If you are like most yoga instructors, setting your rate is one of the most important yet difficult parts about being a teacher.

Charge too little and you are selling yourself short, charge too much and you may miss out on opportunities.

But, there’s another problem.

The fact is that while there are plenty of articles out there on how much you can expect to make as a yoga instructor, it isn’t always clear how they arrived at these figures (which can seem high).

However, we have some good news.

Here at Stretchtopia we recently completed our first yoga instructor salary survey and our hope is that the results will help you negotiate better pay rates.

Background

We asked 107 U.S. based instructors 22 questions about their hourly and annual pay across multiple teaching environments.

We then analyzed this data, comparing different geographic regions and years of experience.

Below are the results.

Hourly Pay

As you can see from the graph, studios tend to pay the least per hour, with yoga retreats being on the higher end.

Private classes, workplace yoga, and teacher trainings are more in the middle at around $70 per hour.

Now, if we break this down by years of teaching experience, we see what we would hope to expect in terms of reasonable increases in hourly pay.

As the chart indicates, those with over 5 years teaching experience do make more hourly money overall than those with 5 or less years of experience.

The difference is most substantial in workplace yoga and private classes.

Annual Salaries

Now, this is where the data seems to conflict with what we are told from online articles and sites like Glassdoor.

Of the instructors surveyed, over 35% earn less than $5,000 from teaching yoga annually and well over half of the instructors make less than $10,000.

If you drill down a little further, of those that have been teaching less than 5 years, close to 75% make less than $10,000 per year.

Nearly half of all instructors do not rely on yoga as their only source of income.

So what are they doing to earn this extra money?

As you might expect, the answers are varied, and include things both related to yoga (such as managing a studio, mentoring, special events, workshops and festivals) as well as income from more diverse activities (such as selling CBD oil, dog walking, working at gyms, food service and real estate).

Geographic Locations

As part of the study, we wanted to look at the degree to which location affected the amount of pay one could expect to earn.

Although we did not receive responses from all 50 states, we did get a significant cross-section of the four regions to compare hourly pay rates at yoga studios.

As you can see from the chart, the eastern states have the highest overall rates, with the west coming in second and the midwest and south offering the lowest.

Interestingly enough, we expected that there would be more variation between hourly pay between geographic regions (with the midwest and south being quite a bit lower by comparison), but this difference seems only nominal and might not be enough to offset differences in living expenses.

Conclusion

Our results indicate that hourly pay in yoga studios hovers right around the $30 – $35 range, nationally.

If you have more than five years experience you should be in a position in to seek pay on the higher end of that figure, regardless of your geographic location.

As far as highest overall pay, retreats seem like a great option (with close to $85 an hour on average). However, it is unclear how many of these opportunities exist for yoga instructors.

For those with over 5 years experience, workplace yoga and private classes seem like good alternatives to studios if these sources of income are consistent.

If you are considering yoga as a potential career option, the results of this survey do seem to paint a bit of a different picture than articles indicating a base pay of close to $40k and a median pay of around $60k.

In fact, our numbers show that almost 90% of all yoga instructors make under $30,000 a year from yoga.

Overall, while the sample of this study is relatively small, the results do shed some light on the amount of pay one could expect to earn as an instructor in 2019. We hope this information can help you in setting pay rates across different teaching environments.

Thanks so much to those that participated!

Looking to increase you salary as a yoga instructor? Check out our Corporate Yoga Toolkit for tips and advice on launching your workplace yoga career!

Author: Christine Mathias

Hi, I’m Christine Mathias, licensed attorney and owner of Stretchtopia. With over ten years of legal experience, I use my skills to help businesses and nonprofits thrive. Using my experience running a workplace yoga organization, I am excited to help other yoga business owners tackle their legal issues and other organizational, financial, and marketing obstacles.