Your floor is £18.70 a tan with an employed therapist, or £12.34 if you do them yourself. Anything below that is costing you money to perform.
April 2026 added roughly £2.90 a tan to a salon paying full business rates — which a £2 price rise does not cover.
Every time this question comes up, someone answers it with a range. Twenty to forty. Twenty-five to thirty-five. Whatever the number, it arrives with total confidence and no source, and you're left wondering whether being at the bottom of it means you're cheap or means you're in Rotherham.
So before anything useful: there is no reliable published benchmark for what a spray tan costs in the UK. Not from the trade bodies, not from the booking platforms, not from the Office for National Statistics. The ranges in circulation are recycled between blogs, and none of them will tell you what to do on Monday anyway, because none of them know what your room costs.
What you can know precisely is your own floor. Start there.
Your floor, in two numbers
A £30 tan carries about £18.70 of loaded cost if a therapist on your payroll delivers it — solution, disposables, filters, laundry, card fee, twenty-five minutes of chair time with employer on-costs, and a share of the room. If you do the tans yourself, take the wage out and it's £12.34. The full model shows every line.
That is not your price. It's the line below which the treatment costs you money to perform. Every pricing decision you make is about the distance between that line and what you charge, and nobody outside your business can calculate it for you.
Work yours out before you read another price list.
What April actually did to that floor
Three things changed at once, and they don't land equally.
Wages: about 25p a tan
The National Living Wage went from £12.21 to £12.71 on 1 April 2026. On a twenty-five-minute treatment with on-costs, that's £6.11 to £6.36 — twenty-five pence a tan, or £156 a year at twelve tans a week.
If you employ juniors, look again. The 18-to-20 rate went from £10.00 to £10.85 — an 8.5% rise, more than double the headline one. That is the increase that actually hurts, and it got almost no coverage.
Business rates: nothing, or £2.65 a tan
This one splits the sector in half and most people have it backwards.
If your rateable value is under £12,000, you pay nothing and nothing changed. Small Business Rate Relief still gives 100% relief below that, tapering to zero between £12,001 and £15,000. Most single-room salons sit here. Skip to the next section.
Above it, in England, the 40% retail and hospitality relief that ran through 2025/26 ended on 31 March 2026. Hair and beauty salons were explicitly included in it — the qualifying list names "beauty salons" and "tanning shops" directly. A permanently lower multiplier replaced it, but it does not replace what the relief was worth. On a rateable value of £20,000, holding the value constant:
2025/26: £20,000 × 49.9p, less 40% relief = £5,988
2026/27: £20,000 × 38.2p = £7,640
That's £1,652 more, a 27.6% increase, and across 624 tans a year it is £2.65 on every single one.
If you're in Wales, it's worse and nobody has told you. Welsh salons had 40% relief in 2025/26. For 2026/27 the Welsh scheme was narrowed to food and drink hospitality only, and the guidance lists salons among the properties that do not qualify. Welsh salons went from 40% relief to none overnight. Scotland kept a 15% scheme and salons are still in it.
Employer National Insurance: check your allowance
Employer NI runs at 15% on earnings above a £5,000 secondary threshold, but the Employment Allowance is £10,500. If you employ one or two people part-time, that allowance may cover your entire employer NI bill. Look at your payroll before you assume this one applies to you.
So what does a £2 rise actually cover?
Add it up for a salon in England paying full rates on a £20,000 rateable value: £1,652 of rates and £156 of wages is £1,808 a year, or £2.90 a tan.
A £1 price rise, after the card fee on it, puts £615 a year in your pocket across 624 tans. So:
| Price rise | Net per year | Covers April? |
|---|---|---|
| £1 | £615 | No — a third of it |
| £2 | £1,229 | No — two thirds |
| £3 | £1,844 | Yes, just |
You need about £3 to stand still. Not to earn more — to end 2026 where you started 2025.
If your rateable value is under £12,000, none of the rates arithmetic touches you, your April was 25p a tan, and a £1 rise covers it four times over. Which of those two salons you are matters far more than any national average could.
The bit that's actually stopping you
It isn't the arithmetic. It's that you think you'll be the only one.
You won't be. In the most recent sector survey, 42.1% of salons had raised prices in the previous three months, and 72.6% expected to raise them in the next three (NHBF State of the Sector, fieldwork February 2026, n=423). That survey was in the field before April landed. Nearly three quarters of your competitors were already planning the rise you're hesitating over.
The wider picture in the same survey: one in five salons trading at a loss, 35% breaking even, and only 7.8% describing themselves as making a good profit. And prices in hairdressing and personal grooming rose about 3.9% in the year to June 2026 (ONS). Your clients have already absorbed increases from everyone else they see.
How to move the number
Four things that matter more than the size of the rise.
Round to something clean. £30 to £33 is a smaller psychological step than £29 to £32, and it makes your card machine and your head easier.
Date it, don't apologise for it. "Prices from 1 September" on the mirror and in your booking confirmations for four weeks. No explanation, no justification. An apology invites a negotiation.
Move the top of your list first. If you offer a premium or express option, raise that before the standard tan. The clients who choose it are the least price-sensitive you have.
Do it once a year and put it in the diary. Salons that raise annually get absorbed. Salons that hold for four years and then need 20% get noticed.
There is no published evidence on how many UK beauty clients actually leave after a price rise — the figures that circulate are assertions, not measurements. So count your own: note your regulars now, and check the same list in three months. You'll have better data on your clients than anyone else has on theirs.
These figures are a model, not a forecast. The rates example holds rateable value constant and uses England's 2026/27 multipliers; the 2026 revaluation changed rateable values, so your bill depends on your new one. Substitute your own numbers throughout.