To better understand how confident beauty professionals and beauty schools feel about their businesses, the Professional Beauty Association (PBA), in partnership with PBA Business Member Pivot Point International, created the Pro Beauty Pulse.
This monthly index tracks industry sentiment across W-2 beauty professionals, 1099/independent professionals, salon owners, and beauty school leaders. We also include data from The KIM Report, providing real-world salon performance results to complement sentiment insights.
PERCEPTION VS. REALITY
The charts above reflect sentiment collected in June, when industry professionals were asked to assess their business conditions during May.
The data below, sourced from The KIM Report, shows actual industry performance for May.
Viewed together, these offer a comparison of how salon industry perceptions compare to real-world results.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
The good news is that May showed improvement over April on a month-over-month basis.
The broader concern is that, despite this improvement, 2026 continues to trail 2025 across most key measures. Customer traffic, service volume, visits, and retail activity remain below last year’s levels.
Year-to-date revenue is still slightly positive, but the growth is coming entirely from higher pricing — not from more clients, more visits, more services, or stronger retail sales.
That creates a risk. Pricing can help offset softer demand in the short term, but it is not a sustainable growth strategy if client traffic and activity continue to decline.
The risk is even greater in a cost-conscious economy, where consumers may delay visits, choose fewer or lower-cost services, or pull back on retail purchases.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
School sentiment had declined across all three measures (past, current, and future confidence) in May but improved across all three measures in June.
One possible explanation is that the industry conversation changed. In May, there was a very active outreach tied to the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed accountability framework, including repeated calls for schools to submit public comments.
By June, the comment period had ended. While the uncertainty had not gone away, the issue was being discussed less often and with less urgency. As a result, sentiment may have improved because the immediate sense of risk became less visible — an “out of sight, out of mind” effect.
The KIM Report aggregates data from more than 10,000 salons and solopreneurs, each with 24 consecutive months on the same software platform to ensure data consistency and reliability.
Month over month, May showed improvement over April, with salon revenue increasing by 2.41%, the number of services rising by 1.64%, unique clients increasing by 2.09%, and retail units up by 3.74%.
The broader concern is that, despite this monthly improvement, 2026 remains behind 2025 across most areas. While service pricing has grown 3.02% year to date, the number of services, unique clients, unique visits, and retail activity are all trending below last year’s levels.
In this soft demand environment, year-to-date revenue has grown, but this growth has been entirely driven by pricing to offset declines in traffic, service volume, and retail activity.
STAY INFORMED
Explore more insights in The KIM Report, your source for real-world data and monthly performance trends shaping the professional beauty market.
