Should an aesthetics clinic take deposits?

This is a plain-English summary of the rules, not legal advice. Have a solicitor check your written terms.

Why take a deposit at all?

• Commitment. A patient who has paid something is more likely to attend, or to tell you they cannot.
• Qualification. Asking for a deposit separates patients who are ready from patients who are browsing, before a practitioner's time is spent.
• Protection. When a slot is wasted, the deposit covers part of the cost.

It also changes how you should judge marketing. PatientFlow counts a booking only when the deposit is paid, and charges only for those. Dr Motox took 160 deposit-paid bookings on that basis. See how deposits fit alongside reminders and qualification to reduce no-shows for the evidence on the no-show side of this.

What does UK law actually say about deposits?

There is no statute that sets a maximum deposit percentage or bans deposits outright. Instead, three pieces of law work together: the Consumer Rights Act 2015 controls whether a term is fair and clear, the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 controls what you must tell the patient before they pay, and the Competition and Markets Authority's guidance explains, in plain terms, how the regulator reads both. None of this is aesthetics-specific: it is the general framework for any consumer deposit or prepayment.

The fairness test: Consumer Rights Act 2015, section 62

Section 62 sets the core test: "a term is unfair if, contrary to the requirement of good faith, it causes a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations under the contract to the detriment of the consumer." An unfair term is simply not binding on the patient, whether or not they agreed to it or signed something. Section 62 also directs you to look at the contract as a whole and the circumstances when the term was agreed, not just the clause in isolation. A deposit clause is judged in that context: is it balanced with what the clinic gives up in return, and was it explained clearly before the patient committed to it.

What Schedule 2 says specifically about deposits and cancellation charges

Schedule 2 to the Act lists terms that may be regarded as unfair. Three paragraphs matter directly for a deposit policy:

Schedule 2, paragraph 4	A term letting the trader keep money paid by the consumer where the consumer decides not to proceed, without a matching right for the consumer to receive an equivalent amount from the trader where the trader is the one who cancels. If you cancel, refund the deposit in full.
Schedule 2, paragraph 5	A term requiring a consumer who fails to fulfil their obligations to pay a disproportionately high sum in compensation. Keep the deposit proportionate to the treatment value and to what the wasted slot actually costs you.
Schedule 2, paragraph 6	The same proportionality test applies specifically to a consumer who cancels or fails to perform the contract, which covers a silent no-show as much as an explicit cancellation.

The CMA's own guidance for businesses translates these paragraphs into a practical test. A term is unlikely to be fair if it makes prepayments "non-refundable, regardless of why the customer cancels", or lets the business "collect all outstanding payments under the contract when you do not have to supply the product any longer". A term is more likely to be fair where deposits "reflect a genuine estimate of what you will lose directly because of the customer cancelling", and the guidance specifically says a business "may legitimately keep a deposit in full if it's no more than a small percentage of the price and you make it clear when exactly it would be non-refundable" (CMA, Unfair terms explained for businesses: full guide). That last sentence is the clearest steer a clinic is going to get: small relative to the treatment price, and the forfeiture trigger stated up front.

Transparency: Consumer Rights Act 2015, section 68

Section 68 adds a separate requirement that sits alongside fairness: a trader "must ensure that a written term of a consumer contract, or a consumer notice in writing, is transparent", meaning it "is expressed in plain and intelligible language and it is legible". A deposit clause can be substantively fair and still fall foul of section 68 if it is buried in dense small print, written in dense legal phrasing, or printed too small to read comfortably. For a clinic this means: put the deposit policy in its own short paragraph, in ordinary English, not inside a wall of general terms and conditions.

What must you tell the patient before they pay?

If the booking is made online, by phone, or by message (which covers almost every aesthetics enquiry today), the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 apply, because the patient is entering into a distance contract. Regulation 13 requires the trader to "give or make available to the consumer the information listed in Schedule 2 in a clear and comprehensible manner" before the contract is made, and if a display has limited space, the essential details must still appear there even if the rest follows separately. Leaving the deposit terms out of that information also undermines the fairness and transparency case for keeping a deposit later.

