What barbers actually earn an hour

The number most barbers quote

Takings divided by the hours spent cutting. Eleven hundred and twenty-eight pounds across thirty-eight hours on the chair, so a shade under thirty pounds an hour. It sounds respectable, and it is the figure that gets repeated in the staff room.

It is also wrong in two directions at once.

Wrong direction one: the hours you did not count

You did not work thirty-eight hours. You opened up, you swept between clients, you sat through a no-show, you scrubbed the sink at the end of the day, and on Sunday you did the books. Those hours were not free. You could not spend them anywhere else.

Seven hours a week of that is conservative for most barbers, and it takes a thirty-eight hour week to forty-five. The rate has not changed; the divisor has.

Wrong direction two: what came off the top

Chair rent came out whether the chair was busy or not. On a percentage deal the shop took its share of every head. Either way that money never belonged to you, and counting it in your hourly rate is counting somebody else's income as your own.

Real hourly rate = (takings − the shop's cut + tips) ÷ every hour you were there.

Run the same week through that and the thirty pounds an hour becomes about twenty-two. A quarter of the number disappears, and it was never really there.

Rent and percentage are not the same risk

Both come off the top, but they behave differently and it is worth knowing which one you are carrying.

Fixed rent is the same whether you take four hundred or fourteen hundred. A quiet week hurts twice — less in, same out. But once the rent is covered, every extra pound is yours, so a busy week is worth more on rent than on a split.

A percentage moves with you. It costs you less in a bad week and more in a good one. It is the safer deal while you are building a book and the more expensive one once the book is full.

Tips flatter the number, and they go first

Most shops take no cut of tips, so they land whole and they lift the rate more than people expect. That is fine, but it is worth watching as its own line rather than folding it in and forgetting.

Tips are the most weather-dependent money in the shop. They soften when people are skint, and they soften before the haircuts do. If tips are carrying a serious share of what you take home, a quiet month costs you more than the drop in cuts alone would explain.

Nobody pays you for the weeks you are not there

Your hourly rate does not care whether you take a holiday. Your year does, and this is the bit that separates self-employed money from a wage.

A fortnight in the sun, the bank holidays, the dead week after Christmas and three days with the flu is comfortably thirty days. That is about six working weeks, which is why forty-six is the honest number of working weeks in a barber's year and fifty-two is a fantasy.

Twenty-two pounds an hour across forty-five hours a week sounds like nearly fifty-three thousand a year. Over forty-six weeks it is closer to forty-seven. The hourly rate did not move. The year did.

So what is a good hourly rate?

There is no national figure worth quoting and anybody who gives you one is guessing. Rent in a market town and rent on a city high street are not the same problem. A twelve pound cut and a thirty-five pound cut are not the same trade.

The comparison that means something is your own number three months from now. That is the only benchmark that controls for your rent, your prices, your town and your book.

Three levers, and it helps to know which one you are pulling

• Charge more per head. The fastest lever and the one people avoid. Two pounds on an average cut moves the annual figure further than most people expect.
• Fill more of the chair time you already pay for. You are paying rent on the gaps whether or not anybody sits in them.
• Take back the hours that earn nothing. A tighter tidy-up routine, a deposit that kills the no-shows, the books once a month instead of every Sunday night.

One thing this is not

It is not a wage. It is money passing through your hands before income tax, National Insurance, kit, products and insurance. Comparing it to an employed salary is comparing two different things, and it is why the hourly rate that looks generous can still feel thin by the end of the month.