UK Hair, Beauty and Personal Care Insolvency Statistics

There were 439 personal care services insolvencies between January and June 2026, against 521 in the same six months of 2025, a fall of 15.7%. Other service activities, the wider section this trade sits in, fell by almost exactly the same amount, 16.9%, because personal care services is not a small part of that section, it is nearly all of it.

These are Company Debt calculations from Insolvency Service Table A1b data.

The rolling 12-month figure confirms the same direction. At 911 cases for the year to June 2026, against 1,031 for the year to June 2025, insolvencies fell 11.6%. Unlike the professional-services trades covered elsewhere on this site, where the picture is mixed, this is a clean, section-wide decline.

Personal care services insolvencies held broadly flat before the pandemic, 517 in both 2016 and 2017, rising to 713 by 2019. 2020 brought a fall to 566, in line with government support and restricted winding-up petitions holding the normal insolvency cycle back across most of the economy.

Salons and personal-care businesses were also among those forced to close entirely for months at a time.

What followed was the sharpest single-year jump on this site. 682 in 2021, then 1,205 in 2022, a 77% increase in one year, and a further rise to 1,286 in 2023, the series peak. That surge coincided with an entire sector reopening after repeated closures, rapid cost inflation, and a wave of new salons and studios opening into strong post-lockdown demand that did not all prove durable.

2024 and 2025 have both come down from that peak, to 1,065 and then 993, and the decline has continued into 2026. The post-pandemic spike is unwinding, though the sector remains well above where it stood before any of this began.

In the personal care cases we see, the business is rarely short of customers. It is short of margin, because the cost of putting a stylist or therapist behind a chair for the day has risen faster than the price a local high street will bear for a cut or a treatment.

Rent is usually the second pressure, and it is a fixed cost in a trade with almost no ability to flex it: a salon cannot easily downsize its premises the way a business with stock or equipment can, and a rates bill set at revaluation does not fall just because footfall has.

PAYE arrears tend to build first here, because staff still need paying on the usual date even in a slow month, and a director will often keep drawing down personally rather than cut the wage bill, right up until HMRC starts pressing.

We would not start with the appointment book. We would look at labour cost as a share of takings, what the actual rent and rates commitment is against current footfall, whether a move to a chair-rental or self-employed model has been priced properly including its VAT consequences, and what is owed to HMRC.

A salon or clinic with loyal, regular clients usually has more genuine options than the owner assumes, restructuring costs, renegotiating a lease, or changing how the team is engaged, provided the conversation starts before a creditor forces the pace.

SIC group 960 covers a mixed set of personal-service trades that cannot be split further in the published data: hairdressing and beauty treatment, physical wellbeing activities such as spas and saunas, funeral and related services, and laundry and dry-cleaning services for individuals. Hairdressing and beauty treatment is generally understood to be the largest part of this group.

This trade group is effectively the whole of other service activities in the official statistics, at 94% of the section’s insolvencies, so the section-level comparison above tells you very little beyond what this page already shows.

These are company counts, not the number of salons, therapists or self-employed stylists affected. A stylist moving from employment to a self-employed chair-rental arrangement changes how a business is structured without necessarily reflecting fewer people working in the trade.

The figures are insolvency volumes, not a failure rate. They are not adjusted for the number of active personal-care businesses, so a falling count does not, on its own, mean the underlying trade is shrinking at the same rate.

The SIC 960 figures come from Table A1b and are not seasonally adjusted. The latest month is provisional and can be revised.

None of the figures above decide whether a particular business is viable. What matters is narrower: whether labour cost as a share of takings still leaves a margin, whether the rent and rates commitment matches current footfall, and what is genuinely owed to HMRC.

Plenty of salons and clinics in difficulty are sound businesses carrying a rates shock or a PAYE arrears bill built up during a slow patch, and both are usually fixable if addressed early.

If you are reading this with a wage run coming and the takings are not there, the thing worth knowing is that the earlier you speak to someone, the more room there is to move: rent renegotiated, an HMRC Time to Pay arrangement, or a rescue procedure such as a Company Voluntary Arrangement or administration.

Once a winding-up petition is advertised, the bank account is usually frozen within days, and at that point creditors’ voluntary liquidation may be the only route still open. If you want to talk it through first, our insolvency advice for directors is the place to start.