Schedule 2 spells out exactly what "the information" covers. Three items are directly relevant to a deposit-paid consultation:

Deposits (Schedule 2, para (u))	"The existence and the conditions of deposits or other financial guarantees to be paid or provided by the consumer." This is the specific line that requires you to state the deposit and its conditions before payment, not after.
Cancellation rights (Schedule 2, para (l))	The conditions, time limit and procedure for the patient's cancellation right, addressed in the next section.
Timing (Schedule 2, para (j))	The arrangements for payment and performance, and the time by which the service will be provided, covering when the consultation itself will happen.

The 14-day cancellation right

Regulation 36 gives a patient who books remotely a 14-day right to cancel. In practice this rarely stops a clinic taking a deposit: if the consultation has not yet taken place when the patient exercises that right, the normal outcome is a full refund of anything paid for a service not yet performed. If the patient specifically asked for the consultation to happen within those 14 days and then cancels, they may owe a proportionate amount for time or resources you have genuinely already committed, but for a future-dated consultation that has not started, there is usually nothing to be proportionate about yet. The regulations carve out certain healthcare arrangements, but that carve-out is aimed at NHS-style statutory provision, not privately booked aesthetics consultations, so treat a private booking as covered unless a solicitor advises otherwise for your specific contract wording.

What if the practitioner decides treatment isn't suitable?

This is where the fairness test in section 62 and Schedule 2 paragraph 4 point in the same direction. If the clinic, not the patient, is the reason the booking does not lead anywhere, because the practitioner assesses the patient at consultation and decides the treatment they enquired about is not appropriate, the patient has not cancelled and has not failed to attend. They turned up as agreed. Keeping the deposit in that situation is hard to justify under paragraph 4's requirement for a matching right when the trader is the one who, in effect, cannot proceed, and it sits badly with the transparency and good-faith tests in sections 62 and 68. A clean policy either refunds the deposit in that scenario or converts it into credit the patient can use towards a different, suitable treatment. Either way, say which one applies before the patient pays, not after the consultation.

Card payments and chargebacks

Because a deposit is usually taken by card, it is worth knowing what a patient can do if they dispute it. Chargeback lets a cardholder "challenge and 'claw back' payments made using a debit or credit card", and the Financial Ombudsman Service notes a patient "usually" has around 120 days to raise one. Separately, Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 lets a patient claim against their card provider for breach of contract, but only where they paid by credit card (not debit), and only where the cash price of the service was more than £100 and not more than £30,000. Neither mechanism changes what the underlying consumer rights law says about whether your deposit term is fair, but both mean a patient who feels a deposit was taken or kept unfairly has a real, low-friction route to get it back, which is another reason to keep the policy proportionate and clearly stated rather than relying on the patient simply not disputing it.

How big should a deposit be?

There is no legal figure. The test throughout Schedule 2 and the CMA's guidance is proportionality: the deposit should be meaningful enough to the patient to represent commitment, and reasonable against what a wasted slot actually costs the clinic in practitioner time, room time and lost marketing spend. Most clinics set a fixed amount for a consultation and credit it against the treatment, which patients read as fair because it functions as a booking fee rather than an extra charge. A deposit set as "a small percentage of the price" of the eventual treatment, in the CMA's own wording, is the safest anchor if you want a rule of thumb rather than a fixed figure.

Two illustrative examples show how that proportionality test plays out in practice, not as data, as worked reasoning. A £30 deposit against a £600 treatment (5%) that is credited in full if the patient proceeds is straightforward to defend: it is small relative to the price, and if forfeited on a genuine no-show it is well within what a wasted slot plausibly costs the clinic in room and practitioner time. A £250 deposit against the same £600 treatment (over 40%), forfeited in full for a missed consultation, is much harder to defend under paragraph 5's "disproportionately high sum" test, because the sum starts to look like a penalty for cancelling rather than compensation for what was actually lost. Where a clinic wants a higher deposit, for example to reflect genuinely expensive practitioner time on a longer procedure consultation, the safer structure is to scale the forfeiture with notice given, a graduated cancellation charge, rather than a single all-or-nothing sum, which tracks the CMA's test that charges should reflect "a genuine estimate of what you will lose".

