The advice nobody unpacks
Search for how to start a salon and within three paragraphs you will read that location is the most important factor. What follows is not a method but a list: be visible, mind the parking, look at the competition. Those are not criteria, they are categories.
But you eventually have to choose between two or three actual units, and categories are useless for that. You want to be able to say: unit A has 40 percent more households in the age group I serve, unit B costs 1.80 EUR more per productive chair hour, and six times as many people walk past unit C on a Thursday evening.
All of that is calculable, everything you need is free and public, and it costs you a weekend. This article is that method, in the order you run it.
Not in here: Dutch commercial lease law, contract types and notice periods, or the cost of fitting the place out. This is only about whether the spot is any good.
Step 1: count the competition already there
Start by counting, not by looking. A feeling that there are "a lot of hairdressers here" is rarely accurate: you see the salons that stand out, not the fourteen self-employed stylists working from home.
The tool is the KVK Bedrijventeller, free to use. You pick a trade and an area and it returns how many businesses are registered there in the Handelsregister. All the figures come straight from the register. Source: kvk.nl, checked September 2026.
Look up your SBI code first through the CBS search tool at sbi.cbs.nl. Hair care and beauty care sit in different codes, and the classification has been updated to SBI 2025, so check yours rather than copying one from an old article.
Then run the KVK Marktscan, also free. It reports on your market area: the number of businesses in your trade and how that is developing, plus population figures, set against the national average and against a reference area you pick yourself. That last part is the most useful, because you compare your neighbourhood with one whose trade you already understand.
Two warnings. A registration is not a salon: mobile hairdressers, dormant registrations and people doing a few clients at home all count, and a registration says nothing about quality, price or occupancy. After counting, walk past the five nearest addresses.
Step 2: look at who lives there
Now the demand side. The source is CBS neighbourhood statistics, the Kerncijfers wijken en buurten table 86165NED on StatLine, with figures for 2025. Free to consult. Source: cbs.nl, checked September 2026.
What the table holds and what you do with it:
- Population per neighbourhood. Your denominator for everything below.
- Age structure, in bands 0 to 15, 15 to 25, 25 to 45, 45 to 65 and 65 plus. A neighbourhood full of 25 to 45 year olds has a different treatment pattern and price tolerance from one full of over-65s. For a pedicure practice the second is the interesting one.
- Households, single-person and with children. Families mean children's cuts and Saturday pressure.
- Income per person and per household, plus low-income and wealth indicators. Income and education figures are often preliminary; the table says so per topic.
- Housing stock and WOZ property values, a useful second indicator alongside income.
- Distance to amenities such as a GP, supermarket and school. A salon beside the supermarket the whole neighbourhood visits weekly sits somewhere quite different from one on a street nobody has a reason to be on.
Record these figures for every unit you are considering and for the two adjoining neighbourhoods. A catchment area does not stop at a CBS boundary.
There is no figure for residents per salon
You are going to go looking for it, so here it is up front: there is no reliable national figure for how many residents a salon needs. The numbers in circulation do not trace back to a primary source, and they would not be worth much if they did, because a salon in central Utrecht and one in a Drenthe village do not have the same catchment area.
So work out your own local ratio. It takes ten minutes:
- Use the Bedrijventeller to count the businesses in your trade in the municipality you want to be in.
- Take that municipality's population from the CBS figures.
- Divide the population by the number of businesses. That gives you residents per registration.
- Repeat for 3 to 5 comparable municipalities: same order of size, same kind of built environment.
- Line them up.
What you have is not a norm but a spread. If your municipality sits at the bottom, the market there is more crowded than in comparable places, and you want an answer to that before you sign. If it sits at the top, either there is room or there is a reason nobody is there.
Same reasoning as with start-up costs: better a method you apply to your own situation than a national average nobody can substantiate.
Footfall location versus destination location
This choice decides how much you pay for visibility. It is a choice, not a verdict on quality.
| Topic | Footfall location | Destination location |
|---|---|---|
| Where | Shopping street, village centre, station | Residential area, first floor, business unit, at home |
| What the rent buys | Visibility and people walking past | Square metres and quiet |
| How clients find you | They walk past and remember you | They look you up, usually online |
| What you must be good at | Window, walk-ins, short treatments | Being findable, booking without a phone call, retention |
| Where it goes wrong | Rent for footfall you never convert | Being invisible and noticing a year later |
| When it makes sense | You start with no client base | You bring regulars or work strictly by appointment |
The common mistake is renting a destination location at a footfall price, or the reverse: taking a prime unit and then working by appointment only, paying for passing trade you never use. Take a destination location and your marketing budget shifts from rent to findability. Count that shift explicitly, otherwise you compare a rent that includes visibility with one that does not.
