin Tuesday actually delivered, valued at the cost you paid that day.
• Per-stylist margin visibility. Each service ties to the stylist who delivered it. The senior who hits 28% on every colour and the junior who hits 11% become visible in the data, not in the owner's gut feel — and tier-level coaching follows.
• Daily fixed-overhead pro-ration. Add a new fixed cost in mid-month and the overhead-per-service slice updates that evening. You do not wait for the monthly close to find out a rent review pushed two services into negative margin.

The output is one number at close of day: today's EBIT, computed from every service entered, with the four-input formula running silently underneath. That is the daily ritual the worksheet eventually becomes. nouz is monthly-only — no annual lock-in and the setup is about seven minutes. Until then, the worksheet is enough — and for many independent salons with a stable menu and stable cost base, the worksheet is the only thing they need.

Related reading: the full pricing formula behind the worksheet; chair rental vs commission economics; the four-input formula on a single haircut; if your salon is busy but not profitable, the four-leak audit; the break-even math on services per month; the pillar guide tying every salon profitability question together; nouz monthly pricing.

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