Does closing on Monday cost a hair salon its Google Maps spot? 424 listings in 22 cities

Salon owners hear two opposite things about Monday. The trade’s habit is to close it, and most owners assume that costs nothing because the salon down the street is closed too. Booking software vendors and local search consultants say the opposite: Google favors a listing that is open when someone searches, so a salon closed on Monday hands its map pack position to the salons that open, and the seven-day salon owns the top three.

We tested it on a Monday. On October 12, 2026, shortly after 10 in the morning Eastern time and 9 Central, we captured the Google Maps top 20 for “hair salon” in 22 US cities, 11 large metros and 11 small cities, and read the open status and the weekly hours under every listing. After removing 9 salon suite buildings that lease rooms to independent stylists, 5 barber shops, a beauty school and a scalp spa, 424 salons remained, 399 of them showing a full week of hours.

The habit is real: 35 percent of the salons in a top 20 are closed all day Monday. So is the cost, but only in the big cities. In the large metros, salons closed all Monday sat at a median position of 12 against 9 for salons open that day. In the small cities the two groups sat at 10 and 9, and the sample cannot tell them apart.

Your benchmark

Search “hair salon” and your city on a Monday morning and read the status line under each of the 20 listings. This is what the 22 cities looked like at the moment of our search:

Status at the moment of the search (399 listings with hours)	Listings	Share	Median position	Top-three slots (of 66)	Median reviews
Open	209	52%	8	48	184
Closed, opening later on Monday	51	13%	11	5	213
Closed all day Monday	139	35%	12	13	161

Open salons held 73 percent of the top-three slots, and the salon at position 1 was open at the moment of the search in 21 of the 22 cities. The 51 salons that had not yet opened for the day, most of them listed to open at 10 or 11, sat at a median of 11, closer to the closed group than to the open one. That matches the dentist snapshot: the list rewards being open at the minute of the search, and a late opening looks like a closed day until the doors open.

Across all 399 listings the correlation between being closed all Monday and position is 0.149, and on the 382 independent salons it is 0.174. Both are weak and both clear the significance bar. The split by market size is where the number becomes a decision.

	Large metros	Small cities
Salons with hours	209	190
Closed all day Monday	80 (38%)	59 (31%)
Median position, closed Monday	12	10
Median position, open Monday	9	9
Top-three slots held by Monday-closed salons	6 of 33	7 of 33
Correlation, closed Monday and position	0.227, significant	0.055, not significant
Median reviews, closed Monday	263	70
Median reviews, open Monday	330	88

In a metro the Monday-closed salon is three places lower and holds 6 of 33 top-three slots while making up 38 percent of the list. In a small city it is one place lower and holds its fair share of the top three.

Is it Monday, or is it reviews?

The salons that close Monday are smaller by the one proxy we have: 263 reviews against 330 in the metros, 70 against 88 in the small cities. Review count is the strongest thing on the list, with a correlation to position of -0.369 in the metros and -0.389 in the small cities, so we split the sample into thirds by review count and compared closed and open salons inside each third.

Pooled, the Monday gap lives in the middle third. Among salons with 100 to 294 reviews, those closed all Monday sat at a median of 12 against 6 for those open that day (rho 0.277, significant). In the bottom third it was 14 against 11, not significant; in the top third, 9 against 9. Inside the metros alone the bottom third clears the bar, 15 against 12 (rho 0.26), with the other two thirds pointing the same way but not significant. In the small cities nothing clears the bar, and in the most reviewed third the Monday-closed salons sat higher.

That is the honest shape of a snapshot. The Monday effect is real and weak, it concentrates among salons whose review count does not already settle the question, and it does not appear where every competitor is closed too. Whether the same salons sit lower on Tuesday needs a before-and-after panel, which is the next step.

The week a top-20 salon keeps

The median salon on the list is open 6 days and 52 hours a week. A quarter are open 44 hours or fewer, three quarters 61 or fewer. Metro salons keep 55 hours, small-city salons 50.

