Published on June 23, 2026 at 08:08 AM
There’s no shortage of controversial topics in the yoga industry, but the conversation surrounding yoga teacher pay rates has been controversial for decades. Earlier this year, the issue was reignited everywhere when teachers were in… CorePower Yoga threatened to strike. Among the reasons mentioned? Low pay.
I’ve taught at studios in relatively small towns that completely underestimated what teachers offered students and paid as little as $12 per hour class. I’ve also worked at studios where I felt fairly compensated with $50 and sometimes $60 for busy classes.
But after experiencing the other side of the situation as a studio owner in recent years, I admit that I don’t know if there’s one right answer to the question of what constitutes a decent pay rate for yoga teachers.
Why are yoga teacher pay rates so complicated?
When my business partner and I purchased… Our studio In 2021, we don’t have an MBA. We were yoga teachers who loved what we did and wanted to create an inclusive yoga community.
What we did was understand that teaching truly holistic yoga classes requires more education and experience than 200 hour yoga teacher training. So we knew we would need to hire and pay accordingly. We agreed and went into studio ownership determined to prioritize fair wages.
Four years later, we still don’t have an MBA, but we have a better understanding of the financial side of running a studio—and that compensating teachers in a way that reflects their value is more challenging than we ever imagined. What we have concluded is that we cannot talk about sustainable teacher pay rates without also talking about the fees we charge students.
There are a lot of expenses involved in running an independent yoga studio, including items that most students and teachers never see or think about. The rent is clear. Also utilities, cleaning supplies, insurance, taxes, props, scheduling software, marketing expenses, music licenses and other costs, including compensation for teachers and front desk staff. This says nothing about paying the owners home salaries.
Keeping classroom prices affordable for students but also high enough to keep the lights on, let alone teachers paid, is not a simple equation. What a studio takes directly determines how much it can pay.
So, how do we decide how much to charge students and pay teachers while keeping in mind fairness for all?
How does a studio determine a yoga teacher’s pay?
I can only speak to what has worked for us. This is how I played the numbers as a business partner and tried to keep things affordable for students and sustainable for teachers
When we looked at operating costs versus revenue, we calculated the cost to the studio per class. We assumed that the students were in unlimited mode membershipfor which we charge $120 per month. This means that if a student takes three classes a week, on average, he takes 12 classes a month. This translates into revenue $10 per studio class. Many members take more classes than this, which means revenue per class can be less.
Then we looked at average class attendance. Our classes are intentionally small. If a class has 15 students in attendance, and everyone is a member, the studio will receive $150 in revenue for the class.
That might sound great! But it’s a common misconception that the studio keeps all that money. For each class, there is also a portion of the cost of rent, electricity, music licenses, and more. So a lot of that $150 goes right back into operating costs.
Now, to the fun part – what do we pay our teachers?
After subtracting what we owed for overhead and calculating our average income per quarter, we decided that our average payroll should be 30 to 40 percent of our revenue, which was suggested by the business training we received. To us, it looks like a yoga teacher pays an average of $30 to $35 per class, depending on the teacher’s experience and bonuses based on attendance. My understanding is that the typical yoga teacher pay rate in our city is $25.
Even with these relatively low teacher wages, our margins have always been tight. For the first three years, my partner and I didn’t pay ourselves. This is a privileged situation, and we know that not every studio owner can afford to do this. But this is what we have to do to be able to achieve the numbers.
Location also factors into the equation. We are a small yoga studio in Tucson, Arizona. If someone is teaching at a studio in Manhattan where attendance rates are $35, a monthly membership is $200, and each class has 60 people, that’s a lot more revenue to take into account when it comes to calculating yoga teacher pay rates. Of course, the overhead of an urban studio will be much higher as well.
Of course, yoga studios don’t compensate anywhere near the rate that brands pay influencers for reels or that apps compensate teachers for recorded classes.
In other words, it’s complicated.
Why there is no simple answer
When we were trying to find a balance between reasonable prices for students and reasonable compensation for teachers, we started having conversations about pay rates with everyone on the payroll. But in our first few years, these conversations were only in response to individuals asking for salary increases.
During these conversations, we learned a lot from our team about how they see the reality of the situation. Many orders were impossible to meet with our operating costs. Sometimes the demands exceeded their level of training; Other times the fees were double what we paid other teachers. When I crunched the numbers, I realized that paying them what they asked would have literally put us out of business.
Saying no felt terrible. I left those uncomfortable conversations feeling defeated and tensions remained high with our teachers. But experience has taught me that transparency about our membership numbers and how that affects pay rates makes it easier for teachers to understand our predicament. It also led me to take some business training.
We finally increased our teacher’s salary after more than four years. Doing so was the scariest business move we’ve ever made. But looking back, I can say it took us a long time. We’ve also fallen into the classic yoga studio owner’s pitfall of considering raises based on requests rather than actually making a plan on how to afford to increase pay rates for everyone.
There are many factors in teacher pay rates, including the fact that the most challenging part of yoga studio ownership is learning how to forecast revenue and plan our growth strategy. But running a business without a plan and asking teachers to understand our inability to balance our books was the main issue. Addressing this is not the solution to the whole problem of yoga teacher pay rates. But it’s the beginning.
I still believe that individual studios and the yoga industry in general need to evolve our evaluation of yoga teachers. I simply don’t know what that looks like yet, and I don’t claim to have all the answers. But if we constantly preach about especially and rules For students, we need to ask ourselves whether our business decisions are also guided by these same principles.
