The cheapest way into this trade
Most people who want their own salon start by pricing premises. Rent, deposit and fit-out push the budget into the tens of thousands before anyone sits in the chair.
There is a way in that skips that block: you go to the client. No rent, no building work and no waiting for a unit to come free: with your kit, your transport and your diary, you can be working next month.
What does it cost? Budget an indicative range of roughly 1,000 to 3,000 EUR. That is deliberately a range and not a national average: the only fixed figure is the KVK registration fee of 85.15 EUR, per kvk.nl, checked September 2026. The rest is your own call: tools, a first stock of products, transport and whatever you put online. If you already have a car and bring tools from your employed years, you sit at the bottom of that range. If you buy everything new and want a portable wash unit, you sit above it.
You are not alone in this: on 1 January 2026 there were 34,878 hairdressers registered in the Netherlands, per kvk.nl, checked September 2026.
Working mobile spans more than hairdressing, and in two trades it is closer to the norm than the exception: pedicure and massage. A pedicure practitioner brings a folding footstool or a light treatment chair and works at the client's kitchen table, with a basin instead of a wash unit, because foot care needs no plumbing at all. A massage practice brings a folding treatment table that fits in a car and sets up in ten minutes, and needs no water either. For a hairdresser it works differently: cutting without a rinse is possible, but washing is not always skippable, so the water question further down this guide genuinely applies there. Anyone offering mobile pedicure or massage skips most of that question and is left mainly with the kit, the transport and the diary as start-up costs.
Home salon versus mobile: two different businesses
These two get used interchangeably and it costs people months. A thuiskapper has the salon inside their own home and receives clients there. Ambulant means you travel and the treatment happens at the client's.
| Topic | Salon in your own home | Mobile, at the client |
|---|---|---|
| Where you work | A room in your own house | The client's living room or kitchen |
| Municipality | A check on your own address | No clients at your address |
| Rent or mortgage | Permission often required | Usually does not arise |
| Biggest start-up cost | Fitting out the treatment room | Transport and kit |
| Water | Your own basin and drain | The client's tap |
| What limits your day | The space you have | The route you drive |
You can combine the two, and plenty of hairdressers do: one fixed day at home and three on the road. But for that one day, every rule in the first column applies. If you are considering it, read the separate article on starting a salon in your own home, which walks the full route past the municipality, your landlord and your mortgage provider.
What you do and do not need to check with the municipality
The question a municipality asks about a business at home is about what happens at your address. Ondernemersplein.overheid.nl says that if you start a business at home you must check whether your plans fit your municipality's omgevingsplan, checked September 2026. That test is about foot traffic, parking pressure and nuisance in a residential street.
If you drive to your clients, nobody comes to your address. The traffic the municipality assesses does not exist, so the biggest hurdle of a home salon falls away. That is not a free pass: park a sign-written van permanently in the street, or turn a garage into storage and a workshop, and it becomes a question again.
What you do arrange: registration with KVK under the right activity, a business bank account, and your VAT. Hairdressing services fall under the low VAT rate of 9 percent and products you sell under 21 percent, per belastingdienst.nl, checked September 2026. No diploma is legally required for a hairdresser according to kvk.nl, which says nothing about what a client expects in her own kitchen.
Your kilometre deduction: 0.25 EUR, and what is already inside it
This is the item that makes mobile work bearable for tax. If you use your own car, motorbike or bicycle for business trips, in 2026 you may deduct 0.25 EUR per kilometre from your profit. The amount was raised from 0.23 EUR with retroactive effect to 1 January 2026.
Source: the approving decision published in Staatscourant 2026, 18302 on 21 May 2026, and the Belastingdienst page on business use of a private vehicle, checked September 2026.
Now the part people get wrong. You may not deduct fuel, insurance, tolls or parking separately from your profit. Those costs are already built into the 0.25 EUR per kilometre. Claiming both the mileage and the fuel receipts is a correction with interest later.
What you get in return is simplicity, but only if you record what you drive. Note the date, the address and the kilometres per trip. At four clients a day and 8 kilometres there and back, you are already past 30 kilometres, and you will not reconstruct that from memory in March.
Travel time, surcharges and your service area
Kilometres are cheap; time is not. Twelve minutes of driving plus five minutes of parking and carrying your kit in is 17 minutes you earn nothing for. Twice per client, that is over half an hour per appointment.
