If you have ever gone looking for spa industry benchmarks, you will have noticed something odd: the same numbers appear on dozens of pages, none of which say where they came from. We went looking for the primaries behind them. Some exist and are excellent. Most do not exist at all.
This is what we found: which organisations publish spa data, what each one actually measures, which geography and which year it covers, and which widely quoted benchmarks turned out to have no source underneath them.
Every figure below carries its publisher, its geography and the year the data was collected. Where we could not find a publisher, we left the number out rather than round it into something vaguer.
What is genuinely known about the spa industry
Three organisations publish spa figures you can check: the Global Wellness Institute for global market size, ISPA for the scale of the US industry, and CBRE for the operating economics of US hotel spas. Between them they cover how many spas exist, how much they earn and roughly how a hotel spa’s cost base behaves. They do not cover anything below that level.
How big the global spa market is
The Global Wellness Institute counted 201,861 spas worldwide earning $157 billion in revenue in 2024, published in its 2025 Global Wellness Economy Monitor. GWI has run this study since 2008; in its first edition, covering 2007, it counted 71,800 spas earning $47 billion. The gap between those two data points works out at about 7.4% annual revenue growth. GWI also puts the sector at 135% of its 2019 level, so the pandemic dip is well behind it.
For context, GWI sizes the whole wellness economy at $6.8 trillion in 2024, forecast to reach $9.8 trillion by 2029. Europe accounts for about $1.7 trillion of that, or roughly a quarter, at $1,876 per person per year. Wellness tourism was $893.9 billion in 2024 and thermal and mineral springs $71.7 billion.
Watch the naming convention here. The report titled “2025” reports 2024 data. That trap repeats across every source in this post.
How big the US spa industry is
ISPA’s Big Five, commissioned by the ISPA Research Foundation and conducted by PwC, is the most detailed free spa dataset we found. Published in March 2026, it reports 2025 data.
| Metric | 2025 | Change on 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue | $23.5 billion | +4.2% |
| Spa visits | 191 million | +1.8% |
| Spa locations | 22,060 | +0.4% |
| Revenue per visit | $123.10 | +2.3% |
| Total employment | 376,900 | +0.2% |
Three years earlier, in ISPA’s 2022 figures, the same industry recorded $20.1 billion, 181 million visits, $111.50 per visit and 360,700 employees.
This is the United States and nothing else. ISPA is a US body and its Big Five counts US locations. The $123.10 figure is the one most often lifted out of context and presented as what a spa client spends anywhere in the world. It is not that, and there is no published number that is.
What spa operating economics look like
The one place published cost data exists is hotel spas. CBRE Hotels Research analysed 297 US hotels that operate their own spas (222 resort, 75 urban, 176 luxury) for the 2023 and 2024 financial years.
| Metric, 2024 | Overall | Resort | Urban | Luxury |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spa revenue per available hotel room | $6,061 | $6,539 | $4,756 | $9,847 |
| Spa as share of total hotel revenue | 3.4% | 3.5% | 3.1% | 4.2% |
| Contract labour as share of spa wages | 9.6% | 5.3% | 17.9% | 8.9% |
CBRE also reports that between 2023 and 2024 spa revenue rose 1.4%, spa labour cost rose 3.9%, cost of goods sold fell 9.9% and spa profit fell 0.5%. Massage accounts for 60–75% of treatment revenue and retail for 15–30% of spa service revenue.
Two cautions before you use any of this. First, “revenue per available room” means per available hotel guest room, not per treatment room. Misreading it is how the fictional per-treatment-room benchmarks in circulation appear to have been born. Second, the average property in this sample has 381 guest rooms. If you run a one-room practice, this is interesting context about how a spa’s cost base behaves in a rising-wage environment. It is not a target.
The directional finding travels better than the absolute one: labour cost is outrunning spa revenue, by 3.9% against 1.4% in a single year, in the one segment where anyone publishes the figures.
Where spa industry statistics come from: a comparison of the sources
If you only take one thing from this post, take this table. It is the answer to “who actually publishes spa data” and it is what most statistics roundups leave out.
| Publisher | What it measures | Geography | Data year | Access |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Global Wellness Institute | Spa counts, spa revenue, wellness economy segments | Global, with regional splits at wellness-economy level | 2024 (published 2025) | Free |
| ISPA / PwC (“Big Five”) | Revenue, visits, locations, revenue per visit, employment | United States | 2025 (published March 2026) | Five headline figures free; the full U.S. Spa Industry Study is ISPA members only |
| CBRE Hotels Research | Spa revenue per available room, spa share of hotel revenue, labour and profit movement | 297 US hotels operating their own spas | 2023–24 | Free |
| Square, Future of Beauty 2025 | Technology adoption, consumer preferences, loyalty, pricing intentions | United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia | 2024 | Free to read online; sample size not stated in the report itself |
| Phorest, Consumer Insights 2025 | How salon clients choose, discover and book | Stated as UK and Ireland; see the caveat below | Fielded 30 October – 13 November 2024 | Free PDF |
Two things worth reading off that table. The gated cell matters most: ISPA collects the operational benchmarks the industry wants and publishes five summary numbers, keeping the rest for members. That single fact explains why almost every “spa benchmark” you find online has no source.
