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Colour room margins

What's a bowl of colour really costing you?

Most colour rooms quietly bleed margin in the mixing bowl. Weigh up what each service actually costs in product, what you're binning, and what price protects your margin.

The numbers you enter

$
What you pay your wholesaler per tube.
Usually 60g.
$
Price of a 1L bottle of developer.
How much colour you weigh into the bowl — not just what lands on the head.
Total developer in the bowl.
%
Portion of the bowl that gets thrown out. Industry ballpark 20–40%.
$
Per-service sundries, ex GST.
$
What you charge now, before GST.
%
Healthy colour rooms sit around 10–15%.

What the numbers mean

True product cost per colour service
$13.22
Every bowl costs you $13.22 in product before a stylist touches it — and $3.31 of that goes in the bin. That's 11.0% of your price.
Product cost % of price
11.0%
Where your colour cost sits against your price.
Wasted product per service
$3.31
What you throw away every single colour.
Wasted product per year
$5,156
Same waste, multiplied across the year.
Suggested min price (ex GST)
$110.17
Price to hit your target product cost %.
Where it goes
Product on the client$10
Binned as waste$3.31

How this is worked out

All figures ex GST. Product cost per bowl = (colour cost per gram × grams mixed) + (developer $/L ÷ 1000 × ml mixed) + other consumables. Waste $ = bowl cost × waste %; the rest is what lands on the client. Product cost % = bowl cost ÷ your price. Suggested min price = bowl cost ÷ your target product cost % (we also show it +10% GST for client-facing quotes). Annual waste = waste $ × services/week × 52. Waste of 20–40% is an industry ballpark, not a hard figure — weigh your own bowls for a week to dial it in. This is a planning guide, not tax or pricing advice.

A working tool, not financial advice. It uses the figures and assumptions you enter — check them against your own numbers and your accountant before any pricing, wage or financial decision. Award and tax figures change (often each 1 July); verify current rates at fairwork.gov.au and ato.gov.au. Shear Profit gives no tax or financial advice.

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