From 1 April 2026, two changes land on the same day for every UK beauty salon that employs staff: a fresh round of National Minimum Wage increases, and statutory sick pay becoming a day-one right with no waiting period. Neither is optional, and both hit salons harder than most sectors because so much of the industry’s workforce sits in the very pay bands that are rising — apprentices, juniors and developing stylists on the early rungs of a beauty or hairdressing career.
Here’s what’s actually changing, and what it means for the way a salon rota and price list are built.
The new wage bands from April 2026
The National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rise across every age band from 1 April 2026. For a salon employing staff at multiple stages of training, that means three separate figures to budget against:
- Apprentices and 16-17 year olds: rising to £8.00 an hour
- 18-20 year olds: rising to £10.85 an hour, up from £10.00
- 21 and over: rising to £12.71 an hour, up from £12.21
Individually, none of these increases is dramatic. But a salon with two apprentices, a junior stylist and a couple of therapists in their early 20s is absorbing all three rises at once, on top of the employer’s National Insurance contribution that sits on top of every one of those wages. The honest response isn’t panic — it’s arithmetic: work out the new hourly cost of a full team, not just the headline rate.
Statutory sick pay becomes a day-one right
The second change is less about the number and more about the timing. Under the Employment Rights Act 2025, statutory sick pay no longer has a waiting period or a minimum-earnings threshold attached to it — it becomes payable from an employee’s very first day, for anyone who’s ill, including a junior only a few weeks into the job. Previously, a new starter had to build up qualifying earnings and wait out unpaid “waiting days” before SSP kicked in; from April 2026, that gap disappears.
For a salon, this matters because appointment-based businesses feel a single sick day more sharply than most — a missed colour or cut is a missed booking, not just a missed shift. It’s worth having a clear, written plan for cover (a colleague picking up a chair, rebooking protocol, how clients are told) rather than working it out for the first time when it actually happens.
What to check before April
A few practical steps make the transition painless rather than a scramble in the last week of March:
- Re-run your payroll costs against the new hourly rates for every band your team sits in, not just the headline 21+ figure.
- Review entry-level pricing. If a junior cut or a basic treatment is priced against last year’s wage cost, the margin on it has just moved — check whether the price still supports the wage behind it.
- Look at service times versus wage cost for treatments delivered mostly by apprentices or juniors, where the wage rise lands hardest relative to the price charged.
- Confirm your payroll system is set up for day-one SSP — most modern payroll software handles this automatically, but it’s worth checking before the first new starter needs it.
- Remember this applies to employees, not the self-employed. Therapists and stylists renting a chair on a self-employed basis aren’t covered by NMW or SSP — only genuine employees on the salon’s own payroll are, which is worth being clear about if your salon runs a mixed team.
None of this is a reason to hold back on training juniors and apprentices — they’re how every experienced stylist and therapist got started, and a salon that keeps investing in them keeps its skills pipeline alive. It’s simply a reason to price and staff with April’s numbers in mind rather than finding out the hard way. Whether a salon is trading in the City of London, Norwich or Holbeck, the same wage bands and the same day-one sick pay rule apply everywhere in the UK — there’s no regional variation to plan around.
The official rates are confirmed on GOV.UK’s National Minimum Wage page, and the day-one sick pay change is set out by Acas’s guide to the Employment Rights Act 2025 — both worth bookmarking for the next update, since neither rate is fixed for good.
