US personal-care market, mapped
Regis is in Chapter 11. Great Clips runs 4,151 sites. The US spa and salon market’s other 98% is where the real buyer lives.
Updated June 8, 2026
For booking and POS software vendors, product distributors, suite-rental aggregators, equipment lenders, and capital providers selling into salon and spa operators. The national chains are loud. The owner behind each of the other 885,000 doors is the actual buyer.
Active US personal-care establishments
iUS locations across the top 10 chains combined
Independents and sub-10-location operators
The top ten chains
The ten largest US spa and salon chains, by storefront count.
Ranked by US storefronts, not by revenue or square footage. The field drops sharply after the top three: Great Clips at 4,151, Regis at 2,966 (and filing Chapter 11), Sport Clips at 1,698. Below those three, no single brand breaks 1,200 sites. The full parent-and-brand breakdown, with who actually owns each chain, sits in Brand-by-brand below.
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.
Software
Booking, POS, and salon-management platforms
Booksy, Vagaro, Square Appointments, Boulevard, Mindbody, Phorest, GlossGenius. The buyer is the owner who signs the contract personally, not a corporate IT department. The independent operator's seat count and monthly revenue decide which tier they land on.
Get the sampleSupply
Professional color and retail product distribution
SalonCentric (L’Oréal), CosmoProf (Sally Beauty), Salon Services, Maly’s. Back-bar contracts, color cases, and shampoo retail SKUs. The recurring revenue a distributor rep builds one owner at a time over years of quarterly visits.
Get the sampleSuite rental
Salon-suite aggregators and franchisors
Sola Salon Studios, Salons by JC, Phenix Salon Suites, My Salon Suite. Recruiting stylists who walked out of a commission shop and want their own door. The long-tail map shows you where the next 50 stylist-tenants are before they announce the move.
Get the sampleCapital
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 search funds running buy-and-build plays in nail, waxing, and massage.
Get the sampleDemand
Local SEO, GBP, and reputation services
Birdeye, Podium, and the agency layer selling Google Business Profile management, review-generation, and owner websites to operators whose books used to fill entirely on word of mouth.
Get the sampleEquipment
Capital equipment and salon fit-out
Belmont, Takara Belmont, Pibbs, Collins. Chairs, dryer banks, shampoo bowls, and the laser machines that turn a commission salon into a medspa overnight. The owner signs the lease, not corporate.
Get the sampleCompliance
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 licensed talent on the floor.
Get the sampleAdjacent universes built the same way: the broader by-industry email lists, the sister med spa directory for the clinical-treatment counterpart, and the rest of the Orbital data hub.
The long version
Detail, on demand.
Published personal-care counts from trade-press reports are 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. For the clinical end of the personal-care market, the companion how-many-med-spas page goes deeper.
How the establishment count is built
- Start with the personal-care universe. Every active US personal-care establishment the Orbital data team tracks, covering 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 each 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. Drybar is shown at corporate footprint, not at the individual franchisee LLC level the raw data surfaces.
- Drop categories that are not salons. Salon-management software vendors are filtered out because they are not operators. Cosmetics counters inside Ulta and Sephora are filtered out as concessions, not storefronts. Hotel and resort spas are filtered out as 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.
Ranked by US storefront count, not by revenue or square footage. The interesting line is the parent company column: the top chains in personal care look like national brands but are mostly franchise networks owned by private equity, and in Regis’s case, a restructuring process that is still moving.
| # | Chain | Parent / brands | US locations | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Great Clips | Privately held. Single brand. | 4,151 | Largest single salon brand in the US by storefront count, more than double the number-two brand. All-cash, no-appointment-required haircut franchise based in Minneapolis. Every location is franchisee-owned. |
| 2 | Regis Corporation | Regis Corporation (NYSE:RGS). Supercuts (1,655), SmartStyle (864), Cost Cutters (365), Holiday Hair (82). | 2,966 | Filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August 2024 after roughly two decades of failed turnaround attempts. Combined location count is a high-water mark; sub-brand footprints are contracting through the restructuring process and may move materially through 2026. |
| 3 | Sport Clips Haircuts | Privately held. Single brand. | 1,698 | Men-and-boys haircut franchise based in Georgetown, Texas. Concentrated franchise-conversion success in suburban Sun Belt markets. Roughly 1,900 units globally when Canada locations are included. |
| 4 | Ulta Beauty | Ulta Beauty (NASDAQ:ULTA). Single brand. | 1,186 | Beauty retailer that surfaces in salon-market data because of in-store hair and brow services. The service counter is a traffic driver inside the retail box, not the core model. Ulta is a retailer first. |
| 5 | Massage Envy | Roark Capital Group. Single brand. | ~1,100 | Membership-billing massage and facial-spa franchise. Location count from public franchise disclosures and Roark Capital portfolio reporting. Sits in a fourth Orbital sub-vertical (massage services) outside the three core personal-care market files. |
| 6 | European Wax Center | European Wax Center (NASDAQ:EWCZ). Single brand. | 1,066 | Body-waxing franchise concept. Post-IPO unit growth has been the cleanest of any chain in the table outside the haircut majors. EWCZ went public in 2021 and has grown its US unit count each year since. |
| 7 | Sola Salon Studios | Radial Equity Partners (since 2024; prior: Palladium Equity Partners). Single brand. | 786 | Suite-rental aggregator. Sola does not employ stylists; it leases private suites to independent operators. Structurally different from a commission salon chain: the stylist-tenant retains the client relationship. |
| 8 | Palm Beach Tan | Trive Capital. Single brand. | 614 | Largest US tanning-salon operator. Membership-billing model. Concentrated in suburban retail strip centers. Acquired by Trive Capital and operated as a standalone portfolio company. |
| 9 | Hand & Stone | Levine Leichtman Capital Partners. Single brand. | 582 | Massage and facial-spa franchise. Competes directly with Massage Envy in the recurring-membership spa segment. Acquired by Levine Leichtman Capital Partners in 2021. |
| 10 | Hair Cuttery Family of Brands | Tacit Capital. Hair Cuttery, Bubbles, Salon Cielo, CIBU. | 492 | Acquired out of Chapter 11 by Tacit Capital in 2020; smaller than its pre-2020 footprint. Includes Hair Cuttery, Bubbles, Salon Cielo, and the CIBU brand. |
Counts from Orbital’s location graph across three personal-care sub-verticals plus public-source disclosures for Massage Envy. Regis Corporation Chapter 11 process is ongoing; sub-brand counts may move materially through 2026 and 2027. Source: Orbital data team, June 2026 snapshot.
