Nu Skin Income Disclosure

It’s been some time since we wrote our review of the Nu Skin opportunity, so we thought we’d come back and see if things have gotten any better for the Nu Skin Brand Affiliates.

We wanted to know if the Affiliates are doing any better, or if this opportunity still loses money for most of them. To find out, we looked at a copy of the annual Nu Skin Sales Compensation Summary. Which is there version of what most MLMs call an Income Disclosure Statement.

While reading through their description, we noticed that an average of 17.85% of Affiliates earned a commission every month. So they are also telling us that 82.15% of Nu Skin Affiliates earned no commission each month.

They present the earnings for the affiliates who did make commission during the calendar year with the table shown below:

Looking at the average monthly compensation, we see that those who make it to the top 3 levels are earning quite well. The same can’t be said for everyone else in the system. Adding them up, we see that only the top 0.48% earn enough to replace a regular job. The remaining 99.52% of Nu Skin Affiliates earn less than minimum wage.

Nu Skin has been unusually honest in their compensation summary, they tell us that the commissions are ‘before expenses’. This is very important because it shows us that these commissions are income, not profit. If we were to look at all the time and money spent running a ‘side hustle’, we’d expect to find that most Nu Skin Affiliates are losing money.

Another issue not shown in the income disclosure is the attrition rate. This is the amount of Nu Skin Affiliates who quit every year. To find out about this, we looked at a Nu Skin Annual Statement.

From their annual report, we can see that Nu Skin ended the year with 25% less ‘sales leaders’, and 7% less ‘customers’ than they had at the end of the previous year. By their definition, the leaders are affiliates who have ‘reached a certain rank’. The customers are in the MLM, but that is ‘to buy at discounted prices’.

Nu Skin has not told us how many new affiliates joined in 2019, but we can see that Nu Skin Affiliates were quitting faster than they were being recruited

It is unlikely that you will make money from Nu Skin, or any other MLM opportunity. If you are considering joining one, we strongly recommend that you look over all your options carefully before committing to anything.

For posts like this check out our list of MLM Income Disclosure Statements. If you notice one that you think should be added to the list, let us know and we’ll do our best.