US personal-care market, mapped
Largest Spa and Salon Chains in the US: 900,000 Establishments, Top 10 Hold Under 2%
The US personal-care market is 900,000 single-chair owners with two PE-backed national chains at the top. Great Clips runs 4,151 locations. Regis Corporation, the parent behind Supercuts, filed for Chapter 11 in August 2024. Outside those two, the field is so fragmented the next biggest is Massage Envy, and Massage Envy is not hair.
The market, in three numbers
A long tail the trade press keeps ignoring.
Personal care looks fragmented because it is fragmented. The state-level totals from Orbital's location graph sum to roughly 605,000 chair-level storefronts across hair, beauty, and spa, which is the addressable B2B unit. The wider 900,000 number from the Census includes solo barbers and home-studio operators who do not register a public storefront. Either way you cut it, the chain layer at the top is small.
are independents or sub-10-location operators
Of the 605,000 storefront-resolved sites, fewer than 7 percent carry a national chain brand. The remainder are single-chair owners, two-shop owner-operators, and small regional banners that never crossed state lines.
share held by the top ten chains
Great Clips, Regis, Sport Clips, Ulta, Massage Envy, European Wax Center, Sola, Palm Beach Tan, Hand & Stone, and Hair Cuttery combined run roughly 14,641 locations.
national hair chains with scale
Great Clips and Sport Clips. Both franchised. Regis was the third until the August 2024 Chapter 11 filing pulled the floor out from under Supercuts, SmartStyle, and Cost Cutters.
Source: Orbital classifier, June 2026 snapshot.
Methodology
Why our count moves and the published numbers do not.
The published numbers you usually see in personal care, the Census County Business Patterns release and the IBISWorld Hair Salons report, are excellent for what they cover. They are also annual at best, biennial in practice, and the buyer behind every chair moves faster than that. We work location by location and refresh against the universe of US small businesses every month.
How the 900,000 figure is built
- Start with the personal-care universe. Every active establishment under NAICS 8121, Personal Care Services, as reported by the US Census County Business Patterns 2023 release. The 900,000 figure includes hair salons, barber shops, beauty salons, day spas, nail salons, and other personal services.
- Resolve each storefront across three sub-verticals. Orbital classifies sites into Hair Salons and Barbers, Beauty Salons, and Day Spas as three distinct markets. Cross-vertical dedup is keyed on company entity ID, not on brand string, so Ulta and Sola Salon Studios appear once even though both market files surface them.
- Roll up the chains, carefully. Regis Corporation rolls into one parent row with Supercuts, SmartStyle, Cost Cutters, and Holiday Hair shown as sub-brands. Massage Envy is added from public-source disclosures (the brand reports roughly 1,100 franchise locations under Roark Capital). Drybar is shown at corporate footprint, not at the single Wayzata franchisee LLC that the raw data surfaced.
- Drop the categories that are not salons. Salon-management software vendors (booking and POS platforms) get filtered out of the chain ranking, because they are not operators. Cosmetics counters inside Ulta and Sephora get filtered out, because they are concessions, not storefronts. Hotel and resort spas (Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons, Hilton) get filtered out, because they are hotel amenities, not standalone businesses.
- Find the owner. The 93 percent of US personal-care sites that are independent or sub-10-location operators are run by people whose names do not appear in trade-press headlines. We find them by name, with a verified email and a direct dial, the same way we find owners across every long-tail vertical.
- Refresh on a rolling schedule. June 2026 is the snapshot quoted on this page. Personal care moves quickly: salons open, close, and rebrand on a quarterly cadence. The Regis Chapter 11 process alone will reshape the top of the ranking through 2026 and into 2027.
Want the source breakdown for a specific state, metro, or sub-vertical (hair, beauty, day spa, nail, suite-rental)? Ask. We do not hide the working.
By state
Where the salon and spa storefronts actually are.