Rent per square metre against revenue per chair
Rents are quoted per square metre per year, a number that is not comparable between units: 60 square metres with a good layout can hold more chairs than 80 with a column in the middle. So convert it into something that is comparable, rent per productive chair hour.
First the denominator. A chair available 40 hours a week, 46 weeks a year, is 1,840 chair hours. Apply a realistic occupancy, say 65 percent, and you sell roughly 1,196 hours per chair per year. Two chairs: 2,392 hours.
Then the numerator. Eighty square metres at 150 EUR per square metre per year is 12,000 EUR of rent. Divided by 2,392 productive hours, that is 5.02 EUR per productive chair hour.
Do that for every unit on your list and you can put a small expensive place next to a large cheap one and see which is genuinely dearer. Then set your hourly rate beside it: at 55 EUR an hour, roughly 9 percent of every hour sold goes to rent here.
Two things to keep honest. Occupancy is an assumption, not a fact, so run the scenario at 50 percent too. And ask separately about service charges and indexation, because neither sits in the price per square metre.
Both do sit in the lease, alongside the term you are then tied to for five to ten years. Why a salon is in principle 290-bedrijfsruimte, what protection that brings and what to check before you sign is set out in the guide on the commercial lease for your salon premises.
For the asking prices themselves there is no usable national table. Take them from current listings for your postcode area and call a local agent to ask what units actually let for.
Parking and the checks everyone skips
The last part cannot be calculated, but it can be ticked off.
Visit 3 times, on 3 days, at 3 times of day. Say Tuesday at 10:00, Thursday at 17:30 and Saturday at 11:00. Count passers-by for 15 minutes each visit and note whether they walk or drive and whether they look like your client. A street that seems lively on Saturday may be a through route midweek.
Parking, in minutes and euros. Not "there is parking", but how many spaces within 100 metres, paid or blue zone, and how long you may stay. A client with a two-hour colour appointment and a 90-minute blue zone comes once.
Bikes and public transport. In urban neighbourhoods a large share of clients arrive by bike. Check there is something to lock up to and that it is not already full on Saturdays.
The neighbours. Which units are empty, which changed hands recently. Walk in and ask how long they have been there and how trade is; that five-minute conversation beats an hour of reports.
The municipal omgevingsplan. Check that your activity is permitted at that address and which permits go with it, and in the same pass look at building plans and roadworks nearby, because a street dug up for eighteen months rewrites your footfall count. KVK puts this first in its omgevingsanalyse. Source: kvk.nl, checked September 2026.
The evening. If you plan to work until 20:00, go and stand there at 20:00. Lighting and how the street feels decide whether clients book an evening slot at all.
What you need on day one at the new address
Once you have run this method you are left with one unit and a stack of assumptions to test over the first months. What goes into that unit next, and in what order you buy it, is in the salon equipment checklist. The most important is your occupancy rate, because that number sits underneath your rent calculation and the whole operation.
So measure it from the day you open, not when your bookkeeper delivers the annual figures in March. You want to see week by week which hours filled, which stayed empty, and on which days people tried to book and found nothing free.
That measurement is built into CelerBook, including if you run a barbershop specifically rather than a broader hair salon: the page on software for barbershops shows what that looks like for that type of business. You get your own booking page on your own subdomain where clients pick their treatment and time themselves, and a calendar per staff member with working hours and time off. The revenue and staff analytics show how your hours actually filled, so the assumption in your rent calculation becomes a measured figure within a few months. Confirmation emails go out automatically, and an SMS reminder ahead of time costs 0.11 EUR excluding VAT per appointment. The first 5 appointments each month are free, then 0.25 EUR excluding VAT per completed appointment, capped at 30 EUR a month for a solo operator plus 5 EUR per additional active staff member. No contract, and no usage means no cost. Try CelerBook for free.