Men's grooming statistics: what men actually spend, and how long it actually takes

You are writing about men's grooming, or wondering whether twenty minutes in the bathroom is a lot. The internet will hand you plenty of confident figures: market size, product adoption, haircut frequency, the supposed grooming boom.

The useful question is simpler: what does each number actually measure? This page assembles federal time, spending, and price data, then marks the popular statistics that have no verifiable home.

Key numbers

These are the headline figures, with the measurement behind each one.

• 35 minutes: Men averaged 0.58 hours of grooming per day in 2025, including non-groomers. Source
• 76.9%: The share of men who participated in grooming on an average day in 2025. Source
• $978: Average 2024 annual spending per consumer unit on personal care products and services. Source
• $78,535: Average total annual expenditures per consumer unit in 2024. Source
• 37.6% versus 30.6%: The increase in the haircuts-and-services index versus the all-items CPI from the 2019 annual average to July 2026. Source
• No federal average-man figure: BLS does not publish annual grooming spend split by the sex of an individual spender in the cited release. Source

Table of contents

• How much time do men actually spend grooming?
• Has men's grooming time actually gone up?
• How much do households spend on personal care?
• Why does grooming feel more expensive than it used to?
• Which men's grooming statistics do not exist?
• The bottom line
• Sources

How much time do men actually spend grooming?

Men averaged 0.58 hours per day grooming in 2025, which is about 35 minutes. That is an average across all men, including men who did not record grooming during their diary day.

The American Time Use Survey category “Grooming” covers washing, dressing, and personal grooming as recorded in a 24-hour time diary. The data is self-reported. It tells you time recorded in that category, not effort, vanity, or how carefully someone groomed.

The participation figure changes how you should read the headline. Since 76.9% of men groomed on an average day in 2025, roughly 23% recorded no grooming at all on their diary day. Among men who did groom, the average was 0.75 hours, or about 45 minutes. Women who groomed averaged 0.93 hours, or about 56 minutes.

The participant gap is about 11 minutes, much smaller than the headline gap between the all-person averages. For a practical companion to this broad category, compare it with a men's skincare glossary or guidance on how to look put together. Those pages discuss routines; ATUS records the time category.

Caveat: a diary-day average is not a stopwatch study of every morning routine, and it cannot tell you whether the time produced a better first impression.

Has men's grooming time actually gone up?

Not by much. Men's average grooming time was 0.55 hours per day in 2003 and 0.58 in 2025, so the time-use series does not support a dramatic 22-year grooming boom.

Here is the full set of listed annual averages. The movement is small and uneven, not a clean climb.

No value is published for 2020. The participation series also does not describe a runaway change: 75.6% of men participated in 2003, 77.9% in 2019, 74.3% in 2023, 74.2% in 2024, and 76.9% in 2025.

That is the first useful reframing. If the bathroom routine barely moved, “grooming boom” cannot simply mean men are spending vastly more time grooming. Look at the invoice and the price index instead.

How much do households spend on personal care?

Households, measured as consumer units, spent an average of $978 on personal care products and services in 2024. That is about $81.50 per month and about 1.2% of the $78,535 in total average annual expenditures.

This is not what the average man spends. A “consumer unit” is roughly a household, not a person, and the BLS annual news release does not split this line by the sex of an individual spender. It also reports $950 in 2023, making the 2024 personal-care figure a 2.9% increase.

For context, apparel and services averaged $2,001 in 2024, down 2.0% from $2,041 in 2023. Average income before taxes was $104,207, and the number of consumer units was 135,760 thousand. None of those figures turns the personal-care line into a male-specific budget.

If you need category definitions rather than a household total, start with men's skin statistics. If you need a routine, use the data here as context, not as a target for how much you should buy.

Caveat: consumer-unit averages smooth together different households, incomes, ages, and spending patterns. They are useful for scale, not for diagnosing one man’s wallet.

Why does grooming feel more expensive than it used to?

Because the BLS index for haircuts and other personal care services rose faster than the headline CPI over the comparable period. From the 2019 annual average to July 2026, haircuts and services rose 37.6%, while all items rose 30.6%.

The checkable arithmetic is: (227.880 ÷ 165.570 − 1) × 100 = 37.6%; (333.918 ÷ 255.657 − 1) × 100 = 30.6%. The index values are not dollar prices. They track how the cost of a fixed basket changes, so they do not tell you what a haircut costs in your city.

This is the signature finding: men’s grooming time was 0.55 hours per day in 2003 and 0.58 in 2025, while the relevant service index moved 37.6% from the 2019 annual average to July 2026. The boom is in the invoice, not in the bathroom.

That distinction matters if you are comparing a haircut, shaving products, or a broader appearance routine. A men's haircut glossary can clarify the service language; how to shave properly covers technique without pretending the CPI can measure your exact basket.

Caveat: “haircuts and other personal care services” is broader than haircuts alone. The 37.6% figure is a category-index change, not a claim about every barber, salon, or city.

Which men's grooming statistics do not exist?

The federal statistic for “the average man’s annual grooming spend” does not exist in the cited BLS release. The available $978 figure is per consumer unit and is not split by the sex of the spender.

That absence is more useful than a plausible-looking number. If you are writing or researching this topic, separate what is measured from what people wish had been measured:

• No average-man annual spend: The Consumer Expenditure Survey line is household-level, not individual-level.
• No verified federal adoption count: There is no federal statistic here for how many men use skincare, own a beard trimmer, or get haircuts at a particular frequency.
• No market-size shortcut: Do not insert a “men’s grooming market” total from a paywalled market-research report we did not verify.

Numbers circulating for product adoption often come from brand-commissioned surveys. The ones without a published methodology are not evidence for this page. A men's skincare glossary can explain terms, but it cannot manufacture a national adoption rate.

The same discipline applies to first impressions. Our free photo perception test shows how a photo reads rather than giving you a numeric beauty score, while first-impression statistics gives context for perception claims. Neither should be described as a validated clinical instrument.

This material is for orientation, not for feeding appearance anxiety; a federal average would not tell you what you personally need to change.

The bottom line

Men’s grooming time has barely changed in the available 2003-to-2025 ATUS series: 0.55 hours per day became 0.58. The clearer change is cost, with haircuts and other personal care services up 37.6% from the 2019 annual average to July 2026, ahead of the 30.6% rise in all-items CPI.

Use $978 carefully: it is 2024 household spending per consumer unit, not the average man’s annual spend. For a writer, the honest answer is sometimes the strongest one: the federal number you want has no home in the published release.

If you want to see how one image lands in the first seconds, try the free photo perception test. It is about how a photo reads, not a beauty ranking.

Sources

These are the three external BLS sources used for the figures and definitions above.

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey, “Grooming” annual-average series. https://www.bls.gov/tus/
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey, 2024 data, released December 19, 2025. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index, U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/