California, Texas, and Florida hold roughly 32 percent of US personal-care storefronts between them. Population alone explains it: those three states hold 28 percent of US residents and 32 percent of US salons. The salon-per-capita rate is flat across the top 15. New York and Illinois round out the top five. The counts below are from the Hair Salons and Barbers market, the largest of the three sub-verticals. Hair-salon counts below; beauty and day-spa concentrate in the same five states with near-identical share.
| # | State | Hair salon / barber locations | Share of US |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 42,644 | 13.01% |
| 2 | Texas | 31,824 | 9.71% |
| 3 | Florida | 28,647 | 8.74% |
| 4 | New York | 19,735 | 6.02% |
| 5 | Illinois | 11,710 | 3.57% |
| 6 | Georgia | 11,513 | 3.51% |
| 7 | Pennsylvania | 10,950 | 3.34% |
| 8 | North Carolina | 10,823 | 3.30% |
| 9 | Ohio | 9,811 | 2.99% |
| 10 | New Jersey | 8,993 | 2.74% |
| 11 | Michigan | 8,291 | 2.53% |
| 12 | Massachusetts | 7,394 | 2.26% |
| 13 | Washington | 7,315 | 2.23% |
| 14 | Virginia | 7,116 | 2.17% |
| 15 | Arizona | 7,081 | 2.16% |
Top 15 states account for roughly 68 percent of US hair-salon and barber locations. Source: Orbital classifier, Hair Salons and Barbers market, June 2026 snapshot. Beauty salons and day spas concentrate in the same five-state group with similar share distribution.
The top ten chains
Largest US spa and salon chains by storefront count.
The pole signs are loud. The math is quiet. Ten chains, roughly 14,641 locations, under 2 percent of the US personal-care market. The remaining 885,000 establishments belong to chains outside the top 10, regional banners, and the deep long tail of single-chair owner-operators.
| # | Chain | US locations | Segment / parent / note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Great Clips | 4,151 | Hair Privately held franchise based in Minneapolis. Largest single salon brand in the US by storefront count, more than double the number-two brand. |
| 2 | Regis Corporation | 2,966 | Hair Parent company of Supercuts, SmartStyle, Cost Cutters, and Holiday Hair. Filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August 2024 after roughly two decades of failed turnaround attempts.
|
| 3 | Sport Clips Haircuts | 1,698 | Hair Privately held franchise based in Georgetown, Texas. Men-and-boys haircut concept with concentrated franchise-conversion success in the suburban Sun Belt. |
| 4 | Ulta Beauty | 1,186 | Beauty retail NASDAQ:ULTA. The in-store hair-and-brow service counter sits inside the broader beauty-retail box, which is why Ulta surfaces in salon-market data despite being a retailer first. |
| 5 | Massage Envy | ~1,100 | Spa / massage Owned by Roark Capital. Franchise model with a recurring-membership billing engine. Locations figure from public franchise disclosures and Roark Capital portfolio reporting. |
| 6 | European Wax Center | 1,066 | Beauty NASDAQ:EWCZ. Body-waxing franchise concept. Post-IPO unit growth has been the cleanest of any chain in the table outside the haircut majors. |
| 7 | Sola Salon Studios | 786 | Suite rental Suite-rental aggregator. Sola does not employ stylists; it leases private suites to independent operators. Owned by Radial Equity Partners since 2024 (prior owner Palladium Equity Partners). |
| 8 | Palm Beach Tan | 614 | Tanning / spa Largest US tanning-salon operator. Owned by Trive Capital. Membership-billing model similar to Massage Envy. |
| 9 | Hand & Stone | 582 | Spa / massage Massage and facial-spa franchise. Owned by Levine Leichtman Capital Partners. Competes head-on with Massage Envy in the recurring-membership spa segment. |
| 10 | Hair Cuttery Family of Brands | 492 | Hair Includes Hair Cuttery, Bubbles, Salon Cielo, and CIBU brand. Acquired out of Chapter 11 by Tacit Capital in 2020; smaller than its pre-2020 footprint. |
| * | Sub-vertical mix | 10 | Hair: 5 brands. Beauty / waxing / tanning: 3 brands. Spa / massage: 2 brands. Suite rental: 1 brand. The top 10 is hair-heavy because hair is the largest of the three core sub-verticals by establishment count. |
| * | Top 10 combined | ~14,641 | Approximately 1.6 percent of the 900,000 US personal-care establishment universe. The remaining 98.4 percent is independent owners, small regional banners, and chains outside the top 10. |
As of June 2026, US open locations. Counts reflect Orbital's location graph across three sub-verticals plus public-source disclosures for Massage Envy. Regis Corporation Chapter 11 process is ongoing; sub-brand counts may move materially through 2026.
Our take
The chair economics do not scale.
We believe
The salon industry is 900,000 independent chairs with two PE-backed nationals at the top and one Chapter 11 filing where the third used to be.