And the bottom two rows are vendor research. Square and Phorest both sell booking software to spas and salons, which is the same thing we do. Their figures below are labelled as theirs throughout, in the same way CBRE’s are labelled as 297 hotels.
What operators get wrong about their own customers
The most interesting material we found is not any single benchmark. It is that where a survey asked operators and consumers the same question, the two groups gave incompatible answers.
The source is Square’s Future of Beauty 2025, which reports 2024 field data across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. Square’s landing page indicates roughly 2,000 beauty business owners and 4,000 consumers, but we could not confirm the sample size from the report itself, so treat everything in this section as provisional on that count.
Memberships: 85% of operators, 18% of customers
85% of beauty leaders said memberships and subscriptions delivered positive ROI. 18% of consumers said they would pay for a membership or club. Roughly a third of leaders, 34%, had added memberships or clubs in the past year, and 24% of those who had not said they would consider it. On the consumer side, willingness to pay for online tutorials was 13% and for subscription boxes 9%.
Those are different questions and both can be true: a membership can pay off handsomely with the minority who want one. But the operator figure on its own reads as “memberships are a safe bet”, and the same report puts consumer appetite at fewer than one in five. The two belong in the same sentence.
Marketing: operators are on social, customers want email
84% of beauty leaders considered social media marketing important to driving sales, and 48% called social media their top way of encouraging customers to return. Asked how they want businesses to contact them, 63% of consumers chose email and 44% chose text messages. Facebook got 22% and Instagram 15%.
The year-on-year movement in the same table is the sharper finding, and one of very few genuine time series in any of this data:
| Preferred contact channel | 2024 | 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| 63% | 63% | |
| Text messages | 44% | 32% |
| 22% | 36% | |
| Social media direct messages | 16% | 23% |
| 15% | 20% | |
| Chat on website | 13% | 14% |
| TikTok | 10% | 14% |
Email held flat and dominant, text gained 12 points, and every social channel fell. Square also notes that 40% of consumers aged 60 and over prefer text messages, and that contact preferences are consistent across age groups.
Age changes the answer for self-service, not for digital contact
Contact preference may be age-neutral, but self-service booking is not:
| 18–43 | 44+ | |
|---|---|---|
| Like using salon or spa mobile apps | 75% | 49% |
| Like automated appointment scheduling | 66% | 44% |
| Like automated payments | 68% | 50% |
Together those two findings say something fairly precise: older clients are markedly cooler on booking technology and perfectly happy to be texted. A shop whose clients skew older and goes online-only is taking a risk, not making an obvious upgrade.
Prices are going up into a market that is spending less
71% of beauty leaders planned to raise prices in the next 12 months. 51% of consumers said they had spent less at beauty businesses over the past 12 months. In the same survey, consumers cut restaurant spending at 63% and retail at 58%, so beauty held up comparatively well, and 63% of beauty leaders reported some financial pressure with 16% calling it significant. Australia was the outlier on the consumer side at 57% cutting back, against 50% in the US, 49% in Canada and 49% in the UK.
The finding that cuts against our own pitch
Phorest’s Consumer Insights 2025 asked salon clients how they had discovered a new salon, and compared it with the same question in 2022:
| 2022 | 2025 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Word of mouth | 65% | Word of mouth | 61% |
| Google search | 46% | 38% | |
| Social media | 31% | 37% | |
| Reviews | 29% | Google search | 35% |
| Google maps | 10% | Reviews | 28% |
Google search fell from 46% to 35% as a route to discovering a new salon, and Instagram overtook it. We sell shop pages partly on being findable in local search, so this is not a convenient number for us, and it is in a report we are quoting elsewhere, so leaving it out would be selective. The honest read is that word of mouth still leads by a wide margin and search is now one channel among several rather than the front door. Note also that the 2022 list has a single combined “social media” row while 2025 splits Instagram and Facebook, so the social comparison is not like-for-like.
Phorest is where the sample caveat bites hardest. Its introduction describes 716 responses from consumers in the UK and Ireland. Its methodology page describes a SurveyMonkey panel of 2,083 completed responses, of which 38% were United States, 20% UK, 15% Ireland, 15% Australia and 12% Canada. Nothing in the report states which of those the charts are drawn from. Respondents also qualified by having visited a hair salon in the past six months, so these are hair salon clients, adjacent to a spa audience rather than the same as it. We are quoting it anyway, with the ambiguity stated, because it is one of very few non-US consumer datasets that exists at all.
If getting found locally is your current problem, our guide to getting your wellness shop found on Google covers the parts of this that you control.
If you want the forward-looking read rather than the reference one, we set out which 2026 trend claims survive a source check in wellness industry trends for 2026.
Benchmarks you will see quoted that have no traceable source
We searched specifically for the operational benchmarks that a “spa industry benchmarks” article is supposed to contain. Almost none of them survive contact with a source check.
