How to Price Your Aesthetic Treatments When Offering Finance

A £600 booking with £450 in fully allocated costs appears to leave £150 in operating profit before tax. A 5% merchant finance fee removes £30, cutting that profit by 20%. The client still sees £600. The clinic retains less.

These figures are illustrative, not Faces fees; VAT is addressed separately below. They show why finance for aesthetic treatments belongs in the costing model before monthly repayments appear on a price list.

Establish the full cost of delivering care

Reliable treatment pricing covers the appointment journey, including consultation, clinical time, documentation, cleaning and expected reviews. It also needs to recover overheads: premises, indemnity cover, equipment depreciation, software and marketing.

An illustrative £180 cost might comprise £60 in materials, £70 in staff time and £50 in overheads and follow-up provision. Owner-practitioners should include payment for their own labour before describing the remainder as profit. Avoid double-counting: if an overhead allocation already includes staff wages, those same wages should not appear again as a separate cost.

Capacity changes the calculation. Monthly overheads of £3,000 spread across 100 completed appointments cost £30 each. Dividing by 200 available slots instead allocates only £15, leaving a shortfall when half remain empty. For appointments of different lengths, allocation by occupied clinical hour is more useful.

Practitioners assessing how to price aesthetic treatments should establish this cost floor before comparing local aesthetic treatment prices. Faces’ guide to structuring clinic prices provides a useful starting framework. A competitor’s headline figure cannot reveal its staffing costs or appointment capacity.

Separate merchant fees from client interest

Effective aesthetic business pricing distinguishes the fee paid by the clinic from interest paid by the borrower. A consumer’s 0% offer does not necessarily mean a cost-free service for the business. Published lender guidance on finance costs describes merchant charges separately from customer borrowing costs.

Before introducing aesthetic clinic finance, obtain the current written fee schedule. Confirm whether the percentage applies to the whole purchase or only the financed balance, whether additional charges apply, and the VAT treatment of those charges.

Comparing finance options for aesthetic treatments also means checking subscriptions, settlement conditions, refund fees and whether different repayment terms carry different merchant rates. The relevant figure is the clinic’s actual contracted cost, not a historical percentage in a blog.

Choose the right profit calculation

A useful aesthetic treatment pricing model distinguishes a target profit in pounds from a target percentage margin. They produce different prices.

Preserving a fixed profit

Assume delivery costs of £180, a target operating profit of £120, and a hypothetical 5% fee on the entire selling price. For this example, there is no VAT on the sale and no additional fee.

Price = (delivery cost + target profit) ÷ (1 − fee rate)

Price = (£180 + £120) ÷ 0.95 = £315.79

The fee is £15.79, leaving £300 before delivery costs and £120 afterwards. A fixed transaction charge belongs in the numerator: an additional £2 charge would change the calculation to £302 ÷ 0.95, producing £317.89.

Simply adding 5% to £300 produces £315. After the £15.75 fee, only £299.25 remains. The shortfall arises because the lender charges its percentage on the increased price too.

Preserving a percentage margin

For a 40% operating margin after the finance fee:

Price = delivery cost ÷ (1 − fee rate − target margin)

Price = £180 ÷ (1 − 0.05 − 0.40) = £327.27

Here, margin means profit divided by sales, not profit divided by costs. The 40% target is an illustration, not an industry benchmark. At the earlier £315.79 price, £120 profit represents approximately 38% of sales. Preserving the same pounds of profit therefore does not preserve the original percentage margin.

Understanding how to price your treatment for finance therefore starts with selecting the intended return. A finance treatment pricing worksheet should state that target explicitly.

Recalculate correctly when VAT applies

VAT can change whether aesthetic treatment finance is commercially viable at an existing price.

Under HMRC’s guidance on cosmetic services, services undertaken purely for cosmetic reasons are standard-rated. Being a registered healthcare professional does not automatically make every service exempt. An accountant should establish the correct treatment of the clinic’s supplies and registration obligations.

