What a Hair System Really Costs in the UK (Over Five Years, Not One)

When a salon quotes you £500 for a hair system, it sounds like a lot less than scalp micropigmentation. I wanted to know whether that holds up, so in September 2026 I read through the published price lists of ten UK salons that fit men’s hair systems, from Bracknell to Manchester to Cardiff. One of them, Bespoke Hair Systems in Lowestoft, was the only salon in East Anglia I could find with its prices online. Then I did the thing none of their price pages do, and added it all up over five years.

I should say up front that I sell the alternative, so read this knowing that. Every figure below links to where it came from, and there is a section on when a hair system is the better choice, because for some people it is.

Is a hair system just a wig?

Near enough, but it is worn differently. The British Association of Dermatologists lists “wigs, toupees and even hair extensions” among the ways men disguise pattern hair loss, and calls any of them a hairpiece, or postiche. A modern men’s hair system is a small unit of real or synthetic hair knotted into a very thin base: a see-through poly “skin”, fine lace, or a tougher mono mesh. The salon shaves the thinning area, bonds the unit on with tape or adhesive, and cuts it into the hair you still have.

That bond is the whole trick. It stays on for weeks, you sleep and shower in it, and done well it is very hard to spot. It is also why the bill doesn’t stop.

What does a hair system cost to buy and fit?

A salon-fitted hair system usually costs £500 to £700 in the UK, with the cheapest around £400 and premium units past £1,000. Most salons sell the unit and the first fitting together, and that first number is the one you get quoted. These are the published prices I found:

Salon	What you get	Published price
Hair Systems Manchester	Hair system	From £450
Bespoke Hair Systems, Lowestoft	System and fitting	£500
BOB Salons, Bracknell	Unit, fitting, cut and blow-dry	£550 to £725
Mens Hair 2 Go, London	Stock or custom unit, fitted	£575 to £630
Simon Constantinou, Cardiff	Hairpiece, custom options	£660 to £1,000
NEU Hair 4 Men	Salon-fitted system and first maintenance visit	£595 to £1,495

You can also buy units online for £170 to £500 from UK sellers such as Tru Hair and pay a salon or barber to fit them, which I come back to below.

How much does a hair system refit cost?

A refit usually costs £50 to £90 in the UK, every three to six weeks, and it is the part the price list leaves out. Every salon I looked at expects you back regularly, and none of them hides it. It just isn’t the number in big type.

A bonded unit loosens as your own hair grows underneath it and as sweat and skin oil work on the tape or glue. So every few weeks it comes off, your scalp is cleaned and shaved again, and the unit is rebonded and tidied. Lowestoft asks for a refit “every 3-5 weeks” at £55. BOB Salons charges £57 on tape or £77 on adhesive “every 4-6 weeks”. Hair Replacement Stylist charges £69.50 on the same four-to-six-week cycle, and Total Cover Plus in Manchester £80 with most clients back “every 3-5 weeks”.

Then there are the bits you buy yourself between visits. Bonding tape, solvent to lift it and adhesive all run about £10 to £20 a go from UK sellers such as Holistique. Small amounts, but they never stop either.

How long does a hair system last?

Months. That is the second number that changes the sum.

The thinner and more natural the base, the quicker it wears out. BOB Salons publishes how many units a year each of its bases needs: four or five a year for the thinnest 0.04mm skin, two or three for a thicker one. Mens Hair 2 Go says a stock unit lasts “3 - 6 months, thus looking at 2 to 4 pieces a year”. Lowestoft is the most generous I found at “6 - 12 months”. Most salons land on two to four units a year.

One thing to be clear on: those figures come from the people selling the units. I couldn’t find any independent research on how long a bonded hairpiece lasts. The NHS does give lifespans for wigs, six to nine months for synthetic and three to four years for real hair, but a wig you take off at night is a different thing from a unit that lives on your head.

The unit is the cheap part. The refit every few weeks is what you are really signing up to.

How much does a hair system cost over five years?

Over five years, a salon-fitted hair system costs somewhere between about £5,800 and £12,500 in the UK, going by salons’ own published prices, and a monthly membership lands in the same range. None of the price pages would give me that figure, so I built it from their own numbers. It leaves out tape, solvent and haircuts, so the real totals run a little higher. The visit where a new unit goes on is covered by the unit price, which is why there are fewer paid refits than weeks divided by the cycle.

