CalcStack — free, instant, no signup. The interactive calculator loads automatically.
97 bookable hours a month carrying $5,913 of costs and income means every hour must earn $60.69 — a $95 color that costs $110 to deliver is a donation.
Most salon menus are priced by vibe: what the shop down the street charges, rounded to a five. This calculator prices from the floor up instead. Add your real monthly overhead — rent, color stock, insurance, software, card fees, marketing — to the income you need to take home, then divide by your bookable hours: chair hours times utilization. That is the hourly floor every service must clear. A 90-minute color with $18 of product at a $60.69 floor costs $109 to deliver; charging $95 for it donates $15 a ticket back to the chair. The tool rounds to client-friendly fives, compares against your current price, and annualizes the gap so the cost of underpricing is a number, not a feeling.
Stylists use it before printing the menu: $5,913 of overhead and income spread over 97 bookable hours sets a $60.69/hr floor — a 90-minute color priced under $110 is a donation.
Because the floor is overhead divided by PAID hours, and utilization sets the denominator. A 30-hour week at 75% booked gives 97.4 paid hours a month; slip to 60% and the same $5,913 of costs and income spreads over 78 hours — the floor jumps 25% with zero cost increase. This is why slow Tuesdays belong in your prices: the market does not owe you full books, and a menu priced assuming 100% utilization loses money every empty slot. It also cuts the other way — raising utilization from 75% to 85% drops the floor 12% and lets you hold prices while competitors raise theirs. Before touching the menu, run the no-show calculator’s policy stack: cutting no-shows from 8% to 3% is utilization recovery that costs nothing.
Then eating the gap is the one move guaranteed to fail — you would be subsidizing clients out of your own paycheck indefinitely. The honest options, in order: raise utilization (fill gaps with waitlist offers and better rebooking), raise the average ticket with add-ons that cost minutes not hours (glosses, treatments, scalp services), cut overhead (renegotiate rent or color stock, drop unused software), or change the market you serve — a specialist colorist in a different neighborhood or a suite of your own can support a floor a walk-in shop cannot. What the floor gives you is the truth about WHICH services lose money: a $40 cut at a $61 floor is fine at 45 minutes and a loss at 60. Trim the losers, keep the winners, and let the menu reflect your actual cost structure instead of the shop down the street’s guess.
Keep the target as pre-tax personal income, then handle tax separately — renters owe the extra self-employment FICA share (roughly 14% of net) plus income tax, and the quarterly-estimated-tax calculator converts the annual number into the four payments. If you want the menu to carry the tax load explicitly, inflate the income target by your effective rate: a $4,500 target at a 25% combined rate means the menu must produce $6,000. The mistake to avoid is mixing models — commission stylists are W-2 (tax withheld for them) while renters are 1099 (nobody withholds anything), so two stylists with identical menus and identical books can need very different floors. Re-run the calculator quarterly: color stock drifts, rent renews, and a menu frozen for two years is a slow-motion pay cut measured in percentages you never see.