What are the license fees to open a med spa in California?
Facility · part of The Practice Perimeter
Short answer
The cited rules do not settle total cost — there is no med-spa license to buy, and the only fees given are board fees: an establishment license at $50 initial and $40 renewal ($100 for a mobile unit), and an esthetician at $75 exam, $40 initial, $50 renewal.
💰 California’s fee schedule is published in dollars without dollar signs, and the premises are the cheap part. “The following fees (in dollars) shall be charged by the Board”: for “Estheticians”, “Application and examination fee 75”, “Initial license fee 40”, “License renewal fee 50” and “License renewal delinquency fee 25”; for “Establishments”, “Application and initial license fee 50”, “License renewal fee 40” and “License renewal delinquency fee 20”. A mobile unit costs more than a fixed one — “Initial inspection and license fee 100” — because it is inspected.
Cal. Code Regs. tit. 16, § 998(c), (g), (h) · verified Sep 2, 2026 · regulatory monitoring, not legal advice
Related California rules
The board wrote this about a real solicitation it received, and its answer runs to one word. a business had offered physicians “up to $400 per month per spa” to serve as a medical director. The Medical Board describes that as “offering the opportunity for physicians, for a fee, to rent their license to a business so that the business may engage in the practice of medicine”, asks whether a physician can sign on, lend their name on paper to a salon or spa, collect the fee and escape liability for the patients the business treats, and answers “NO!”. The standards for informed consent, delegation to allied health professionals, confidentiality and boundaries and medical records, “as well as responsibility and liability apply to physicians” — “even those denominated “medical director.””
Medical Board of California — Medical Spas guidance (the medical-director role) · verified Sep 8, 2026
⚠️ California puts a separate license on the sterile compounder. “a pharmacy that compounds sterile drug products shall possess a sterile compounding pharmacy license as provided in this article.” Compounded semaglutide is a sterile drug product, so this is the license a California practice’s supplier must hold — distinct from its ordinary pharmacy license.
Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 4127(a) · verified Sep 2, 2026 · read at Public.Law — California Codes
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Related California questions
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← All California rules and changes · MedSpaRadar is regulatory monitoring and reference: it summarizes public laws, regulations and agency actions and links each to its source. It is not legal, medical, or compliance advice, and using it creates no attorney-client relationship. A summary can lag its source or leave out detail, and monitoring itself can be interrupted — so an absence of alerts means nothing reached you, not that nothing happened. Read the cited source, check its effective date, and confirm any change to your operations or clinical practice with qualified health-law counsel and your medical director. Legislative data via LegiScan (CC BY 4.0).