Just over half of the patients who had a non-surgical treatment at an aesthetics practice in 2024 came back in 2025, according to Guidepoint Qsight. The firm puts the patient retention rate at 52%, and at 63% for the practices it calls top-performing.

Those figures come from a vendor's slide deck, not a peer-reviewed paper. Erik Haines, head of Guidepoint Qsight, presented "Medical Aesthetics Industry Trends" on January 8, 2026 at what the deck's cover calls the Octane Aesthetics Forum, and the 37-slide file is posted on Qsight's website. Qsight is a commercial data business; the deck's closing slides list its six data products and invite readers to get in touch. We read every slide.

The retention slides cite one source, "Qsight Sales Measurement," with footnotes saying the measures are on a same-store basis and that spend and retention exclude surgical transactions. That is the whole of the published method. Nowhere does the deck say how many practices feed the 52%, how they were chosen, or how closely they resemble a typical med spa. The retention slides carry no geographic label either, though the deck's market-size slides are marked U.S.

The patient retention rate, category by category

Qsight's summary slide gives three practice-level averages for 2025. Average retention was 52%, shown as "+2% vs. '24." Average spend per patient was $1,576, also up 2%. And the average practice acquired 496 new patients, down 6%, under a slide title saying new patient acquisition "softened again in 2025."

Retention differs a lot by what the patient bought. Neurotoxin patients had the highest rate among the three categories Qsight charts, at 57%. A category labelled "Weight Loss Dietary Lifestyle" came in at 46% and professional-grade skincare at 39%. Whether a patient had to return for the same category to count, the slide doesn't say.

But brand loyalty is slipping. Among returning neurotoxin patients, 14% switched brands in 2025, against 9% in 2019. A separate slide shows the share of neurotoxin visits that also included a dermal filler procedure falling from 21% in 2017 to 13% in 2025.

Manufacturer rewards programs get three slides. Patients who used one returned at a rate of 68% from 2024 to 2025, and non-users at 42%. Qsight says 28% of non-surgical patients used a manufacturer program in 2025, up from 12% in 2017, on a base of 3.2 million patients. For neurotoxin visits the share was 45%, up from 22%, on 5.8 million visits.

All of this sits against a slower market. The deck puts total non-surgical patient spending at US practices at $21.0 billion in 2025, up 3% from $20.4 billion. From 2021 to 2022 the same line grew 24%.

What the deck does not tell you

A journal article would carry a limitations section. This deck has none, so the gaps below are ours to list.

"Top-performing" is never defined. The 63% could describe the top quarter of practices by revenue, the top tenth by retention itself, or something else entirely, and each reading makes it a different target. The "+2%" beside the retention figure could mean two percentage points or a 2% relative change; the slide doesn't say. "Same-store" goes unexplained too. Among the loyalty slides, only two give a sample size.

Then there is the rewards comparison. A 26-point gap is large, but the slide shows two groups side by side and nothing more. Patients who bother to enroll in a rewards program may simply be the ones who were always going to come back.

What it means for a practice

Everything from here is our analysis, not Qsight's.

At 52%, a practice that treated 1,000 patients in 2024 saw 520 of them again in 2025 and needed 480 new faces just to hold its patient count. That's an illustration, not a Qsight figure. The deck's own acquisition number points the same way without closing the loop: the average practice brought in 496 new patients, 6% fewer than the year before, and the deck never gives the average practice's total patient count to set that against.

The distance between 52% and 63% is worth pricing. On the same 1,000 patients it is 110 more people returning. If each spent Qsight's $1,576 average, an assumption on our part, that is about $173,000 a year.

Treat 52% as a rough yardstick, then, and not as a diagnosis. Your own figure is one report away in most practice-management systems: patients seen in one calendar year who were seen again in the next. For a peer-reviewed look at what may move it, see our summary of a 17-clinic Australian study on structured treatment plans, and for where retention feeds into pricing, our membership pricing guide.

Qsight closes with three things it says it will monitor in 2026. Retention isn't on the list.

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