Should your hair salon open on public holidays? The New Zealand maths

Every long weekend, the same question lands in the salon group chat: are we opening on the Monday? Some owners swear a public holiday Saturday is their best trading day of the quarter. Others swear they lose money every time they staff one. Both can be right, because the answer depends on numbers that differ salon by salon: what the day costs you under the Holidays Act, how full the book realistically gets, and whether the day in question is even a public holiday where your salon stands.

This guide works through the open-or-close decision the way an accountant would. The pay rules (time and a half, plus the alternative holiday that owners keep forgetting to price in), what closing actually costs, a labelled break-even example in New Zealand dollars, the calendar traps (Mondayisation, Matariki, your region's anniversary day), and the Easter twist that surprises most salon owners: the law that restricts Easter trading is about selling goods, and a salon providing services can open on days most shops must close. We finish with the unglamorous part that prevents the real chaos: making your booking diary and your Google profile tell clients the same story. If clients book you through a free booking calendar for your hair salon with 0% commission, the diary settings are half the decision.

Two scope notes before the numbers. First, this is general information checked against official New Zealand sources in October 2026, not legal advice: verify anything you rely on at employment.govt.nz. Second, this article is about the open-or-close economics; the roster mechanics around a public holiday (who you can roster, breaks, shift changes) live in our companion guide to staff rostering for New Zealand hair salons.

What a public holiday hour really costs under the Holidays Act

New Zealand has no industry award for hairdressing: one set of Holidays Act rules applies to every salon. An employee who works on a public holiday must be paid at least time and a half for the hours worked. Precisely, the employer pays the greater of the employee's relevant daily pay for the time worked plus half that amount again, or their relevant daily pay including any penal rates already in the employment agreement (employment.govt.nz, public holiday pay, checked in October 2026).

Then comes the part the group chat always forgets. If the public holiday is an otherwise working day for that employee (a day they would normally have worked), working it also earns them an alternative holiday: a full paid day off to take later, on top of the time and a half (employment.govt.nz, public holidays rights, checked in October 2026). The alternative holiday is paid at the employee's relevant daily pay for the day they take it, not for the hours they worked on the holiday. So a stylist who does a short five-hour public holiday shift still banks a whole day.

In dollars, at the adult minimum wage of NZ$23.95 an hour (the rate from 1 April 2026), time and a half is about NZ$35.93 an hour. Most qualified stylists earn well above the minimum, so your real figure is higher; our guide to hairdresser wages in New Zealand covers what the market actually pays. And KiwiSaver employer contributions apply to public holiday wages like any other gross pay.

Closing is not free either. If the public holiday falls on a day an employee would otherwise have worked and the salon stays shut, you still pay them their relevant daily pay (or average daily pay where applicable) for the day (employment.govt.nz, managing public holidays as an employer, checked in October 2026). So the real comparison is never "wages versus zero". For your Saturday crew on a Saturday holiday, it is "time and a half with revenue, plus a banked day" against "a full day's pay with no revenue at all".

You can only require the work if the agreement says so

Before the spreadsheet, the rights. An employer can only require an employee to work a public holiday if the day would otherwise be a working day for them and their employment agreement says they have to work public holidays; work outside agreed hours also needs a lawful availability clause (employment.govt.nz, managing public holidays as an employer, checked in October 2026). Without that clause, the day is built from volunteers, and time and a half plus a banked day off does a fair bit of recruiting on its own.

Two useful flexibilities, both with paperwork attached:

• Transferring a public holiday. You and an employee can agree in writing to observe a public holiday on a different identifiable calendar day that is a working day for them. The transfer must be genuine: it cannot be used to avoid the time and a half or the alternative holiday, which simply move to the new day.
• Alternative holidays are the employee's to take. Agree the timing in good faith, and remember each banked day is a future roster hole: three stylists working Labour Day means three extra days off to absorb before summer.

A public holiday that falls inside a stylist's annual leave stays a public holiday and does not burn a day of their leave balance. How annual leave, sick leave and public holidays interact is its own subject, covered in our guide to salon staff leave entitlements in New Zealand.

The break-even maths: a worked example

Here is the calculation worth doing a month out, not the morning of. Every figure below is a deliberately hypothetical example with the assumptions labelled; the method is the point, so re-run it with your own numbers.

Assumptions. Two employed stylists at NZ$28 an hour, both normally rostered 8-hour days, so the holiday is an otherwise working day for both. You would open 10 am to 4 pm, 6 hours each. Product and consumables cost about 10% of takings. Menu prices are GST inclusive; the contribution figures strip GST out, because the 15% inside your prices was never yours.

Step 1: what closing costs. Both stylists are paid their relevant daily pay for the day: 2 × 8 hours × NZ$28 = NZ$448 in wages (plus 3.5% KiwiSaver, about NZ$16) for a dark salon. Call it roughly NZ$464.

Step 2: what opening costs. Hours worked at time and a half: 12 hours × NZ$42 = NZ$504, plus KiwiSaver, about NZ$522 on the day. Each stylist also banks an alternative holiday, a full 8-hour day at NZ$28 to be paid later: about NZ$448 more, plus KiwiSaver. Total labour cost of the decision: roughly NZ$986, about double the closed-day cost, before you count that each banked day later removes a revenue-earning day from your calendar or has to be covered.

