Staff management
Chair rent vs commission: how Australian barbershops pay their barbers
Rent the chair, split the takings, or pay a wage? What each model means for your margins, your paperwork and your risk — and the numbers you need to track whichever you choose.
Every barbershop owner ends up at the same fork. A good barber wants a chair in your shop. Do you rent them the chair, split what they earn, or put them on a wage?
The answer changes your margins, your paperwork, and — the part most people skip — your legal risk. This is a plain-English guide to the three models as they work in Australia, and the numbers you need to keep whichever one you pick.
This is general information, not tax or legal advice. The links to the ATO and the Fair Work Ombudsman below are where the actual rules live, and an accountant who knows your shop is worth the hour.
The three models
1. Chair rent
The barber pays you a fixed amount — usually weekly — to work from a chair in your shop. They keep everything they earn. They are running their own small business inside yours.
Why owners like it: your income from that chair is fixed and predictable. A quiet week is their problem, not yours.
Why barbers like it: on a busy chair, they keep more. The better they get, the more the arrangement favours them.
The catch: a chair renter is meant to be genuinely independent. That usually means they set their own prices and hours, bring their own clients and tools, take their own bookings and payments, and carry their own insurance. The more of that you control, the less it looks like rent.
2. Commission
The barber earns a percentage of what they bring in. The split varies a lot from shop to shop — it depends on how much the shop supplies — and some shops pay a different rate on retail, or a higher one above a weekly target. You supply the shop, the walk-ins, the booking system and the products.
Why owners like it: cost moves with revenue. A slow week costs you less, and a barber who builds a following lifts the whole shop.
Why barbers like it: no rent to find in a quiet week, and no business admin.
The catch: commission is a way of calculating pay. It does not by itself decide whether someone is an employee or a contractor — and if they are an employee, commission generally has to at least meet what the award would have paid them for those hours.
3. Wage (often plus a bonus)
An hourly rate under the award, sometimes with a commission or bonus on top. For most shops this is the Hair and Beauty Industry Award.
Why owners like it: it is the simplest arrangement to get right, and you control the roster, the prices and the standard of work.
Why barbers like it: a known pay packet, leave, and super.
The catch: the cost is fixed whether the chair is busy or not, so your walk-in flow and rebooking rate carry the risk.
The question that matters more than the percentage
Owners spend a long time arguing about the exact percentage and very little on the question that can actually hurt them: is this person an employee or a contractor?
You do not get to choose that by what you write on the agreement. It is decided by how the arrangement really works. Calling someone a contractor when the relationship is really employment is known as sham contracting, and it carries penalties. If a "chair renter" works the hours you set, at the prices you set, on clients the shop supplies, wearing your shirt — it is worth getting advice before someone else gives it to you.
Two things owners are often surprised by:
- Super can still apply to contractors. If you pay a contractor mainly for their labour, you may have to pay super guarantee on those payments even though they have an ABN.
- Chair rent is income to you, and GST may apply. If your business is registered for GST, the rent you charge is generally part of your taxable sales. A barber renting a chair has to register for GST themselves once their turnover passes the registration threshold.
Start with the ATO's guidance on employee or independent contractor and the Fair Work Ombudsman's pages on independent contractors.
Which model suits which shop
| Your shop | Usually suits |
|---|---|
| New shop, walk-in heavy, you supply the clients | Wage, or wage + bonus |
| Established shop, barbers building their own regulars | Commission |
| Experienced barbers with their own following and their own bookings | Chair rent |
| A mix of apprentices and senior barbers | A mix — and that is fine |
Plenty of shops run two models at once: apprentices on a wage, seniors on commission, one long-standing barber renting the back chair. What makes that workable is not the agreement. It is being able to see, per barber, what actually happened.
The numbers you need, whichever model you pick
On commission, you need each barber's takings for the period, split by services and retail if the rates differ, with discounts and refunds handled the same way every time. "Roughly what I did this week" is how disputes start.
On chair rent, you need to keep the renter's money and yours genuinely separate — their sales are not your revenue — while still knowing how busy that chair is, because that is what tells you whether the rent is right.
On a wage, you need revenue per rostered hour, per barber. It is the only way to know whether a chair is paying for itself, and whether the quiet Tuesday needs three barbers or two.
In all three, the walk-in queue matters more than owners expect. Who gets the next walk-in is, in effect, who gets paid. A queue everyone can see — first available, or the barber the customer asked for — takes that argument off the shop floor.
How Trimsy handles it
Trimsy records every sale against the barber who did the work, so per-barber takings are a report, not a Friday-night reconstruction. You can see what each barber brought in and what they are owed, whether that is commission or chair rent, and the walk-in queue shows everyone whose turn it is — the customer's and the barber's.
It is one flat monthly fee, with no percentage of your takings, however many barbers you add.