Your cancellation policy — how to make one that holds up

Guidance for Beautrix artists · 10 September 2026

Your clients are consumers in law, even though you are not. That means the Consumer Rights Act 2015 applies to your terms in full, and a term that is unfair is not binding on your client — a court can strike it out of its own motion, without your client even raising it.

This matters practically. An unfair cancellation term is not a term that gets you a telling-off. It is a term that does not work when you need it.

The three things that make a deposit clause fail

1. It is one-way. The single most common failure. The law's grey list treats as presumptively unfair a term "permitting the trader to retain sums paid by the consumer where the consumer decides not to conclude or perform the contract, without providing for the consumer to receive compensation of an equivalent amount from the trader where the trader is the party cancelling".

Read that again: if you keep her deposit when she cancels, but she gets nothing extra when you cancel, the term is presumptively unfair. The fix is one sentence, and it costs you almost nothing because you rarely cancel.

2. It is a flat amount, whatever the circumstances. "No refunds under any circumstances" is the CMA's own example of a term likely to be unfair. So is a fixed charge that applies identically whether she cancelled three weeks out or twenty minutes out.

3. It takes more than you actually lost. A cancellation charge should reflect "a genuine estimate of what you will lose directly because of the customer cancellation". Beauty work has low fixed costs and short-notice slots often refill. Charging the full treatment price for a no-show is very hard to defend.

What a defensible policy looks like

A small deposit. Enough to make the booking real — around 10–20% of the treatment price. A 50% non-refundable deposit is where the CMA starts looking.
A sliding scale by notice given. More notice, more refund. This is the single strongest signal that the charge reflects real loss rather than punishment.
Refund what you actually recover. If you refill the slot, refund the deposit. If you refill it partially, refund proportionately.
Reciprocity. If you cancel, she gets her deposit back in full — plus something.
An exception for the exceptional. Illness, bereavement, a genuine emergency. Offer to reschedule.
Shown before she pays, not buried in terms she scrolls past.

A wording you can use

Reserving your appointment. To hold your appointment we take a deposit of £[X], which is [Y]% of the price. The rest is due on the day.
If you need to cancel or move it. More than 72 hours before — we refund your deposit in full, or move you to another date at no charge. Between 24 and 72 hours before — we keep half the deposit, to cover the products and travel already arranged. Less than 24 hours before, or if I arrive and nobody is there — we keep the deposit.
In every case, if I manage to fill your slot with another booking, I will refund your deposit in full. And I will never keep more than I have actually lost — if my costs come to less than the deposit, you get the difference back.
If I have to cancel, you get your deposit back in full, and I will offer you [the next available appointment at 10% off / a first-choice slot / a £X credit].
If something serious happens — you are ill, there has been a bereavement, something outside your control — tell me and we will find another date. No charge.

Adjust the hours and the percentages to your work. A bridal party you have blocked a whole day for is a different case from a 45-minute appointment, and a longer notice window is easier to justify the bigger the booking.

Things not to do

Do not take the full price up front and call it a deposit. That is an advance payment, and keeping all of it is much harder to defend.
Do not charge a "no-show fee" on top of keeping the deposit. The CMA calls that double compensation.
Do not write "non-refundable" with no exceptions. It reads as strong and it is the weakest thing you can write.
Do not hide it. A term she did not see before paying is not transparent, and transparency is part of the fairness test — not a separate nicety.

Show it before she pays

Beautrix puts your policy on the booking page above the payment step, with a box she has to tick to say she has read it. That tick is recorded. If a dispute ever reaches a chargeback or a court, being able to show she saw the exact wording before she paid is worth more than the wording itself.

This is guidance, not legal advice. If a lot of money turns on your cancellation terms — you take large bridal deposits, say — it is worth an hour of a solicitor's time.