Proportionality in practice: a worked comparison

Policy design	Likely fairness read
Fixed deposit, small % of treatment price, credited against treatment, refunded if clinic cancels	Low risk. Matches the CMA's own description of a legitimately kept deposit.
Deposit forfeited in full regardless of notice given, or regardless of why the patient cancels	High risk. Matches the CMA's example of a term unlikely to be fair.
Sliding scale: full refund with 48+ hours' notice, partial forfeit inside 48 hours, full forfeit on a silent no-show	Lower risk than an all-or-nothing rule, because the charge tracks the clinic's actual, increasing loss as the appointment gets closer.
Deposit kept when the clinic itself cancels or the practitioner rules out treatment at consultation	High risk. Conflicts directly with Schedule 2, paragraph 4.

A model deposit policy (example only, not legal advice)

This is a plain-English example of what a policy could say. It is not a template to copy and paste as your own terms; have a solicitor check the exact wording against your own pricing and systems.

1. State the amount, and that it is credited in full against the cost of treatment if the patient goes ahead.
2. State how much notice the patient must give to move or cancel the booking without losing the deposit, for example 48 hours.
3. State that the deposit is refunded in full if the clinic cancels, reschedules with insufficient notice, or the practitioner decides at consultation that treatment is not suitable, or explain clearly if it converts to credit instead.
4. State what happens if the patient does not attend and gives no notice at all.
5. Include the cancellation information the Consumer Contracts Regulations require for a booking made remotely: the 14-day right, and how and when it can be exercised.
6. Write all of the above in short sentences, in one place, and show it to the patient before they are asked to pay, not in a longer terms document they are unlikely to read in full.

Does a deposit put patients off?

It puts off patients who were not going to turn up, which is the point. Patients who are genuinely ready to book expect to confirm a slot at a private clinic, in the same way they would expect to pay a deposit for many other private services. The drop-off happens when the deposit is a surprise sprung at the payment screen, so explain it plainly in the conversation before the payment link is sent, not in small print after it. A patient who has already been told the amount, what it is credited against, and what happens if plans change, pays it as a formality rather than an obstacle.

There is a second, quieter benefit worth naming directly. A clinic that only ever takes payment after the treatment has no early signal of who is serious and who is not, so every enquiry consumes the same amount of practitioner and front-desk time regardless of intent. A deposit taken at the point of booking, alongside proper qualification of what the patient wants and whether they can afford it, moves that filtering earlier in the process, before a slot is reserved rather than after it is wasted. That is a scheduling and cash-flow decision as much as a legal one, and it is why the deposit question and the no-show question sit together: see how deposits combine with reminders and qualification to reduce no-shows for the evidence on that side.

How does PatientFlow handle deposits?

With PatientFlow the deposit is part of the booking itself. After WhatsApp qualification, the patient pays a deposit through the checkout to confirm the consultation, and only then does the booking land in the clinic's diary and portal, with the full conversation behind it. The fairness and transparency rules above still apply to the clinic's deposit terms, and those terms should be shown in the conversation before the payment link. PatientFlow counts, and charges £75 for, a booking only when the deposit is paid. Dr Motox took 160 deposit-paid bookings this way in four months.

A deposit policy checklist for UK aesthetics clinics

1. Set the deposit as a small, proportionate amount against the treatment price, credited in full if the patient proceeds.
2. Write the policy in plain English, in one place, and show it before the patient pays.
3. State the notice period for moving or cancelling without losing the deposit.
4. Refund in full, or convert to credit, if the clinic cancels or the practitioner decides treatment is not suitable.
5. Include the 14-day cancellation right for any booking made online, by phone or by message.
6. Review the policy with a solicitor before publishing it, and again if you change the amount or the terms.