Free tool · no email required
Put your own figures in — solution, consumables, chair time, premises and the shelf — and see what a tan actually leaves you.
The salon maths
Your prices, your volume, your premises. In pounds, with every assumption showing — change any of them.
Start with your business type
Retail margin is illustrative — standard UK trade margin is ~50% (keystone markup). Full trade wholesale pricing is included inside your order confirmation and trial box. Every assumption is listed below the calculator.
Recommended first stepTest the colour and fade on a real client before committing.
Claim Free 100ml Trial BoxOrder 2L Starter Pack — £120 (£60/L) →Live from your sliders: 12 tans/week at £30 a tan, £60/litre and 3 retail add-ons/week. One change at a time, over a year.
| Change | Extra profit per year |
|---|---|
| Sell three more retail items a week£9.00 profit per item, and no extra chair time at all3-piece retail starter setBuff & Glow Mitt + Medium & Dark SoufflésTrade cost£40.50Combined RRP£59.50Retail profit£19.00Retail margin32%Preselect this set in the salon order → | £1,404 |
| Put your price up £2Across every tan you already do | £1,229 |
| One more tan a weekValued at gross less labour — an extra booking adds no fixed cost | £1,038 |
| Eliminate no-shows entirelyAt the 3.14% category rate — about 20 slots a year | £391 |
| Find a solution 20% cheaperThe number the industry argues about most | £267 |
Read it from the bottom. For most realistic figures, the price you pay per litre is the smallest lever available to you — and one client lost to a poor result costs more than a year of the saving.
Calculator methodology
At £60 a litre and 28 tans to the litre, the solution in the bottle costs £2.14 a tan. That is the number most people mean when they talk about what a tan costs — and it is the smallest part of it.
Add disposables, filters, liners and laundry and consumables come to £3.24. Add card fees, the loaded cost of the chair time, and the share of your premises that the tanning room uses, and the full cost of a £30 tan is about £18.70 — leaving £11.30 of profit, or 37.7%.
Worked example
One salon, one treatment room, an employed therapist. 12 tans a week at £30 each — 624 a year. Spray tans run £20–£40 across the UK, so these are middling numbers on purpose.
| Client pays | £30.00 |
|---|---|
| Solution | −£2.14 |
| Disposables | −£0.75 |
| Filters, liners and laundry | −£0.35 |
| Card fee | −£0.45 |
| Chair time, loaded | −£6.36 |
| Share of fixed costs | −£8.65 |
| Profit | £11.30 |
A spray tan is not a fifteen-minute treatment. Door to door — consultation, prep, treatment, clean-down and reset — the model assumes 25 minutes. At the National Living Wage of £12.71 an hour from April 2026, that is £5.30 of wage, and about £6.36 once employer National Insurance and holiday pay accrual are added. If you do the tans yourself, set the hourly rate to zero — but the minutes are still the scarcest thing you own.
Take the fixed costs attributable to the tanning room each month — a share of rent and rates, the room's heat, light and water, your treatment liability insurance, a slice of the booking software — and divide by the treatments you did that month. At £450 a month and 52 tans, that is £8.65 a tan.
Note what that does: overhead per tan is a function of how busy you are, not of how much you spend. Doing more tans in the same room is the same thing as making the room cheaper.
Transparent assumptions
Everything the model chooses rather than measures, with the range it realistically moves in. Change any of them in the calculator above; the sensitivity block updates from the same numbers.
| Assumption | Used here | Realistic range |
|---|---|---|
| Yield per litre | 28 tans | the product figure — measure your own |
| Disposables per tan | £0.75 | £0.40–£1.50 |
| Filters, liners and laundry per tan | £0.35 | £0.15–£0.70 |
| Chair time, door to door | 25 minutes | 20–35 minutes |
| Employer on-cost multiplier | 1.20× | 1.15–1.25× |
| Room-attributable fixed costs | £450 per month | £250–£900 |
| Retail margin at RRP | 50% | 40–60% |
| Card processing rate | 1.5% | 1.0–2.0% |
| Ticket price | £30 | £20–£40 nationally |
At £60 a litre and 28 tans to the litre, the solution is £2.14. With disposables, filters and laundry, consumables come to £3.24 a tan. Add card fees, loaded chair time and a share of your premises and the full cost is about £18.70 on a £30 treatment.
About £11.30 on a £30 tan with an employed therapist — roughly 38%. Before labour and premises the contribution is £26.31, which is the figure to use when deciding whether to take one more booking.
At 12 tans a week, a solution 20% cheaper saves about £267 a year. Selling three more retail items a week is worth £1,404. Solution price is the smallest lever in the model, and one client lost to a poor result wipes out the saving.
Divide the fixed costs attributable to the tanning room each month — a share of rent, rates, utilities, insurance and booking software — by the treatments you did that month. At £450 and 52 tans that is £8.65 a tan, and it falls as you get busier. Filling the room is the same thing as making it cheaper.
28 for the Malibu Professional Spray litre. Your own number will sit either side of that depending on equipment, technique and coverage. Measure your own: mark the bottle, count the tans over a week and divide. Every other figure in this calculator depends on it.
Yes. No email, no registration and no limit on use. It is built in pounds sterling for UK salons, mobile therapists and multi-site operators.
These figures are a model, not a forecast. Substitute your own numbers — the assumptions are listed above so you can. Retail margin is illustrative — standard UK trade margin is ~50% (keystone markup). Full trade wholesale pricing is included inside your order confirmation and trial box.