Step 3: what the chairs must earn. Opening gives you 12 bookable chair hours. Say your mix of cuts and colour averages NZ$95 per chair hour when a column is genuinely full: a fully booked day takes NZ$1,140 GST inclusive, which is about NZ$991 excluding GST. Less 10% product, the day contributes about NZ$892. Against the roughly NZ$522 of extra wages that opening adds on the day itself, a full book is comfortably ahead. Against the full NZ$986 decision cost, with the banked days priced in, it is ahead by less than NZ$100 of contribution, before rent, power or your own Saturday.

Step 4: the sensitivity test, where most owners lose. At 60% booked, those 12 chair hours shrink to about 7, takings to about NZ$684 GST inclusive, contribution to about NZ$535: barely covering the extra on-the-day wages, and nowhere near the full decision cost. At 50% the day loses real money and the question answers itself.

The rule of thumb that falls out: open only when your diary history says the day books out, or close to it. If the Saturday of a long weekend filled solid last year with clients asking for more, open, and open with your highest-ticket services. If last Labour Day limped along at 60% with walk-in trims, close, pay the day, and let everyone have the barbecue. Three levers improve the maths without touching the law: the owner's own chair carries no penalty wages; a curated menu (colour and occasion styling, not fringe trims) raises the chair-hour average; and protecting the day from no-shows matters more than on any other date, because an empty chair at holiday staffing cost hurts roughly twice as much. Our guide to appointment reminders for New Zealand salons covers that insurance.

A note on surcharges: some New Zealand businesses add a public holiday surcharge, and it is lawful provided it is disclosed clearly and up front and genuinely reflects extra costs actually incurred; the Commerce Commission has warned businesses about unclear holiday surcharges under the Fair Trading Act (comcom.govt.nz, checked in October 2026). If you surcharge, say so on the booking page and the price list before anyone books, never at the till.

Which days are public holidays for your salon: Mondayisation and anniversary days

New Zealand's public holiday calendar has three traps that put a time-and-a-half day in your roster unannounced.

Mondayisation cuts both ways on a Saturday salon. When Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year's Day, 2 January, Waitangi Day or Anzac Day falls on a weekend, it is observed the following Monday or Tuesday for employees who do not normally work weekends, but on the actual Saturday or Sunday for those who do (employment.govt.nz, public holidays and anniversary dates, checked in October 2026). Boxing Day 2026 falls on a Saturday: for your Saturday crew, that Saturday is the public holiday, time and a half plus a banked day if they work it, while for a Tuesday-to-Friday stylist the holiday is Monday 28 December. Same salon, one date, two different pay outcomes, and nobody gets two holidays out of one Mondayised date. The whole December stretch, with its Mondayised pair of holidays and the January cliff that follows, is covered in our guide to Christmas and summer bookings for New Zealand salons.

Matariki moves every year. The Māori New Year holiday always falls on a Friday, one of a salon's strongest trading days, but the date shifts with the maramataka: Friday 10 July in 2026. Check the official list each year and make the open-or-close call while it is still weeks away.

Anniversary days are regional. Auckland, Wellington, Canterbury, Otago and every other province observes its own anniversary day on its own date, and South Canterbury's differs from Canterbury's. A Christchurch salon and a Hamilton salon run different holiday calendars, and an employee observes only one anniversary day a year. Check your province on the official anniversary dates list before publishing each roster cycle.

The Easter twist: trading law is about goods, not haircuts

Here is the part of the calendar that confuses salon owners most, because two different laws collide over one weekend.

The Shop Trading Hours Act 1990 forces most shops to close on three and a half days a year: Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and Anzac Day until 1 pm (legislation.govt.nz, Shop Trading Hours Act s 3). But the restriction is about selling goods by retail. Employment New Zealand's guidance is explicit: a business that only provides a service, such as cutting hair, can open on restricted trading days, provided it does not sell any goods, hair products included (employment.govt.nz, restricted trading days for shops, checked in October 2026). So a salon can legally do haircuts on Good Friday; ring up a bottle of shampoo that day and you have broken the trading law, with a fine of up to NZ$1,000 for the occupier. If you open on a restricted day, take retail off the shelf and out of the till, literally.

Three more Easter wrinkles worth writing on the calendar:

• Good Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays, Easter Sunday is not. Staff working Good Friday get time and a half plus the alternative holiday if it is an otherwise working day. Staff working Easter Sunday get their ordinary pay, because the Holidays Act does not touch it. That also means a "public holiday surcharge" on Easter Sunday mislabels the day; if your costs genuinely rise that Sunday, describe the surcharge honestly or skip it.
• Easter Sunday has its own right of refusal. Shop employees may refuse to work Easter Sunday without giving a reason, and an employer who wants Easter Sunday staffing must give written notice of that right between 8 and 4 weeks before the day (employment.govt.nz, working and trading on Easter Sunday, checked in October 2026). The rules are written for shops, and a services-only salon sits in a grey zone the guidance does not spell out; the safe, decent practice is to treat the notice and the refusal right as applying to your team anyway.
• Boxing Day is a public holiday but not a restricted trading day. Opening between Christmas and New Year is a pure Holidays Act question: time and a half plus alternative holidays, with no trading-law bar.

