At £30 a tan, the solution in the bottle costs you £2.14. All your consumables together come to £3.24. Add chair time and a share of your overheads and the full loaded cost is about £18.70, leaving roughly £11.30 of profit per tan.
The number most of us worry about — what we pay per litre — turns out to be the smallest lever in the whole thing.
When we talk about what a tan costs, we nearly always mean the solution. It's the number on the invoice, it's the one that stings when it goes up, so it's the one that feels like the cost.
It isn't. On a £30 tan, solution is 7% of what your client hands over. The other 93% is where your money actually is, and most of it sits in things that never appear on any invoice: how long the room is tied up, how many slots go empty, and whether anything left with her.
So let's do the whole thing properly, sums showing, ready for you to drop your own numbers in.
The worked example
One room, one therapist on the payroll, twelve tans a week — 624 a year — at £30 each. Both are chosen, not surveyed: there is no published UK benchmark for what a spray tan costs a client, so £30 is a placeholder for your own price and twelve a week is a real column rather than a wishful one.
Every figure that was chosen rather than sourced is listed in one block near the end, with the range it realistically moves in. Swap in yours as you go.
What leaves the room with every client
Solution — £2.14
A litre of Sunset Professional is £60. At 28 tans to the litre:
£60 ÷ 28 = £2.14 per tan
Twenty-eight is the rating for the professional litre. Yours will land either side of it — a full-coverage tan on a larger frame with an older gun uses more, a light hand on a well-set-up HVLP uses less. Nobody can tell you from here which one you are.
So measure it. Mark the bottle, count the tans, divide. One week, and it's the most useful number you'll get out of this, because everything below moves with it. Each tan you gain or lose per litre shifts your solution cost by about 8p.
Disposables — £0.75
Hairnet, sticky feet, disposable briefs, barrier cream, wipes.
Realistically anywhere from £0.40 to £1.50 depending on what you hand out. If everyone gets briefs and a barrier-cream sachet you're at the top end; if most of your regulars turn up with their own, you're at the bottom.
Filters, liners and laundry — £0.35
Extraction filter and tent liner, spread across the tans they last for: about £0.15. Towels and gowns through the wash: about £0.20.
Small, and almost always left out altogether. Together they come to more than a sixth of what the solution costs you.
Total consumables: £3.24
£2.14 + £0.75 + £0.15 + £0.20 = £3.24
That's the number worth carrying around — not £2.14. The price on the bottle is never what a treatment actually consumes.
The bits that don't feel like costs
Card fees — £0.45
About 1.5% on a £30 transaction, so 45p. Nothing per tan. £281 a year across 624 of them.
Your contribution per tan: £26.31
£30.00 − £3.24 − £0.45 = £26.31
This is the one to reach for whenever you're deciding whether to squeeze in one more booking, because it's what an extra tan genuinely puts in the till before anything fixed shifts.
The loaded cost of chair time
Here's where the real money is, and it's the bit that usually gets waved through.
A spray tan isn't a fifteen-minute treatment. Door to door — consultation, prep, the tan itself, clean-down, reset — call it 25 minutes. Some rooms genuinely run it in 20. Plenty run it in 35 once the reset is counted honestly.
For an employed therapist on the National Living Wage, which went to £12.71 an hour in April 2026:
£12.71 × (25 ÷ 60) = £5.30
Then the on-costs. Employer National Insurance runs at 15% on earnings above a secondary threshold of £5,000, and holiday pay accrues on top. Together that's roughly a 1.20× multiplier on gross wage — worth checking against your own payroll, and against your Employment Allowance:
£5.30 × 1.20 = £6.36
After labour, the tan leaves you £19.95.
If you're doing the tans yourself there's no wage leaving the business — but those 25 minutes are still the scarcest thing you own, and the day you start thinking about hiring you'll need them priced. Cost them at what you'd pay someone else to do it.
The share of everything else
Overheads are the one figure nobody can hand you, because it's yours. What you can have is the method:
room-attributable fixed costs per month ÷ treatments per month
Attributable means the share that belongs to tanning — some of the rent and rates, the room's heat and light and water, your treatment liability insurance, a slice of the booking software. Not the whole salon's cost base.
Take £450 a month here. It's the most business-specific number in the whole model — a room on a Manchester high street is nothing like a room in Zone 2.
At 12 tans a week, you're doing 52 a month:
£450 ÷ 52 = £8.65 per tan
Look at what that does. Your overhead per tan depends on how busy you are, not on what you spend. At 52 tans a month it's £8.65. At 75 it's £6.00. At 30 it's £15. Filling the room is the same thing as making it cheaper — and if you take one thing away from all this, take that.
