Two new payroll costs hit your salon this year. The one that will actually catch you is a €552 line nobody mentions.

Two separate costs landed on Irish salon payroll this year, and neither is huge on its own. Together they add about €473 a year to every full-time chair on the minimum wage. That is the easy part. The part that will actually catch you is a single threshold, €552 a week, where one extra hour on a busy Saturday costs you the price of two.

The short answer, with the numbers

You want to know what an employee costs you in Ireland in 2026. Two things changed this year, on top of the wage itself.

My Future Fund started on 1 January 2026. It is the state's automatic pension scheme. If a staff member is aged 23 to 60, earns €20,000 or more a year, and is not already paying into a pension through your payroll, they are enrolled and you pay 1.5% of their gross pay into it. Neither of you gets a vote.

Employer PRSI rises on 1 October 2026. PRSI is the social insurance you pay on top of wages. The rate goes up by 0.15 of a percentage point: from 9.00% to 9.15% on weekly pay up to €552, and from 11.25% to 11.40% where weekly pay is above €552.

Now put both on one real chair. The national minimum wage has been €14.15 an hour since 1 January 2026. A stylist on that rate working 39 hours a week earns €551.85 a week, €28,696 a year.

• Auto-enrolment at 1.5% of gross: €430 a year.
• The PRSI rise on that wage: €43 a year.

So roughly €473 a year per full-time chair once both are running. Four employed chairs, about €1,900. Real money, not a catastrophe.

The interesting number is the one nobody put in a headline.

€552 a week is a cliff, not a slope

Read the PRSI table properly and you find something the payroll summaries skip. The lower employer rate applies to weekly pay up to €552. Above €552, the higher rate applies to all of it. Not to the slice above the line. The whole week's pay.

That is a step in your costs, not a gradient. And your minimum-wage full-timer is sitting 15 cent below it.

From 1 October, here is what that step looks like:

• 39 hours, €551.85 a week. Employer PRSI at 9.15% = €50.49.
• 40 hours, €566.00 a week. Employer PRSI at 11.40% = €64.52.

One extra hour. The hour costs €14.15 in wages. The PRSI jump costs another €14.03 on top. So the fortieth hour costs you €28.18, near enough double what you think you are paying for it.

Run that hour every week and it compounds quietly. Over a year: €736 of wages and €730 of PRSI, about €1,465 a year for one hour a week.

The same trap sits under a pay rise. Give that stylist €5 more a week and you cross the line. Five euro of wage, €12.99 of extra PRSI, €17.99 leaving your account so they can have a fiver.

Cross it on purpose, or not at all

The obvious response is to build the rota around €552 and never go near it. Do not. That path ends with more people on fewer hours each, and thin hours is the most reliable way to hollow out a salon. Clients rebook with a person, not a premises, and a stylist you cannot give a full week to will find someone who can.

The better response is to know exactly where the step is and cross it deliberately.

The step costs about €12.42 a week at the boundary, roughly €646 a year, and you pay it whether you go one euro over or eighty. That makes a €5 rise the worst possible move and a proper jump, the promotion to senior stylist with a column and a price list to match, much better value: same step, spread over far more pay.

Same logic on hours. An extra hour on a Saturday in December is fine. An extra hour every week to cover a Tuesday nobody books is €1,465 a year buying you an empty chair. The staff scheduling guide and the break-even calculator turn a rota into a cost per week, which is the only way to see this before it happens.

The €20,000 line, and your part-timers

Auto-enrolment has its own threshold and it behaves differently.

Your 1.5% starts when a staff member earns €20,000 or more a year across all their employments, not just what you pay them. At €14.15 an hour that lands at about 27.2 hours a week: 27 hours a week comes to €19,867 a year, 28 hours to €20,602.

Three things to know about that line:

• Their other job counts. A stylist with two part-time chairs in two salons can cross €20,000 without either owner spotting it. You get told through payroll when it happens, so do not try to police it yourself.
• There is a 13-week lookback. Someone earning at the €20,000 pace over a quarter can be enrolled on that basis, so a heavy summer can trigger it.
• Opting in is their call, and you still match it. A member of staff under the threshold can choose to join, and once they do your obligations are identical. That is the one that arrives unannounced.

Some of your team are deciding this month

This bit is worth reading in July specifically.

Anyone enrolled on 1 January 2026 has to stay in for six months, and then gets a two-month window to leave. For that first group, the window is July and August 2026. If a stylist opts out, your 1.5% for them stops as well, and their own contributions are refunded.

Leave it alone. Pushing staff to opt out is not a grey area: employers who prevent enrolment or pressure people into leaving face fines and prosecution, NAERSA publishes a list of employers convicted of non-compliance, and the Workplace Relations Commission handles cases where staff are penalised for taking part. A saving of €430 is not worth a conviction with your salon's name on it.

There is a boomerang anyway. Anyone who opts out or pauses is automatically re-enrolled after two years if they still qualify. An opt-out this August is a cost deferred to 2028, not a cost avoided.

You were handed the money for this three weeks ago

Now hold the two numbers up together, because almost nobody has.

On 1 July 2026 Ireland cut VAT on hairdressing services from 13.5% to 9%, permanently. Hold your prices and that is about €3.64 more kept on every €100 of service takings. On €150,000 of service takings, roughly €5,450 a year.

The new payroll costs on four full-time chairs come to about €1,900 a year.

Read that plainly: the state handed you a permanent margin gain in July and takes back a slice of it from October. Bank the VAT cut and this is covered three times over with room to spare. We went through why banking it beat discounting in the hairdressing VAT briefing.

Announce a price cut in July and you gave away the cushion while the payroll bill still turns up. Not a reason to panic. A reason to look hard at your price board before October rather than in January.

What a buyer can now model that you cannot argue with

Last piece, and it has the longest tail.

A buyer prices your salon on the profit a new owner would keep, your owner earnings, times a multiple. What they are really buying is a forecast, and forecasts get discounted for whatever looks uncertain.

Auto-enrolment just made a chunk of your future labour cost publicly scheduled. The employer rate is 1.5% now, 3% in year four of the scheme, 4.5% in year seven, and 6% from year ten. On the current start date that is 2029, 2032 and 2035. It is not a forecast, it is a table on gov.ie. Anyone running due diligence on your salon in 2029 can build your payroll cost out to 2035 without asking you a single question.

You cannot negotiate with a published schedule. What you can change is how much of your revenue depends on employed hours in the first place.

Retail, memberships, prepaid blocks and prebooked colour are revenue that carries no PRSI, no pension contribution, and no interest in what year of the scheme it is. Every point of turnover you shift from employed labour to those lines is a point the 2035 escalator cannot reach, and it happens to be the same thing that makes a salon sellable: recurring revenue and a business that runs without you standing at the chair. Track it on your net margin monthly so you can prove it moved.

None of that is new advice. What is new is a dated, published, unarguable reason to start this quarter instead of next year.