What Florida Cosmetologists Earn

Figures published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2025 put the median wage for Florida’s 23,530 cosmetologists at $29,530 a year, or $14.20 an hour. The national median is $35,790. The spread inside Florida is wide — a tenth earn under $27,450 and a tenth over $58,320 — and there is an important limit on what these numbers cover, set out at the end.

The figures

Occupation 39-5012, Hairdressers, Hairstylists, and Cosmetologists, 2025:

	Florida	national
employed	23,530	305,710
median, annual	$29,530	$35,790
mean, annual	$36,210	$43,960
10th percentile	$27,450	$27,040
90th percentile	$58,320	$71,190
median, hourly	$14.20	$17.21

These figures already include tips and commission. That is the opposite of what most readers assume, and it is explained in full further down.

Florida sits below the national figure, and the gap widens with earnings

At the bottom the two are almost identical — Florida’s 10th percentile is actually $410 above the national one. At the median Florida is $6,260 behind, and at the 90th percentile $12,870 behind.

So the difference between Florida and the country is not really a difference in starting pay. It is that the upper half of the distribution reaches less far.

Where in that range somebody lands has more to do with what they do than with the credential itself — the specialty registrations reach different work from a full license, and the salon side is a different business again.

The mean is well above the median, which tells you something

$36,210 against $29,530 is a gap of nearly $7,000. A mean pulled that far above a median means the distribution has a long upper tail — a minority earning considerably more, rather than most people clustering near the average. Reading the mean as “what a cosmetologist earns” would overstate the typical case by about a quarter.

Tips and commission are already in these figures

This is the part most people have backwards. The Bureau’s wage definition for this survey includes tips, commissions, piece rates, incentive pay and production bonuses. The median above is not a base wage with tips still to come on top — it is meant to be the whole of straight-time earnings.

What the definition excludes is overtime pay, shift differentials, weekend premium pay, holiday premium, non-production and year-end bonuses, and the employer’s cost of benefits.

So a figure that looks low against what a busy stylist reports taking home is not explained by missing tips. It is more likely explained by the spread — the tenth and ninetieth percentiles are $27,450 and $58,320, and a full-time schedule is not what everyone in the count is working.

One thing the figures do not settle

Whether booth renters and the self-employed are counted. This is a survey of establishments, which is a reason to read the numbers as describing employed practitioners rather than everyone holding a license. This site has not established how that boundary is drawn, so it does not claim one.

And none of this is set by the Board. Wages are not a licensing matter. Nothing on this page is a requirement, an entitlement or a rate anybody is obliged to pay — it is a statistical description of what was reported, and it sits here only because “what does this pay” is a reasonable question to ask before spending 1,200 hours on a cosmetology license or on one of the specialty registrations.