The full picture
| Per tan | |
|---|---|
| Client pays | £30.00 |
| Solution | −£2.14 |
| Disposables | −£0.75 |
| Filters and liners | −£0.15 |
| Laundry | −£0.20 |
| Card fee | −£0.45 |
| Chair time, loaded | −£6.36 |
| Share of fixed costs | −£8.65 |
| Profit | £11.30 |
£11.30 on a £30 tan — 37.7%.
If you're doing the tans yourself, take the wage out and it's £17.65, or 58.8% — which isn't really profit so much as profit with your own wages folded into it. Worth being straight with yourself about that when you're comparing your figures to a salon that employs.
Is that a good margin?
Nobody publishes an average net margin for a UK salon — the sector survey measures profitability in bands rather than percentages, so any "average salon margin" figure you see quoted should be treated with suspicion.
What the survey does show is the shape of it: one in five salons is trading at a loss, 35% are breaking even, and only 7.8% describe themselves as making a good profit (NHBF State of the Sector, fieldwork February 2026, n=423).
Against that spread, a treatment column running at 37% is pulling its weight. Tanning is a good column. If yours isn't landing somewhere near this, the model above will show you which line has gone wrong.
What actually moves the number
Same salon, 624 tans a year, one change at a time:
| Change | Extra profit per year |
|---|---|
| Sell three retail items a week (£18 soufflé at 50% margin) | £1,404 |
| Put your price up £2 | £1,229 |
| One more tan a week | £1,038 |
| Eliminate no-shows entirely | £391–£515 |
| Find a solution 20% cheaper | £267 |
Read it from the bottom.
A litre 20% cheaper is worth about £267 a year. Five pounds a week. It's the smallest lever on the list and it's the one that gets argued about the most. And if a cheaper solution costs you a single client — one woman whose colour went wrong, who says nothing and quietly books somewhere else — you're behind for the year.
Retail is the biggest lever, and it costs you no chair time at all. Three items a week.
Two things make that the easiest money on the list. 70% of salon clients who don't currently buy products say they would like to (Phorest Consumer Insights 2025, n=716, UK and Ireland). And the category is growing fast — UK self-tan sales rose 43% in the year to April 2026 (Circana, 2026) — but that growth is measured in shops and online, which is to say it is happening in the channel you don't control. Your client is already buying self-tan. The question is only whether she buys it from you.
No-shows are worth more than they look. Take 3% of your bookings as no-shows — an assumption, not a measurement, and the honest range is 1% to 5%. On 624 tans a year that's about 20 empty slots. Recovering them is worth £391 if the therapist's hours are avoidable, £515 if you're paying her to sit through them.
Count your own over a season before you spend anything on fixing it. The sector-wide no-show figures that circulate in the trade press come from platform press releases with no published sample or method, and one of the most-quoted is out by roughly a factor of ten against the sector's own revenue.
And trimming chair time isn't a saving, it's capacity. Getting a tan from 25 minutes down to 20 doesn't put £1.27 in your pocket. It puts 25% more slots in your day — and it's worth nothing at all unless you fill them.
Assumptions
Everything above that was chosen rather than sourced. Change them to yours.
| Assumption | Used here | Realistic range |
|---|---|---|
| Yield per litre | 28 tans | product figure — measure your own |
| Disposables per tan | £0.75 | £0.40–£1.50 |
| Filter and liner, amortised | £0.15 | £0.05–£0.30 |
| Laundry | £0.20 | £0.10–£0.40 |
| Chair time, door to door | 25 min | 20–35 min |
| Employer on-cost multiplier | 1.20× | 1.15–1.25× |
| Room-attributable fixed costs | £450/month | £250–£900 |
| Retail margin at RRP | 50% | 40–60% |
| Ticket price | £30 | £20–£40 |
| Volume | 12 tans/week | — |
What to do about it
- Measure your actual yield. Mark the bottle, count the tans, divide. One week. Everything else moves with it.
- Add up your room's fixed costs and divide by last month's treatments. That one number tells you more about your tanning than anything else here.
- Time a tan properly, door to door. Reset included. Most of us are 5–8 minutes optimistic, and that's 20–30% of the labour cost.
- Count how many clients left with something. Under one in five, and the biggest lever on the table is sitting untouched.
- Stop optimising the litre price. It's £5 a week. Put that attention on the top three rows instead.
These figures are a model, not a forecast. Substitute your own — the assumptions are listed above so you can.
Corrected 8 August 2026. An earlier version of this article gave an average UK salon profit margin of 8.2%; no such figure is published, and it has been replaced with the profitability spread the sector survey actually reports. The no-show costs and the retail-share benchmark were sourced to platform press releases with no published sample or method; the no-show rate is now stated as an assumption with a range, and the retail figures have been replaced with sourced ones.