Days open per week (share of all 424 listings; those without a full week of hours are not shown)	Share of listings	Median position	Listings in the top three	Median reviews	Median hours per week
4 days	6%	12	2	69	33
5 days	31%	11	15	139	44
6 days	41%	9	37	203	56
7 days	17%	9	12	381	67

Sunday is the day salons close: 78 percent of the list, 72 percent in the metros and 85 percent in the small cities. Monday is a distant second at 35 percent, every other day is closed by fewer than one listing in ten, and 92 percent are open Saturday. So the five-day salon on this list is almost always closed Sunday and Monday, and the six-day salon is the one that opened Monday.

Does the sixth day buy position? Six- and seven-day salons sit at a median of 9 against 11 for five-day salons, and days open correlates with position at -0.137 pooled and -0.214 in the metros. But seven-day salons carry 381 median reviews against 139 for five-day ones, and inside review thirds weekly hours do not relate to position in any third (-0.142, -0.087 and -0.067, none significant). A longer week and a larger review count travel together, and the review count is the one the list tracks.

Reviews, and who is on the list

Rating is a floor and volume is the ladder here too. The median rating is 4.8 and its correlation with position is 0 across 424 listings. The 50 salons rated a perfect 5.0 sit at a median position of 14 and hold 1 of the 66 top-three slots; 44 percent of them have fewer than 50 reviews. Volume orders the list in both kinds of market: the metro top three carry 561 median reviews against 214 at positions 13 to 20; the small-city top three carry 170 against 52.

The benchmark travels better as a multiple. Read the 20 review counts in your own pack and take the middle one. The top three carry 1.69 times that number in a metro and 2.23 times it in a small city. The floor is lower than owners assume: the least reviewed salon in each metro’s top three had a median of 244 reviews, in each small city’s top three 134, and 6 of the 22 cities had a top-three salon under 100.

The national haircut chains are nearly absent: 17 of 424 listings are chain locations, 2 of them in the metros, holding 2 of 66 top-three slots and no position 1. A search for “hair salon” returns independents. The website button matters more in a small city: 90 percent of metro listings link to a site of their own and the share hardly moves by position, but in the small cities 88 percent of the top three do against 45 percent of positions 13 to 20.

What changed in verification

The first pass excluded 9 real salons as lead-marketplace listings because their website button goes to a booking platform; they now stay with the website marked unmeasurable. It kept 5 Sola Salons suite buildings as chain locations because the rule was written in the singular, and excluded a salon collective whose name contains the words of a hair restoration chain. The two largest “salon websites” in the first pass were a directory and a link page, both now unmeasurable. Every Monday figure was recomputed after each correction and on independents alone; no conclusion changed, and the chain count fell from 21 to 17.

What to do with this

• In a metro, Monday is a real cost, and a small one. Closed-Monday salons sit three places lower and are underrepresented in the top three, most clearly between 100 and 300 reviews.
• In a small city, keep the Monday you want. The list does not sort on it when a third of your competitors are closed too.
• If you open late, the morning list treats you as closed. Salons opening at 10 or 11 sat with the closed group at the moment of the search.
• Spend the effort on reviews. Volume is the only measured factor that orders the list in both kinds of market, and it is what the longer-week salons had in common.

Limits: what this can and cannot tell you

Measured: the listed weekly hours, open status at the moment of the search, review counts, ratings, positions and website links of 424 hair salon listings in the Google Maps top 20 for one query in 22 cities on one Monday morning, with every hours comparison repeated on independents, by market size and inside review thirds.

Not measured: the same list on a Tuesday. This is a snapshot, so it shows that Monday-closed salons sit lower on Monday, not that they rise when they open. Searches in the afternoon or evening, when the late openers would be open. Whether listed hours match the hours the salon keeps.

Range restriction: every salon here already appears in the top 20. The study can say whether Monday closure sorts the list, not whether it keeps a salon off the list.

Other explanations: Monday-closed salons are smaller by review count, and a salon that adds a sixth day may add reviews with it. Review thirds hold volume roughly constant and the gap survived in one third of three, and not in the small cities. Listings filed as beauty salons rather than hair salons (58 of 424) could not be verified one by one.

The number to write down

The median salon in a Monday map pack is open six days and 52 hours a week, and 35 percent of the list is closed. In a metro, closing Monday costs about three places and a few top-three slots; in a small city it costs almost nothing. Read the status lines in your own pack on a Monday, decide what the sixth day is worth to you, and put the rest into reviews.