The salon industry is 900,000 independent chairs with two PE-backed national chains at the top: Regis Corporation (Supercuts, SmartStyle, Cost Cutters, entered Chapter 11 in August 2024 after 20 years of failed turnarounds) and Sport Clips (privately held, roughly 1,900 franchise units when you include Canada). Outside those two, the segment is so fragmented that the next biggest is Massage Envy with 1,100, and Massage Envy is not hair. The real story is not a top-10 ranking. It is that beauty consolidation has been tried by every large operator and has failed every time. The chair economics do not scale.
That gap matters when you choose your motion. A vendor team that builds its pipeline around five enterprise logos walks past 600,000 buyers who have a license number, a chair, a lease, and a credit card. A team that knows the long-tail map can run the same conversation 600,000 times with a different name on the door each week.
Who buys this data
B2B vendors selling into 600,000 storefronts.
This page is for the teams selling into salon and spa operators, not the operators themselves. If you ship one of the categories below, the long-tail map is what your AE team has been asking for.
Booking, POS, and salon-management platforms
Booksy, Vagaro, Square Appointments, Boulevard, Mindbody, Phorest, GlossGenius. Selling the upgrade off a paper book or a desktop scheduler to owners who personally sign the contract.
Professional color and retail product distribution
SalonCentric (L'Oreal), CosmoProf (Sally Beauty), Salon Services, Maly's. Distributing the next case of color, the next year of shampoo retail SKUs, and the back-bar contracts that make stylists loyal.
Salon-suite aggregators and franchisors
Sola Salon Studios, Salons by JC, Phenix Salon Suites, My Salon Suite. Acquiring real-estate sites and recruiting the next 50 stylist-tenants who walked out of a commission shop and want their own door.
Payments, lending, and roll-up capital
Embedded payments inside booking platforms, equipment finance for chairs and laser machines, working-capital lines for owner-operators, and the search funds running buy-and-build plays in nail, waxing, and massage.
Local SEO, GBP, and reputation services
Birdeye, Podium, agency layer selling Google Business Profile management, review-generation, and websites to owners whose books used to fill on word of mouth.
Capital equipment and salon fit-out
Belmont, Takara Belmont, Pibbs, Collins. Selling chairs, dryer banks, shampoo bowls, and the laser machines that turn a salon into a medspa overnight. The owner signs the lease, not corporate.
Training, licensing, and continuing education
Pivot Point, Paul Mitchell Schools alumni networks, state cosmetology board CE providers, and the brand-academy programs (Aveda, Redken, Goldwell) that owners pay for to keep talent.
Adjacent universes built the same way: the market insights index, the broader by-industry email lists, the sister med-spa owner email list, and the largest pest-control companies map for the long-tail-services family.
Plain-spoken
When the spa and salon dataset is the wrong fit.
Do not buy this if any of the following are true.
You only sell at the Ulta and Great Clips corporate tier. If your motion is one annual contract with the public majors, you do not need a long-tail map of 900,000 establishments. You need a short Rolodex and a strong relationship manager. Save your budget.
You sell DTC beauty products to consumers. The consumer haul-video shopper and the salon owner buying back-bar inventory are two different buyers. Consumer-data sets serve the first one. This dataset serves the second.
Your sales motion only fires above $100k ACV. A single-chair owner with two stylists rarely writes a six-figure annual check on day one. The long tail will not meet your unit economics. Call us when an enterprise-only motion stalls and you need a mid-market overlay.
You need real-time cosmetology license status. State cosmetology boards publish that on their own websites, with appeal periods and reinstatement windows that move daily. We refresh monthly, which is the right cadence for prospecting and the wrong cadence for compliance gatekeeping.
The honest version
Why most spa and salon vendor data is wrong.
If you Google "largest spa and salon chains in the US," the top result is usually a trade-press top-10 list written from a press release, or an IBISWorld report sized for an analyst deck. Both are excellent for what they do. Neither hands a vendor team the next 50,000 names to call.
The first problem is that most lists inflate the chain layer by counting categories that are not chains. Salon-management software platforms surface in the data because they identify as "salons" in their LinkedIn category. Cosmetics-counter brands surface because they have hundreds of staffed counters inside Ulta and Sephora. Hotel and resort spas surface because they have a treatment menu and a booking calendar. Strip all three categories out and the top-of-table looks different. The actual salon industry is haircut chains, suite-rental aggregators, beauty-retail boxes, and the four membership-spa operators (Massage Envy, Hand & Stone, European Wax Center, Palm Beach Tan).
The second problem is that enterprise B2B databases roll up by parent and lose the buyer. They show Regis Corporation as one record at the Minneapolis HQ and the 1,655 Supercuts shops collapse into a single row. The actual buyer for a back-bar contract is the franchisee, not corporate procurement. The actual buyer for a booking-software upgrade is the owner of one shop, not the C-suite. The storefront-level view sees both layers; the parent-level view sees one.