California, Texas, and Florida together hold roughly a third of US personal-care storefronts. Population alone explains most of 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, meaning the market tracks households, not tourism skew or income concentration. Counts below are from the Hair Salons and Barbers market, the largest of the three sub-verticals. Beauty salons and day spas concentrate in the same five-state group 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 data team, June 2026 snapshot. Beauty salons and day spas concentrate in the same five-state group with similar share distribution.
We believe
Beauty consolidation has been tried by every large operator and has failed every time. The chair is the unit. The chair does not franchise.
Every ten years, private equity looks at the US salon market and decides the long tail is ripe for a roll-up. The pitch is always the same: fragmented, repeat-transaction, recession-resistant. The result is also always the same. Regis built the largest US salon footprint in history and filed Chapter 11 in August 2024 after two decades of failed turnaround attempts. Service Corporation International exited the salon business decades earlier. Various PE-backed regional banners in nail and waxing have come and gone without crossing 200 locations.
The problem is structural, not operational. A commission salon’s economics are tied to the individual stylist, not to the real estate. The stylist holds the client relationship. When the stylist leaves, the revenue follows. This is why suite rental has been the only structurally durable growth model in the market: Sola Salon Studios recruits the stylist who already has a book, puts them in a private suite, and collects rent. The stylist builds equity in their own client relationship. Sola does not manage turnover because the stylist is not an employee.
For a vendor, this matters in one specific way: your motion cannot be built around a chain-management procurement team. The buyer in this market is the individual owner sitting behind a license number, a lease, and a credit card. The same conversation that closes one unit closes the next thousand units with a different name on the door each week.
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 publicly traded majors, you do not need a long-tail map. You need a short Rolodex and a relationship manager who already knows the procurement team. 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 ACV only works above $100k. 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 sites 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.
If you Google “largest spa and salon chains in the US,” the top result is usually a trade-press top-ten list written from a press release, or an industry-report PDF sized for an analyst deck. Both are excellent for what they cover. 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 spas surface because they have a treatment menu and a booking calendar. Strip all three categories out and the top of the table looks different. The actual salon industry is haircut chains, suite-rental aggregators, beauty-retail boxes, and the four membership-spa operators.
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 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. Annual industry reports refresh once a year. Government establishment data refreshes on a 12-to-18-month lag. Regis filed Chapter 11 in August 2024, and any list 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 Orbital sits in. The same engine that mapped HVAC contractors and roofing firms 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. Use the industry reports 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?
The Orbital data team's June 2026 snapshot covers the US personal-care market across hair salons and barbers, beauty salons, and day spas. The full universe count and sub-vertical breakdown are at the top of this page. Chain-affiliated locations account for around 6 percent of those sites; the rest is single-chair independents, small two-to-three-chair shops, and regional banners that never crossed state lines. That chain share has never grown past 7 percent despite a decade of PE-backed roll-up attempts.
What is the largest spa and salon chain in the US?
Great Clips is the largest US spa and salon chain 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, 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. Sub-brands appear 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 the trade-press industry reports?
Trade-press reports publish annual revenue estimates and location counts, but the numbers lag by 12 to 24 months and group personal care into broad industry buckets. Orbital counts location by location, refreshed on a rolling monthly schedule, with each location resolved to an owner or decision-maker. Trade-press sizes the market for an analyst deck. Orbital hands a vendor team the next 50,000 names to call.
Who buys this data?
B2B vendors selling into salon and spa operators. Booking and POS software platforms. Product-and-supply distributors handling color, retail SKUs, and back-bar contracts. Payment processors and working-capital lenders. Suite-rental aggregators recruiting new stylist tenants. Local SEO and reputation agencies selling to independent owners. Capital providers running buy-and-build plays in nail, waxing, and massage. The buyer is almost never a corporate procurement office.
When is this dataset the wrong fit?
Three cases. First, if you only sell to enterprise buyers at the Ulta or Great Clips corporate tier, you need a short Rolodex, 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 annual contract value only works above six figures, single-chair operators 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.
Tell us the states, sub-verticals, or chain affiliations you want. We send a free sample of around 100 verified owner records you can check against your own pipeline, no commitment, no email-list back-and-forth. For the clinical-treatment counterpart, see the sister med spa directory.
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