Salon & Beauty
Business Funding

Salons get read as retail with a booking diary attached. On our panel 20 lenders fund hair and beauty equipment as an asset, 22 fund a shop or office fit-out, and 34 will lend against retail premises if you are buying rather than renting the unit (checked September 2026). Panel composition changes with each pull, so those are a guide.

The number that decides most salon cases is not the credit score. It is whether a director owns a home. 39 of our 55 unsecured lenders will proceed without a homeowning director, which leaves a meaningful minority that will not. Momenta Finance, to take one published example, requires at least one person of significant control to be a homeowner on unsecured loans up to £350,000, and two homeowners above that. Plenty of salon owners rent. It is better to know which list you are on before an application goes anywhere.

Age of business is the second gate. 21 of the unsecured lenders will look at a business trading under a year and 5 will look at a genuine start-up. A second chair in an established salon is an easy conversation. A first salon, on a lease signed last month, is a different one, and the honest answer is that fewer doors are open.

Turnover caps catch people out because almost nobody publishes them. Momenta says in its own FAQ that it can typically lend up to 15% of a company's annual turnover, and sets a £350,000 minimum turnover with two years of trading before it will look at all. Apply that rule to a salon turning over £200,000 and the ceiling is around £30,000 whatever the credit file says. Different lenders draw the line in different places, but a ceiling of that shape exists at most of them.

At £10,000 unsecured, 30 lenders on the panel have a product covering the amount, over terms from 1 to 60 months, with published floors starting at 4.1% and a median floor of 21.3% (checked September 2026). At £25,000 it is 36 lenders and the median floor drops to 19.2%. A floor is where pricing starts, not where a salon lands.

Adverse credit is survivable and worth being straight about. 24 of the unsecured lenders accept minor adverse older than 24 months and 8 will consider moderate adverse. Against equipment the numbers are different again: 14 of our asset lenders accept business adverse and 19 will lend to a business showing a loss, because the styling units and the treatment beds are the security.

Salon equipment is what the trade calls a soft asset: it does not hold value like a digger or a lorry, and fewer lenders will fund it. That market is about to get slightly smaller. Time Finance, which publishes a £1,000 minimum asset finance facility on its Growth Guarantee Scheme page, told the market in its 17 August 2026 takeover announcement that it will stop offering new soft asset finance shortly after the deal completes, expected in the fourth quarter of 2026. Existing agreements are unaffected. If you were counting on that route for chairs and dryers, the window is this year.

Where a lender sits on new versus used matters as much as the rate. Simply Asset Finance publishes a range of £5,000 to "£10m plus" and says in writing it will consider a new-start company, while Novuna, whose lending entity is Mitsubishi HC Capital UK, publishes a three-year minimum trading requirement. Two lenders, same product, opposite answers to the same salon. That is the whole argument for checking criteria before applying rather than after being declined.

Buying the kit outright costs nothing in finance and empties the account in an afternoon. Spreading it keeps cash for the things no lender funds, like the six weeks of marketing that fills the new nail bar. The arithmetic that settles it is not the rate, it is whether the cash you keep earns more than the finance costs over the same months. We can put both totals in front of you. The lender still makes its own decision.