The third problem is staleness. IBISWorld's Hair Salons report refreshes annually. Census County Business Patterns refreshes on a 12-to-18-month lag from the data year. Regis filed Chapter 11 in August 2024, and any list that was sized in 2023 still shows Supercuts at full footprint. We refresh monthly, which is the right cadence for a market this fragmented.
This is the gap we sit in. We map the universe of US small and mid-market businesses, classify each location into its sub-vertical, find the owner or decision-maker for that site, and ship a verified contact before the conversation starts. The same engine that found 26,000 HVAC owners and 19,000 pest-control owners finds the salon owner sitting behind each license number. What is specific to salons is the layer on top: sub-vertical tagging (hair, beauty, day spa, nail, waxing, tanning, suite-rental), brand affiliation, parent rollup, and the per-state cosmetology-license number when the operator publishes it. We are the storefront-count complement to the trade-press revenue lists, not a replacement for them. Use IBISWorld to size the deck. Use this when the AE team asks who to call on Monday.
Questions
Before you ask sales about spa and salon data.
How many spa and salon businesses are there in the US?
There are roughly 900,000 active US personal-care establishments across hair salons and barbers, beauty salons, and day spas as of the 2023 Census County Business Patterns release for NAICS 8121 (Personal Care Services). The figure is dominated by single-chair independent operators. Chain-affiliated locations account for around 6 percent of the total.
What is the largest spa and salon chain in the US?
Great Clips is the largest spa and salon chain in the US by storefront count, with 4,151 franchise locations. Regis Corporation, the holding company behind Supercuts, SmartStyle, Cost Cutters, and Holiday Hair, sits second with roughly 2,966 combined locations. Regis filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August 2024 and has been reducing its US footprint since.
How concentrated is the salon and spa industry?
Barely. The 10 largest US spa and salon chains combine for roughly 14,641 storefronts out of about 900,000 personal-care establishments, or under 2 percent of the market by location count. Single-chair independents and small two-to-three-chair shops account for the rest. Personal care is one of the most fragmented categories in the US economy, on a par with restaurants and well below pest control or HVAC on consolidation.
Why does Regis Corporation appear as one row instead of four brands?
Regis Corporation owns Supercuts, SmartStyle, Cost Cutters, and Holiday Hair, and reports through a single parent. Ranking each brand separately would inflate the appearance of fragmentation at the top of the table. Regis filed for Chapter 11 in August 2024 after roughly two decades of failed turnaround attempts, so the combined 2,966 figure is a high-water mark, not a forecast. We surface the sub-brands as bullets under the parent row.
Can I filter by state, metro, or sub-vertical?
Yes. The dataset is filterable by state, metro, ZIP, chain affiliation, parent company, and sub-vertical (hair salons and barbers, beauty salons, day spas, nail salons, waxing and laser hair removal, tanning, suite-rental operators). California, Texas, and Florida together hold roughly 32 percent of US personal-care locations. Tell us the cut you want when you request the sample.
How is your count different from IBISWorld or Statista?
IBISWorld and Statista publish annual industry reports with revenue estimates and counts, but the published numbers lag by 12 to 24 months and group personal care into broad industry buckets. Our count is location-by-location, refreshed on a rolling monthly schedule, with each location resolved to an owner or decision-maker. The two views answer different questions. Theirs sizes the market for an analyst deck. Ours hands a vendor team the next 50,000 names to call.
Who buys this data?
B2B vendors selling into salon and spa operators. That includes salon software platforms (booking and POS), product-and-supply distributors (color, retail SKUs, capital equipment), payments and lending, suite-rental aggregators, marketing and SEO agencies serving local owners, and capital providers running roll-up plays in nail, waxing, and massage. The buyer is almost never a corporate procurement office. It is the owner who signs the truck note, the lease, and the software contract personally.
When is this dataset the wrong fit?
Three cases. First, if you only sell to enterprise buyers at the Ulta, Sephora, or Great Clips corporate tier, you need a short Rolodex of named contacts, not a long-tail map. Second, if you sell DTC beauty products to consumers, you want a household database, not B2B owner data. Third, if your motion fires above 100,000 dollars in annual contract value, the single-chair operator market will not meet your unit economics. Save your budget and call us when the enterprise motion stalls.
See the spa and salon owner dataset before you pay for it.
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