About Best Cosmetology Programs

What does this site cover?

This site covers cosmetology and barbering schools in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, read from the license file of the board that regulates each one, alongside six occupations the training leads into. The table below is the whole of it, including the parts that are thin.

School and license counts are read from the state boards. Wage coverage is the May 2025 BLS release.

Why does this site check licenses instead of accreditation?

This site checks licenses instead of accreditation because cosmetology programs have no programmatic accreditor. NACCAS accredits schools as institutions, so a school can be accredited while the program inside it has been reviewed by nobody, and no accreditor reviews the curriculum the way one does in nursing or social work.

The state board license is the credential that actually decides something. Hours banked at a school that was not licensed at the time do not count toward the licensing exam, which makes an expired license the most expensive detail a prospective student can miss. It is also a fact a school has no incentive to lead with, and the reason this site reads the board's file rather than the school's page.

None of that makes an accredited school a worse choice. Institutional accreditation is a real signal about a school as a business, and it is what federal financial aid turns on. It answers a different question from the one a student is asking, which is whether the hours they are about to pay for will count.

How are schools ranked on this site?

Schools are ranked on completion rates their own institutions report to the federal government, through the College Scorecard, in 47 of the 51 jurisdictions. Ranking on earnings was tried first and abandoned: the field-of-study earnings series for this trade failed a basic coherence test, with medians that did not sit between the subgroups they were built from.

An accredited school with no published completion figures is not ranked here, because accreditation is not an outcome and this site will not treat it as one. In 4 states nothing published supports an order at all, so those states get a checked directory rather than a ranking with an invented basis. The full model, including what is weighed and what was rejected, is on the methodology page.

Where does the data come from?

The data comes from three places, all of them primary. State boards publish the license files and the hour rules. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes wages and employment, in the May 2025 release used for every figure on the site. The Department of Education publishes the completion rates the rankings are built on.

Nothing here is taken from another ranking site, from a school's marketing copy, or from an aggregator. Where a figure is missing it is shown as missing: a wage BLS withheld for a small sample is not rendered as a zero, and a state with no published roster is named rather than quietly dropped.

What does this site get wrong?

The honest limits are worth stating before you rely on any of it. Every wage figure excludes self-employed workers, because the federal survey collects from employers, and in a trade where renting a chair is normal that is a large exclusion rather than a footnote.

Board files go stale. A roster is accurate as of the date it was read, and a school can lose or regain a license between that date and yours, so the board's own verification page is the last word rather than this one. Hour requirements are held for the cosmetology license only; barbering, esthetics and nail technology are licensed separately with their own rules, and this site does not carry those.

There are no growth projections anywhere on this site. They come from a different federal release that is not held here, and a projection is the most copied and least checked number on pages like these.

How does this site make money?

This site may receive compensation when readers request information from or enroll in programs featured here. Sponsored placements are labeled. Accreditation status, wage data, and program structure data are sourced directly from official records and are reported the same way regardless of partnership status.

Disclosure follows the FTC endorsement guides. No placement changes a license record, a wage figure or a ranking position, because all three are read from sources this site does not control.

Who writes this site?

Zoe MacDougall holds a BS in Psychology from the University of Washington and is the founder and editor of Best Cosmetology Programs. She is responsible for what the site publishes: which schools it covers, what it counts as evidence, and the ranking model set out on the methodology page. The background is research and editorial rather than licensed cosmetology, and the site says so wherever it matters.

She can be found at LinkedIn, and edits the sibling sites covering social work and marriage and family therapy programs.

Corrections are wanted, particularly from schools and boards. If a license record here is out of date or a figure is wrong, write to help@hakia.com with the board page that shows it, and it will be changed.