The best way to gain an understanding of the cost of hair transplantation, is to digress to first principles. These 9 principles, when understood, should give you  a relatively good idea regarding the options which will impact the final cost. Although you may find it difficult to estimate certain percentages or numbers, give it a try because you will be surprised at what you will accomplish.

1. Prior to hair loss, the scalp had approximately 100,000 hairs. This is a ballpark figure and varies with hair colour but 100,000 is a number that is useful for our purpose.
2. Next, try to estimate what percentage of your scalp (that we will be treating) has experienced significant hair loss as compared to the entire 100 % of your scalp. Please note that it may not be the entire area of scalp that has lost hair, just the zone that we will be concentrating our work in.
3. Thus, percentage of scalp affected (to be treated) _______ multiplied by 100,000 equals the number of hairs that were in this region prior to hair loss.
4. Next, estimate the number of hairs that still remain in the region that we will be treating.__________ Granted, this is a difficult number to gauge but it is well known that our scalp begins to look appreciably thin only after losing half of our hairs.
5. Subtract number of hairs still remaining _______ from number that were present prior to hair loss _______ to give an estimate of the number of hairs lost. _______
6. In order to achieve significant fullness, one-half to two-thirds of the hairs that were originally present should be replaced. _______
7. A follicular unit will contain anywhere from 1, 2 or 3 hairs (on occasion 4). In general, the average hair count in a follicular unit is close to 2 hairs.
8. Grafts at our clinic will always be comprised of 1 follicular unit and often 2 follicular units.
9. Therefore, the number of grafts will be determined by the amount of hair required to repopulate the balding area divided by the number of hairs in the grafts transplanted.

Graft Numbers in the First Hair Transplant Session
The chart following the Norwood Classification, gives general guidelines for the number of follicular unit grafts needed in the first hair transplant procedure.

Norwood's Classification of Male Pattern Alopecia

The Norwood Class A Patterns

Note that the above table estimates the numbers of follicular units. All hairlines are comprised exclusively of follicular units and in many cases the entire transplant is undertaken using follicular units. However, once you have had a thorough review by Dr. Wallik, you may decide to have a large proportion of your grafts comprised of two follicular units. Thus, a transplant of 3600 follicular units may translate to no more than 2000-2500 grafts.

Overall Cost