How to price a lash fill in 2026

Most lash fills are priced by looking sideways: the studio down the road charges $70, so you charge $65. That's not a price – it's a guess about someone else's costs. Their rent, their speed, their retention. The durable way to price a fill is to build the number from the bottom: product, time, overhead, wage, margin. Here's the walkthrough, with example numbers you should replace with your own.

Step 1: cost the product in the tray

A fill uses less product than a full set, but it isn't free. Sit down once with your last supply order and cost a single fill honestly:

• Trays – a $25 tray might realistically serve 8–10 fills: ~$2.75
• Adhesive – a $30 bottle, maybe a month before it turns, across 40 appointments: ~$0.75
• The small stuff – primer, remover for outgrown extensions, gel pads, tape, wands, cleanser: ~$2.50

Your product line: about $6 a fill.

Yours will differ – premium trays, faster-expiring adhesive in a humid room, or a generous aftercare kit can double it. The point isn't the number; it's that you know yours. This is what service recipes in DaySync are for: attach the products and quantities a fill consumes to the service, and it tracks the real product cost and margin per appointment as prices change.

Step 2: cost the time honestly

A 60-minute fill is not 60 minutes. There's setup, consultation over the state of the retention, cleanup, notes and photos, and the buffer before the next client. Call it 75 minutes of chair time for a 60-minute service. If you do fills in 45, cost 60. Speed is a skill you're allowed to be paid for – but only if you don't lie to yourself about the clock.

Step 3: spread the overhead

Everything you pay to exist as a business has to live inside your service prices, because there's nowhere else for it to live. Add up the month:

• Chair or suite rent – $450
• Insurance, licence, accounting – amortised together: $60
• Shared consumables – couch roll, disinfection, nothing tied to one service: $40
• Phone, booking, marketing – the small monthly bits: $50

Monthly overhead: $600.

Divide that by your bookable hours, not the hours you're awake. Book 100 chair-hours a month and overhead works out to $6 an hour – about $7.50 for a 75-minute fill.

Step 4: pay yourself on purpose

Decide your target hourly wage like an employer would – say $40 an hour, adjusted for your market and level.

Labour in a 75-minute fill: $50.

Step 5: add margin, then sanity-check

Add the wage and overhead to breakeven, then load in your margin – for the slow week, the training course, the lamp that dies.

$6 product + $7.50 overhead + $50 wage + 20% margin – the fill prices at about $76.

Now sanity-check against the street. If the studios around you charge $70–$85, you're in the pocket. If your cost-built number comes out far above the local ceiling, the answer isn't to shave your wage – it's to look at the inputs: faster fills, better retention (fewer freebie fixes), cheaper rent, or a clientele that pays for your level. If it comes out far below what the street charges, congratulations: raise your price and bank the difference.

The fill-to-set ratio trap

One quiet mistake: pricing fills too cheap relative to full sets. If a set is $150 and a fill is $55, you've built a business where your best clients – the loyal three-weekers – generate your worst hourly rate. Run the math per hour of chair time for both services. Many lash techs discover their fills earn less per hour than their sets, which is backwards: fills are your retention engine and your most predictable revenue. Price them so a day of fills is a day you're glad about.

Put the number to work

A cost-built price is also easier to defend – to yourself, mostly. When adhesive jumps 15% or your rent goes up, you're not wondering whether a raise is "allowed"; you re-run five lines and the new price falls out. If your services live in DaySync with their recipes attached, the product line updates as your supply costs do, and the margin on every fill is visible per appointment instead of being a year-end surprise.

Review the whole stack twice a year. Your speed changes, your costs change, your book fills up – and a full book at a price built for an empty one is the most common way good lash techs stay broke. Price from your costs up, check against the street, and let the calendar tell you when you're due to go up again.