The Short Version
Color and highlights: essentially never. Perms: sometimes, depending entirely on which specific salon you walk into. If you’ve been searching for a straightforward Great Clips color price list, the reason you’re not finding one isn’t a gap in the research — it’s that the service mostly doesn’t exist within this brand’s model in the first place.
Here’s the full picture, including what perm pricing actually looks like at the locations that do offer it.
Why Color Isn’t Part of the Great Clips Model
This isn’t an oversight — it’s a deliberate business decision baked into how Great Clips operates. The entire brand is built around speed: walk-in convenience, Online Check-In, and haircuts that typically wrap up in fifteen to twenty minutes. Coloring services don’t fit that model at all. A full color or highlight session can run anywhere from forty-five minutes to several hours depending on complexity, which would completely disrupt the fast-moving waitlist system that defines the Great Clips experience for everyone else in line behind you.
There’s also a staffing and training angle. Color work requires a different depth of specialization than a standard haircut — color theory, chemical formulation, timing, and correction work are a genuinely separate skill set from cutting. Full-service salons build their staffing and pricing models around stylists who specialize in that work; Great Clips’ franchise model is built around fast, consistent cutting instead, and most locations simply don’t carry the product inventory or specialized staff to support coloring services at all.
If you’re set on getting color done, a full-service chain — Fantastic Sams and similar brands are commonly cited as the closer comparison — is going to be the more realistic option, typically running somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 for a full color and roughly $80 for a full set of highlights, though this varies significantly by market and salon.
Perms: The Exception, Not the Rule
Perms are where the story gets more interesting, because unlike color, they’re not universally absent — they’re inconsistently available. Some Great Clips locations offer them as a standard service; plenty of others don’t touch chemical treatments at all. Since every salon is independently owned and operated, whether a specific location offers perms comes down entirely to that franchise owner’s decision, staffing, and local demand.
The only reliable way to find out is to call ahead or check with your specific salon directly — there’s no national list of “perm-offering” locations to search, and pricing pages online are frequently outdated or based on a single location’s rates rather than a nationwide standard.
What Perm Pricing Actually Looks Like
Where perms are offered, pricing typically breaks into three tiers based on how much hair is being treated:
Partial perm — generally the least expensive option, often used for adding volume or texture to just the top or crown rather than the entire head. Reported pricing across different markets ranges from around $30 to $40.
Regular (full) perm — the standard option covering the whole head, typically landing somewhere between $49 and $65, though some markets report figures closer to $60–$70 as an average.
Long-hair perm — priced highest of the three since longer hair requires more product, more processing time, and more of the stylist’s time overall. This tier has the widest range across locations, with reports spanning roughly $75 up to $115 depending on hair length and local market pricing.
To put some real numbers next to this: one Ohio location priced its tiers at $30 for a partial perm, $49 for a regular perm, and $79 for a long perm. A California location a few states over listed $40, $65, and $90 for the same three tiers. Another California salon reported a long perm running as high as $115. The spread between locations, even within the same state, tells you almost everything you need to know about how decentralized this pricing actually is.
Why the Range Is So Wide
A few factors explain why perm pricing swings so much more than a basic haircut does:
Hair length and density. More hair means more rods, more solution, and more processing time — all of which scale the price up directly.
Local market rates. Franchise owners set prices based on their specific market’s cost of living and competing salon rates, the same way haircut pricing itself varies by region. A perm in a lower cost-of-living area can run meaningfully cheaper than the identical service in a major metro market.
Stylist specialization. Not every stylist at every salon is equally experienced with chemical services, and some locations may price perms slightly higher to reflect a more specialized team member handling that particular service.
Local competition. Where a Great Clips location sits close to several other salons that also offer perms, pricing can shift to stay competitive with what’s nearby.
How Great Clips Perm Pricing Stacks Up Against Full-Service Salons
Even at the higher end of Great Clips’ range, perm pricing tends to sit below what a dedicated full-service or boutique salon charges for the same service. Independent perm pricing elsewhere commonly starts around $100 and climbs well past that depending on the stylist’s experience and the salon’s positioning — some specialty salons price cold perms or more elaborate texture treatments at $300 to $500 or more. That gap is consistent with Great Clips’ broader value positioning across every service it offers: even on the rare occasion it does chemical work, it’s generally still priced to compete with budget and mid-range salons rather than premium ones.
That said, “cheaper” doesn’t automatically mean “equivalent.” A specialty salon or an independent stylist who works with perms regularly may bring more consistent technique and a wider range of texture options than a generalist stylist at a location where perms are an occasional add-on rather than a specialty. If the result matters more to you than the price difference, it’s worth weighing a specialist’s experience against the savings before booking, especially for a long-hair perm where the technical margin for error is higher.
How to Actually Find Out What Your Local Salon Charges
Since there’s no centralized, reliable price list for either color or perm services, the only genuinely accurate approach is:
- Call your local salon directly and ask whether they currently offer perms, and if so, what their pricing looks like for partial, regular, and long-hair options.
- Check the Great Clips app or website for your specific salon’s service list — some locations do list perm availability alongside standard haircut services, even though pricing usually isn’t shown until you’re in the chair.
- Ask about hair prep requirements. Some salons won’t perform a perm on hair that’s been bleached or heavily color-treated, since the chemical combination can cause serious damage — worth confirming this applies to your hair before you book anything.
- Get a quote at consultation. Because pricing depends on your specific hair length and density, most stylists will want to see your hair in person before confirming a final number, even if they’ve given you a general range over the phone.
What This Means If You Want Color or a Perm
If color or highlights are what you’re after, Great Clips isn’t going to be the answer at almost any location — plan on visiting a full-service salon instead, and budget accordingly, since color work generally costs several times what a basic Great Clips haircut runs.
If you’re after a perm specifically, it’s worth a few phone calls before assuming your nearest Great Clips does or doesn’t offer it. Given how much the pricing itself varies between locations — sometimes by 50% or more for the same tier of service — it’s also worth calling more than one nearby salon if you have a few within reasonable driving distance, since the difference in price for the exact same service can be significant depending purely on which franchise owner is setting the rate.
The Bottom Line
Great Clips built its entire business around being fast and predictable, and chemical services like color simply don’t fit that model at almost any location. Perms are the one exception, but “exception” is the key word — availability and pricing both depend entirely on the specific salon, with reported costs ranging anywhere from roughly $30 for a partial perm to well over $100 for a full perm on long hair. There’s no substitute for calling ahead and asking directly; anything else is a guess dressed up as a price list.