Make the diary and Google agree with your decision

Whichever way the spreadsheet lands, the decision only exists once your booking calendar and your Google listing reflect it. The classic failure: the team agrees in October to close for Labour Day, and the booking page quietly sells the Monday solid to clients who then stand outside a dark salon.

If you close:

1. Block the day in the booking calendar the moment the decision is made. A blocked day can never be booked, which beats cancelling and re-homing appointments later. On ViteUneCoupe's free plan, with unlimited online bookings and 0% commission permanently, each stylist has their own schedule, so you block the whole salon in one pass or keep a single volunteer bookable.
2. Set special hours on your Google Business Profile marking the day closed, your region's anniversary day included, because Google's generic holiday prompts do not know when Canterbury Anniversary falls. The quarterly routine is in our guide to Google Business Profile for New Zealand hair salons.
3. Rebook the regulars whose cycle lands on the holiday at their previous visit, not in a panic the day before.

If you open:

1. Open the day deliberately: the hours you will actually staff, a curated service list, honest durations, because an overrun at time and a half is the most expensive overrun of the year.
2. Mirror the volunteer roster into each stylist's booking schedule so clients can only book the people who agreed to work. Nothing sours a public holiday faster than online bookings landing on a stylist who said no.
3. Publish the real hours everywhere: Google special hours, the booking page, any surcharge stated before booking.
4. Confirm and remind everything. At holiday staffing cost, the reminder is the cheapest insurance in the building. On ViteUneCoupe's Standard plan, from 29 € excluding tax per month with no commitment, confirmation, reminder and thank-you emails go out automatically; note that ViteUneCoupe is European software billed in euros, so the New Zealand dollar amount on your statement moves with the exchange rate and your bank may add a foreign-transaction fee. Two honest limits: reminders are email only, with no SMS on any plan, where NZ-built tools bundling SMS have a genuine advantage for text-first clients, and ViteUneCoupe is not a payroll or rostering tool, so the Holidays Act side stays with your payroll software and accountant.

A dated heads-up: the Holidays Act is being replaced in 2028

One thing to pin above the payroll desk. Parliament passed the Employment Leave Act 2026 (Royal assent 6 August 2026), which replaces the Holidays Act 2003 with an hours-based leave system from 6 August 2028 (MBIE, Holidays Act reform, checked in October 2026). Until that date, every rule in this article applies in full. The public holiday fundamentals (time and a half, alternative holidays) carry into the new regime in revised form, but the calculations around them change, so when 2028 approaches, have your payroll provider confirm the new mechanics rather than assuming this article's arithmetic still holds. We will update this guide when the new rules are in force.

Frequently asked questions

What do I have to pay salon staff who work on a public holiday in NZ?

At least time and a half for the hours worked: the greater of relevant daily pay for the time worked plus half again, or relevant daily pay including any penal rates in the agreement. If the day is one the employee would otherwise have worked, they also get an alternative holiday, a full paid day off to take later. Checked on employment.govt.nz in October 2026.

Do I have to pay staff if my salon closes on a public holiday?

Yes, if the day is an otherwise working day for them: they get a paid day off at their relevant daily pay (or average daily pay where applicable) even though the salon is shut. An employee who would not normally have worked that day is not paid for it.

Can my hair salon open on Good Friday and Easter Sunday?

Yes, for services. The restricted trading days (Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Anzac Day until 1 pm) restrict selling goods by retail; Employment New Zealand confirms a business only providing a service such as cutting hair can open, provided it sells no goods that day, retail hair products included. Good Friday is still a public holiday, so Holidays Act pay rules apply; Easter Sunday is not a public holiday, and shop employees have a specific right to refuse Easter Sunday work.

What is Mondayisation and how does it affect my Saturday staff?

When Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year's Day, 2 January, Waitangi Day or Anzac Day falls on a weekend, it moves to the following Monday or Tuesday for employees who do not normally work weekends, but stays on the actual day for those who do. Boxing Day 2026, a Saturday, is the holiday itself for your Saturday crew and Monday 28 December for weekday-only staff. Nobody gets two public holidays from one date.

How full does a public holiday need to be before opening pays?

Run the maths with your own numbers: time-and-a-half wages plus KiwiSaver, plus an alternative holiday per stylist for whom it is an otherwise working day, against bookable chair hours times your realistic GST-exclusive average, less product costs, remembering that closing still costs a day's pay per rostered stylist. In our labelled hypothetical, a 60% booked day barely covered the extra wages alone. If the diary history does not point to a near-full book, closing usually loses you less.

Does an alternative holiday depend on how many hours were worked on the holiday?

No. An employee who qualifies banks a whole alternative holiday regardless of the shift length, and it is paid at their relevant daily pay for the day they eventually take, not the hours they worked on the public holiday. A short holiday shift therefore carries a disproportionate cost, which is worth knowing before rostering two-hour token shifts.