No-show and cancellation rates. Published claims for the same industry ranged from about 1% to about 40%. A range that wide is not a benchmark, it is an absence of one. This is commercially the most tempting number for a booking software company to quote and the least defensible, which is exactly why we are not quoting one. Our own guidance on reducing no-shows is deliberately written without a headline percentage.
Revenue per treatment room. The only published figure we traced is ISPA’s, from its 2004 study: $52,163 per treatment room and $172 per square foot. Twenty-two years old, and not a 2026 benchmark by any stretch. Everything modern quoting a per-room number traces back to vendor blogs with no methodology, and CBRE’s per-available-hotel-room figure is not a substitute.
Treatment room occupancy and utilisation. The frequently quoted “50–65% utilisation” range is attributed to ISPA data without naming a publication. ISPA’s operational research is members-only, so that attribution cannot be checked by anyone reading it. The companion claim that “70–90% is healthy” has no attributed origin at all.
Client retention, lifetime value and visit frequency. This was the worst case we found. The published “benchmarks” contradict each other directly: first-visit retention averages given as both 35% and 75%, rebooking rates given as both 30–40% and 60–70%, with no primary underneath any of them. Two of the better-resourced reports also contain retention figures presented as industry averages with no stated basis, method or definition. A consumer survey cannot measure how many clients came back to a salon; only platform data can, and neither report says that is where the number came from.
Technology adoption rates. Any figure of the form “X% of spas use online booking” that does not name a sample, a country and a fielding date should be assumed to have neither.
Labour cost as a percentage of revenue, and staff turnover. The “labour is 40–50% of revenue” line is attributed to ISPA by vendor blogs and appears in no free ISPA publication. CBRE’s directional figure — labour up 3.9% against revenue up 1.4% — is the honest version of the same point.
Even good reports contradict themselves
The two best-resourced sources here each disagree with themselves internally, and it is worth knowing what that looks like.
In Square’s report, a section summary card and a chart four pages later give different values for the same four technologies, with automated payments and automated appointment scheduling transposed between them: one page has payments at 56% and scheduling at 52%, the other has payments at 52% and scheduling at 56%. The chart’s own wording asks about consumers “at a restaurant, retailer, beauty salon or spa” while the summary card presents the same items as beauty-specific, so these may be two different questions. We do not know, so we are not quoting either figure as a beauty statistic.
In Phorest’s report, the front matter and the back matter describe two different studies, as set out above.
Neither of these is a bad report. Both are careful documents from companies that paid for genuine research. What is worth taking from them is narrower: a plausible, wrong number was available inside a good report by reading one page and not the other. If that can happen with the source open in front of you, it has certainly happened to every roundup that copied a figure from another roundup.
How to benchmark against your own trend line when no industry figure exists
Because there is no published number for most of what you would want to measure, the comparison that actually works is your shop this quarter against your shop last quarter. That is not a consolation prize. An industry average across 22,060 US locations was never going to tell a two-room practice much anyway, and your own history controls for your prices, your city and your service mix for free.
The standard spa metric definitions are worth borrowing even without benchmark values attached:
- SUR (space utilisation rate) — treatment hours sold divided by treatment hours available.
- RevPATH (revenue per available treatment hour) — treatment revenue divided by available treatment hours.
- ATR (average treatment revenue) — treatment revenue divided by treatments delivered.
Pick three or four numbers, record them the same way every month, and only compare them to your own previous readings. Consistency in how you measure matters far more than which metric you choose. Some practical rules:
- Fix the definition before you start. Decide whether a cancelled-and-rebooked appointment counts, and never change your mind mid-year.
- Use a whole month or quarter, never a week. A single quiet week in a small shop is noise.
- Compare like periods. December against December, not December against February.
- Write down what changed. A price rise, a new service, a staff departure, a fortnight of bad weather. A trend line without context invites you to draw the wrong conclusion.
- Watch direction, not level. Whether your rebooking rate is “good” is unanswerable. Whether it is higher than it was six months ago is answerable and more useful.
WellDesk includes an Earnings report that covers this: sessions, duration, revenue, commission and average per session, broken down by team member for any date range you choose, exportable to CSV or Excel so you can keep your own history outside the app. It is a fixed report rather than a report builder, and it does not predict anything — it tells you what happened, which is what a trend line needs.
If you are setting this up from scratch, our first week with online bookings walks through getting clean data into the system in the first place, and our buyer’s guide for massage therapists covers what to look for in a tool.
What to do with all this
The short version: use GWI when you need the size of the market, use ISPA when you need the scale of the US industry and label it as US, use CBRE when you need to talk about how a spa’s cost base moves and label it as 297 hotels. Treat Square and Phorest as vendor research with disclosed limits. Treat anything else you find without a named publisher, a sample and a date as decoration.
For everything below industry level — your utilisation, your retention, your no-show rate, your revenue per room — there is no number waiting for you, and there probably won’t be one soon. Measure your own, consistently, and compare it to itself.
WellDesk is free right now for the first 100 shops, and after that it is 9.99 € a month for the owner plus 5 € a month for each extra person who takes bookings, with reception and admin logins free. It is your landing page and your booking page in one, with the client records and the earnings report behind it. If you want somewhere to start keeping your own numbers, that is a reasonable place to begin.
