Personal Care and Other Services

In plain terms: if you run a hair salon, a barbershop, a nail salon, a day spa, a tattoo or massage studio, a laundromat or dry cleaner, a funeral home, a pet grooming shop or a repair business, the orders of 2020 and 2021 named your trade. Between March 16 and April 3, 2020, forty-six States and the District of Columbia closed personal-care premises by name; the other four were closed by county and city orders in their largest markets. Reopening, between April 24 and July 6, 2020, came only on conditions written into the orders: appointment-only service, one customer per operator, six feet or a barrier between stations, waiting rooms closed, face coverings on operator and customer, services on an uncovered face barred, and occupancy of twenty-five to fifty percent. California closed the trade indoors a second time on July 13, 2020 and a third time from December 6, 2020 to January 25, 2021; New Mexico closed it again in November 2020; seventeen jurisdictions re-capped it that winter. Funerals were capped at ten mourners in ten States and barred as gatherings of any size in New York. Every laundromat stayed open under the federal essential-workforce list while the hotels, restaurants, offices and schools whose linen it cleaned were closed by order. The last capacity and appointment conditions fell between January 18 and July 1, 2021; in the summer of 2021, seven States, the District and more than twenty metropolitan areas placed every salon chair, laundromat and funeral chapel under an indoor face-covering order again, with a duty on the operator to enforce it, and Puerto Rico required every salon worker to be vaccinated or tested weekly.

This page covers the ten functions of a business in this industry, the layers of government whose orders reached each, the six quarters one by one, and the fourteen sentences the Internal Revenue Service (the "Service") uses in its letters, each answered from the public orders held in this site's Orders Library (the "Library"). The statute's operative text, the "Suspension Clause", asks whether an operation was fully or partially suspended during a quarter due to such orders; Notice 2021-20 (the "Notice") is the Service's guidance on it; the "United States" is the Government as litigant. The quarter the Service's letters most often dispute is the third quarter of 2021, and the record answers it: the orders in force from July 1 to September 30, 2021 are listed below by issuer, date and operative clause.