Route	The working	Per year	Over five years
Lowestoft, going easy	1 unit at £500, 12 refits at £55 (every 4 weeks)	£1,160	£5,800
Lowestoft, two units a year	2 units at £500, 11 refits at £55 (every 4 weeks)	£1,605	£8,025
BOB Salons, poly with lace front	3 units at £699, 7 refits at £57 (every 5 weeks)	£2,496	£12,480
Kipling, Sheffield, monthly membership	£130 to £220 a month, plus £300 to join	£1,560 to £2,640	£8,100 to £13,500

Those numbers sit where UK wearers say they do. A man in Norwich posted on Reddit that his salon charges “£600 for the system and initial installation and £55 per refit, which is every three weeks or so”, and put it at “around £1500 a year roughly, excluding all the products”. A London wearer on the same forum pays £550 a unit, replaced every four months, and puts his year at “around £1,900”. On r/AskUK, one man pricing it up estimated “anywhere between £2000 - £3000 a year”.

The difference between the top and bottom of that table is mostly how thin a base you want and how often you go back. The thing that doesn’t change is that it’s every year, for as long as you want the hair.

Is there a cheaper way?

Yes, and they are worth knowing about before you commit to the salon route.

Buy the units yourself. UK wearers who order units online and pay a barber to fit them report spending far less. One puts his year at “3.5 orders a year, total 801GBP plus 100GBP for product so roughly 900 a year”. The catch is that you are doing more of the work, and the quality of the fitting is down to whoever you find.

The NHS. Hardly anyone mentions this one. Some wigs are available on prescription, and from April 2026 the charge is £80.15 for a stock synthetic wig and £310.55 for a full made-to-order human hair wig, with under-16s, some students, hospital in-patients and people on certain benefits exempt. The catch for most men reading this is that local NHS boards decide what they fund, and pattern baldness is usually out. Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire won’t fund treatment for it “as it is a normal process of ageing”, and does not routinely fund “the ‘Interlace’ or other hair systems”. Cheshire and Merseyside says the same. If your hair loss comes from a medical condition or treatment, talk to your GP, because that is a different case.

Stop covering it. Shaving it off costs nothing, and for plenty of men it looks better than they expected. I’ve written about shaving your head when you’re balding separately.

The costs that aren’t money

People who wear systems are honest about this, and it is worth hearing from them rather than from me.

The Norwich wearer says he has to “sacrifice a day every three weeks for a refit”, and that when the refit is due, “it’ll start to itch or come a bit loose”. Another UK wearer said glue gives you “4-5 days of a really clean bond and then it starts slowly melting”, and that he wouldn’t “do two workouts in a row without a shower and a reapplication”. One wearer going through this July’s heatwave was having to refit every fortnight.

There is a medical side too, though it is uncommon. The acrylate glues used to fix hairpieces are a known cause of allergic skin reactions, and journal studies have recorded cases, including a 28-year-old man whose forehead reacted where his hairpiece was glued. A dermatology review also warns that pulling adhesive off the scalp over and over can itself cause hair loss along the front hairline. Neither is a reason to panic, but neither appears on a salon price list.

When a hair system is the right choice

If you want hair, a system is the only way to get it without surgery. You can grow it, style it, part it and run your hand through it. Nothing I do gives you that.

Plenty of men simply don’t suit a shaved head, and one man on r/AskUK put it better than I could: “I just don’t suit shaved.” If that’s you, and the running cost and the refits sound manageable, a well-fitted system from a good salon is a reasonable choice, and I’d rather you went and had a proper consultation with one than let me talk you out of it.

Where scalp micropigmentation fits

Scalp micropigmentation is a different answer to a different question. The NHS describes it as a tattoo “used to look like short hair”. It doesn’t grow anything and gives you no length. What it does is recreate the look of a closely shaved head, or add density where thinning hair lets the scalp show through, so it suits men who are happy to keep it short.

The cost works the other way round to a system. Full SMP starts from £1,000, built over two or three sessions, or density SMP from £600 if you are keeping some hair on top. After that there’s no monthly bill. The pigment softens over the years, and a touch-up from £300 typically lands somewhere between three and seven years later. I’ve gone into how long scalp micropigmentation lasts in more detail.

	Hair system	Scalp micropigmentation
What you get	Real hair you can style	The look of a closely shaved head or extra density
Upfront	About £400 to £700 a unit, fitted	Full SMP from £1,000, density from £600
After that	A refit every 3 to 6 weeks and 2 to 4 new units a year	A touch-up from £300 every few years
Day to day	Tape or glue, rebonding, care with heat and sweat	Sun cream on the scalp, once it has healed
If you stop	You are back to your own hair the day it comes off	It softens slowly over years

Individual results vary, and it’s not a treatment for the hair loss itself. If you are still weighing up a transplant as well, what a hair transplant costs in the UK covers that side, and hair fibres versus SMP covers the cheapest option of the lot.

So which one?

If you want length, pay for the system, pick a good salon and budget for it every year, not just the first one. From the prices above, that’s roughly £1,200 to £2,500 a year for most people, and more on premium units.

If you’d be happy with a short, sharp shaved look and mainly want to stop paying out every month, SMP is usually the cheaper route after the first couple of years, but only if the look genuinely suits you. That’s what a consultation is for. I’ll tell you if I think it won’t.