Executive Summary

In every state and in the District of Columbia, manicurists and barbers need an occupational license—effectively a government permission slip—to do their jobs. These licenses, which are often quite onerous to obtain, come with high costs for aspiring workers and consumers. Licensing proponents say these costs are justified by the need to protect public health and safety. Empirical evidence for this claim is lacking, however, with vanishingly little research exploring the necessity of licensing for workers in these or other beauty and personal care occupations.

This study aims to change that. It uses data on health inspection outcomes—a common measure of health and safety risks—and a research design that takes advantage of variation around state borders to answer the question: Do licenses for manicurists and barbers equate to better public health and safety outcomes?

For manicurists, this study compares the outcomes of 2,148 nail salon inspections in Connecticut and New York during a period when Connecticut did not license the occupation. For barbers, this study compares the outcomes of 3,218 barbershop inspections in Alabama, which licenses the occupation less onerously, and Mississippi, which licenses it more onerously. If manicurist and barber licenses bolster health and safety, then nail salons and barbershops in unlicensed or less onerously licensed states should exhibit worse inspection outcomes than counterparts who need to meet steeper state-imposed requirements.

This study’s results do not support that hypothesis. In fact, they suggest licensing and licensing burdens have no substantive impact on health and safety risks. Inspection outcomes were favorable across the board, regardless of licensing regime. Not only that, differences were quite small (and in the opposite direction licensing proponents would hypothesize). In short, unlicensed nail salons and less onerously licensed barbershops were just as clean and safe as businesses facing steeper licensing requirements.

These results suggest states are subjecting aspiring manicurists and barbers to expensive and time-consuming licensing for no good reason. As such, they add to a growing body of research suggesting licensing has few benefits and many costs. Licensing requirements are costly in terms of time and money for aspiring workers to fulfill, and, in one way or another, these costs are passed along to consumers. Yet most research, like this study, suggests licensing and licensing burdens improve neither service quality in general nor health and safety in particular.

These results also point to an existing regulatory alternative that is both less costly than licensing and more targeted to protecting the public: health inspections. Already widespread, inspections focus on what matters—safe, sanitary practices at the point of service. Inspections are what Connecticut relied on to protect nail salon patrons during the period when it did not license manicurists, and there is no evidence that this system did not work. Indeed, this study’s results suggest the expectation of inspections, together with ordinary market incentives, was sufficient to ensure safe, sanitary service at Connecticut nail salons.

This is good news. It means that states can eliminate occupational licenses for manicurists, barbers, and other beauty and personal care workers, and instead rely on inspections of the places where they provide their services, without sacrificing health and safety. In so doing, they will fulfill their duty of protecting the public while opening opportunities for people to earn an honest living—without bearing unnecessary and often unaffordable costs.