Credential
Cosmetology licence
About 125,000 people a year finish a cosmetology programme and borrow to do it. The work it leads to pays less than the typical American job, which means the cost is never recovered from a pay premium — because there isn't one.
What it costs to get — the middle half of the range.
No single training length — it is set state by state.
No payback period. The job pays no premium over the typical US job, so there is nothing for the cost to be recovered from.
Where no figure above could be verified we publish none rather than an estimate.
Source: US Department of Education, College Scorecard, Field of Study data, 2026 · view
What that cost figure is, and what it is not
The federal programme code, CIP 12.04, covers cosmetology together with related grooming programmes such as nail technology and esthetics, so the range is not cosmetology alone. That range is median cumulative FEDERAL LOAN DEBT at completion, not a tuition sticker price and not total cost. It is what completers actually borrowed, so it excludes grants, savings, family money, employer funding and living costs — which makes it a FLOOR on what the credential costs, never a ceiling. The low and high figures are the 25th and 75th percentiles across the institutions that report a figure for this programme, so a quarter of institutions sit below the low end. College Scorecard pools two award years into each figure; the release used here is dated 10 June 2026.
Every state sets its own training-hour requirement and they range from roughly 1,000 to 2,100 hours — nine months to over a year full time. There is no national figure, and we will not average fifty different rules into one that no state actually uses.
Licences renew every one to two years, with a fee in every state.
How many people hold this, and how many are working in the field
We could not source this one
For some credentials the issuing body publishes a credible count of everyone who holds it, and where it does we publish that count beside the number of people employed in the work. No such count exists for this one that we could verify, so this page shows none. We would rather leave the gap visible than fill it with an estimate — an invented denominator is worse than an absent one, because it cannot be checked.
There is no national count of licensed cosmetologists. Licensing is run by fifty separate state boards, no federal agency aggregates them, and the one industry body that collects licence records sells them and mixes US and Canadian data. So this page shows no denominator. We looked; it is not there.
What happened to the people who finished the training
Four years after completing — a figure for the programme code, not for this job alone
Of 109,085 people who completed Cosmetology and personal grooming, undergraduate certificate or diploma and were no longer studying four years later, 16,760 had no earnings on record at all — 15.4%. The ones who were working earned a median of $26,307, with the middle half between $13,783 and $41,270.
“No earnings on record” is not “unemployed”. The measure is the absence of any wage record and any positive self-employment income for the whole year. Nobody was asked whether they wanted work, so the count holds people who left the workforce by choice — raising children, caring, travelling, living on someone else's income, moving abroad — alongside everyone who wanted a job and had none. Nobody publishes the split and we will not guess it. What it does establish is how many people finished this training and were earning nothing from it or from anything else four years on, which is exactly what the pay figure above cannot tell you.
And this figure is not specific to this job. The federal government publishes programme outcomes at four-digit granularity and no finer, and this credential's programmes share their code with others. So the figure describes everyone who completed anything under that code at this level, not only the people who went on to do this work.
What that programme code covers: CIP 12.04 is cosmetology together with barbering, nail technology, esthetics and related grooming programmes. They lead to different state licences and somewhat different pay, and the Department publishes no split. What they have in common is the thing this row shows: they are the largest sub-degree programme in the country by completions, and they have the worst four-year outcome of any programme on this page.
This is the worst outcome of any programme we can publish, on the largest sub-degree cohort in the country. Set it beside the cost above: people are borrowing for it.
Who is in the cohort: completers who received federal student aid — roughly half of US undergraduates, and the other half are not measured here. People who went on to further study are in neither column. The Department suppresses institutions with cohorts too small to publish and adds statistical noise to the rest, so this is a sum over the institutions large enough to report: 788 of them, recovering 81.8% of the Department's own national count for this programme. Dropping the smallest reporting programmes moves the rate by 0.1 percentage points.
Source: US Department of Education, College Scorecard, Field of Study data, 2026 — release of 10 June 2026; measured four years after completion · view · the same figure for every programme we can publish
What it lets you do
The pay belongs to the job, not to the credential. These are the occupations it qualifies you for.
| Job | Is it required? | Median | Employed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hairdressers, Hairstylists, and Cosmetologists | Legally required to hold the job | $35,790 | 305,710 |
Median pay and employment: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025.
Does it pay for itself?
The job this unlocks does not pay more than the typical US job once every occupation is weighted by how many people are in it. There is no pay premium, so there is nothing for the cost to be recovered from. That does not make the credential worthless — it may be legally required, or the route into work you would rather do — but it does mean it is not an investment that returns cash.
What you need before you start
- A place at a state-approved cosmetology school
- The state training-hour requirement, which varies widely
Do not do this if
- you are borrowing to pay for it — the work it leads to pays below the typical US job, so the debt has no pay premium to come out of
- you cannot stand for most of a working day
- you are counting on salon employment — much of this work is booth rental, which is self-employment with none of the guarantees
All credentials, by payback period · How this is calculated · Look up something else