Search for wellness industry trends and you’ll find the same list everywhere: AI, holistic care, sustainability, personalisation, wellness tourism. Almost none of it cites anything. The percentages that do appear tend to trace back to another blog post, which traces back to a third, which cites nobody.
We know, because the first version of this page was one of them. It claimed that over 70% of wellness consumers prefer businesses with eco-friendly practices, attributed to “studies”. We couldn’t find the study, so the claim is gone rather than reworded.
Here’s what’s left after a source check. One trend has real year-on-year numbers behind it. The market is measurably growing. Most of the rest is worth ignoring.
The one trend with numbers behind it: everything takes longer than it did
The clearest measured finding for 2026 isn’t about treatments or technology. It’s about where owners’ hours go.
Square’s Future of Beauty 2025 asked beauty business leaders whether nine parts of running their business took more or less time than a year ago. At least 72% said “more” for every single one. Not one area got easier.
| Where the time went | Reported spending more time |
|---|---|
| Marketing and social media | 84% |
| New product or service development | 83% |
| Business strategy | 82% |
| Staff training | 82% |
| Researching or implementing new technology | 81% |
| Managing finances and cashflow | 80% |
| Management | 79% |
| Hiring and staff sourcing | 75% |
| Working front of house | 72% |
Two things make this worth more than the average trend claim. It’s a year-on-year comparison rather than a snapshot, which is rare in this data. And it’s internally consistent: the 81% technology figure appears both as a headline and as a row in the chart, with the same value, which is not something every report in this space manages.
The response is in the same report. 81% of leaders were researching or implementing new technology to save time, and at least 76% wanted to invest in AI or automation across every area asked about, led by inventory management at 84%, supplier management at 83% and taxes at 78%.
A caveat that belongs with every figure above: Square sells booking and payment software to this exact audience, so this is vendor research, the same way CBRE’s numbers are hotel-industry research. Square’s landing page indicates roughly 2,000 beauty businesses and 4,000 consumers across the US, Canada, the UK and Australia, but we could not confirm the sample size from the report itself. The field data is 2024, despite the 2025 in the title.
What is growing
The market is real and it’s measured. The Global Wellness Institute counted 201,861 spas worldwide earning $157 billion in 2024, against 71,800 spas earning $47 billion when it first ran the study in 2007. That’s roughly 7.4% annual revenue growth over the long run. ISPA’s US figures, compiled by PwC, put the American industry at $23.5 billion across 22,060 locations in 2025, up 4.2% on the year.
We’re deliberately not reproducing the full tables here, because they belong in one place. Our guide to what spa industry statistics are actually published, and by whom has the complete breakdown, the geographies each source covers, and the traps in reading them.
One thing to hold onto: all of these measure the market, not your shop. A sector growing 7.4% a year tells you the category isn’t shrinking. It says nothing about whether your Tuesdays fill.
The claims to ignore
These turn up in every 2026 trend list. We went looking for sources for all of them and came back empty-handed:
- Sustainability preference percentages. No published, dated, transparent survey measuring what share of wellness consumers choose businesses on environmental grounds.
- Technology adoption rates. What share of shops use online booking, digital intake, reminders or a CRM, and how that changed year on year. Widely quoted, never sourced.
- No-show and cancellation rates. The single most quoted number in this industry, and we could not trace a methodologically sound one.
- Client retention rates and lifetime value. Including the “acquiring a client costs five to seven times more than retaining one” line, which has no traceable origin in this sector.
- Trending-service growth rates. Percentage growth figures for LED, cryotherapy, CBD and similar.
- Wellness tourism applied to local shops. Wellness tourism was $893.9 billion in 2024, and that is a real number about travel. It is not evidence that a two-room studio should build a retreat.
If you see any of these with a percentage attached and no named publisher, sample size and date, treat it as decoration.
Where owners are putting money
Alongside the time pressure, Square asked what leaders had added to the business in the past year. 42% had started a loyalty or rewards programme, the most common addition. On the consumer side, 55% said they buy products or adopt practices their beauty specialist recommends, with shampoos and cleansers leading.
That second figure is the more useful one for a small shop, because it costs nothing to act on. The recommendation you already make at the end of a treatment is the mechanism, not a retail strategy.
Before committing to memberships specifically, read the operator-versus-consumer gap in that same report, which we covered in the statistics guide. The short version is that operators are considerably more enthusiastic about memberships than customers are, and both figures come from the same survey.
What a one- or two-room shop should take from this
The honest read is a narrow one.
Admin load is rising across the board and the people it’s rising for are mostly reaching for software to absorb it. That matches what we hear from the shops we work with, and it’s the one trend on this page with a year-on-year measurement behind it. If you’re going to change one thing in 2026, changing where your admin hours go has better evidence behind it than any treatment trend.
The market growing at 7.4% a year is context, not a plan. And the rest of the standard trend list is someone’s content calendar rather than a finding.
One practical note on reading any of this: reports are named for the year they’re published, not the year they measured. Square’s “2025” report carries 2024 field data. ISPA’s March 2026 release reports 2025. That gap catches people out constantly, and it’s why a trend post is worth re-checking annually rather than trusting once.
Where WellDesk fits
If the time-pressure finding above matches your year, that’s the problem we build for. WellDesk puts booking, a calendar per person, client records and automatic email reminders in one place, on a landing page and booking page that are yours rather than a listing alongside your competitors.
Two honest notes. We’re building AI features, but they aren’t live yet, so nothing on this page should read as us claiming them today. And reminders currently go out by email only.
Pricing: the first 100 shops use WellDesk free and lock in their price for when we do start charging, which is 9.99 € a month for you plus 5 € a month for each additional person taking bookings.
Create your account and set your booking page up in an afternoon.