For a VAT-registered clinic making a standard-rated sale, £360 includes £60 VAT and therefore represents £300 revenue, following HMRC’s VAT calculation method.

If the merchant fee is 5% of that £360, the fee is £18. With delivery costs of £180, measured after any recoverable VAT, operating profit is £102.

To retain £120 under those assumptions:

VAT-inclusive price = (£180 + £120) ÷ [(1 ÷ 1.20) − 0.05] = £382.98

This assumes no additional fee VAT or other charges. Any irrecoverable VAT must be included in the costing model.

Decide how finance fits the wider price list

Sound aesthetic clinic pricing does not automatically create a higher price for financed clients.

A clinic can absorb the fee where the remaining margin is acceptable, or review its standard prices across payment methods. It can also model a blended payment cost. If 30% of sales value attracts a 5% finance fee and 70% attracts a 1% payment fee, the weighted cost is 2.2%. That average supports planning but does not make every individual booking equally profitable. Stress-testing the same model at 60% financed sales raises the blended cost to 3.4%, showing how a change in payment mix affects returns.

When pricing treatments for clients, avoid adding a finance surcharge without checking the agreement and obtaining appropriate compliance advice. The FCA’s rules on interest-free claims require the total payable not to exceed the cash price where the offer is described as interest-free.

A cheaper non-finance price therefore needs careful consideration; relabelling the difference an “administration fee” does not resolve the issue. These calculations establish the revenue needed to cover costs, not permission to charge different prices by payment method.

Cost packages and cancellations before launch

With payment plans for aesthetic treatments, a package discount and merchant fee can reduce income together.

A hypothetical £900 course discounted to £810 leaves £769.50 after a 5% fee, before delivery costs and ignoring VAT. The combined reduction against £900 is 14.5%, not merely the advertised 10% discount.

Each package needs an agreed scope, expected review time and a fair cancellation process. It should not contain unnecessary appointments simply to meet a lender’s minimum borrowing amount. The GMC’s cosmetic-intervention standards explicitly prevent commercial interests from compromising care for its registrants.

Before launch, confirm what triggers settlement, how partial refunds work and whether fees are returned. Delivery should never be confirmed early merely to release funds; the provider’s contractual delivery conditions must genuinely be met.

Money received for future appointments still needs to fund those appointments. It should not all be treated as available profit.

Explain the total price before the monthly figure

Clients comparing monthly payments for aesthetic treatments need the full purchase price and repayment terms, not an isolated monthly amount.

For illustration, a £600 purchase with a £120 deposit and six £80 repayments totals £600 where no borrowing charges apply. With interest or fees, that division is insufficient; staff should use the lender’s approved illustration.

A quote explaining the cost of aesthetic treatments should specify what is included and show unavoidable charges upfront, including applicable VAT. The CMA’s price-transparency guidance explains why mandatory charges cannot be held back until checkout.

Use approved finance wording, including required status disclosures. Under the FCA’s advertising rules, interest-bearing repayment claims can trigger representative-example requirements. Promotions exclusively for 0% APR agreements have a specific exception, not an exemption from all advertising rules.

Avoid urgency that pressures a borrowing decision. ASA guidance on responsible cosmetic advertising highlights problems with promotions that rush consideration.

Test the economics against completed bookings

The commercial test for financing aesthetic treatments is retained profit, not financed sales alone.

Review realised fees, refunds, appointment time and profit per occupied clinical hour monthly. Compare the actual finance charge with the fee for the payment method it replaces, rather than automatically treating the whole finance fee as an additional cost.

Separate genuinely additional bookings from clients who would otherwise have paid upfront. Moving an existing booking onto finance creates a fee without necessarily creating extra revenue.

Faces supports finance applications through direct links and its Booking System. Its guide to setting up finance explains the registration process and operational considerations. Those routes can support a consistent process, but each clinic still needs its own cost model.

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