Put that in your rate. A 45-minute cut that actually takes 80 minutes of your day is not a 45-minute cut. There are two fixes and you need both.
The first is a treatment price above what the salon round the corner charges, because you deliver at the client's home. The second is an explicit travel surcharge per zone, so the client five minutes away does not pay the same as the client twenty minutes away.
Mind the VAT. Belastingdienst.nl states that you calculate VAT over the total amount you invoice, including items such as travel costs, checked September 2026. Your travel surcharge therefore follows the rate of the treatment, so 9 percent for hairdressing. Put it on its own invoice line and your bookkeeping stays readable.
A minimum charge per visit helps too. A client who only wants a fringe trimmed costs you the same trip as one who has colour and a cut.
Which brings you to how far you go. Without a boundary, your service area gets decided by whoever calls first, usually someone across town.
Pick a radius or a list of postcodes up front, and publish it. For most mobile hairdressers the line sits around fifteen minutes of driving, with a wider zone at a higher surcharge. Outside it you say no, or you say yes to a half-day where you cluster several clients.
Clustering is the whole craft here. Four clients in one neighbourhood in an afternoon is a good day. Four clients spread over four neighbourhoods is the same revenue with ninety minutes of extra driving. Run a fixed day per area and steer new requests to the day that matches their neighbourhood. It feels strict, and it is the difference between six clients in a day and four.
Liability when you work in someone else's home
In a salon, everything sits on floors and furniture that can take a splash of colour. In a living room it does not. No business insurance is legally compulsory for a zzp'er, but on location, business liability cover is the policy that matters most. Ondernemersplein.overheid.nl uses precisely the example of damage you cause at a client, such as knocking something expensive over, checked September 2026.
Think of colour on a pale floor or the arm of a sofa, a bottle tipped onto a wooden table, a chair leg that scratches. Not disasters, but amounts that eat a full month of margin. Keep a floor sheet and a table protector in the car, use them every time, and check that your car insurer knows about the business use: a private policy is written for private use.
Water and hygiene without your own basin
Cutting and shaving carry no licence requirement or GGD inspection, unlike permanent make-up, tattoos and piercings. That does not make hygiene less important, only less inspected.
The practical problem is water. A salon has a basin at working height; a client's home has a kitchen tap, a shower or a bathroom sink, none of which were built for this. Solve it before you book the first appointment, not while standing there with a towel in your hand.
Three workable routes. A neck cushion for the kitchen sink so you can rinse with a shower head. A portable wash unit with its own tank and catch tray, which looks the most professional and costs the most. Or dry cutting as standard, with the client washing beforehand, which belongs in the booking confirmation and not on the doorstep.
What you bring either way: clean towels per client rather than per day, tools disinfected between addresses, your own waste bag, and hand sanitiser for the bathroom with no soap.
Your diary: every address is a planning question
This is where people coming out of a salon get stuck. In a salon you book a time slot. Mobile, you book a slot plus an address plus the journey to it, and all three have to work with the appointment before.
Three things to lock in from week one. The address belongs to the booking and not to a separate message, or you will spend your day hunting for a house number across three channels. Between two appointments belongs a travel block, not optimism. And your working day has a start and an end, because with no shopfront your diary is the only boundary you have.
Ask for the parking situation and the floor at booking: five minutes hunting for a space shifts your whole afternoon.
Confirmations and reminders weigh more heavily here. A no-show in a salon costs an empty hour. A no-show fifteen minutes away costs an empty hour plus half an hour of driving for nothing.
What to do over the next two weeks
Week 1: set your service area and your prices. Write down your radius or postcodes, pick a treatment price that covers your travel time, and set a surcharge per zone plus a minimum per visit. Register with KVK, open a business account and get a quote for liability cover.
Week 2: build your kit and your route. Solve the water problem, buy floor sheets and towels, start a mileage log on the first trip, and set up your diary with fixed days per area and travel blocks between visits.
CelerBook, software for hair salons, is built for exactly that diary. You get your own booking page on your own subdomain where clients pick their treatment and time within the working hours you release, and where the notes field on the booking carries the address instead of a separate message. You see the whole day in one calendar that writes every appointment through to your Google Calendar, so your route is on your phone too. Confirmation emails go out automatically, and an SMS reminder ahead of time costs 0.11 EUR excluding VAT per appointment, which is cheaper than one wasted drive. The pricing suits a start without premises: 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.