- A class is not an hour. Planning, travel both ways, setup, admin and recovery are all unpaid time attached to it, and most teachers count none of them.
- The sum is fee, minus direct costs, minus a share of your annual costs, divided by billed plus unpaid hours.
- Annual costs — insurance, membership, CPD, phone, website — divided by classes taught in a year usually come to a few pounds per class, and almost nobody counts them.
- The real value is comparing classes. Two classes on the same fee can be on completely different hourly figures once travel and numbers are counted.
- A poor number has three answers: raise the fee, cut the unpaid time, or let the class go. The third is the one teachers rarely consider and it is often right.
We get asked this more than almost anything else, and for me it’s the wrong question to start with. Not a silly one. Just unanswerable from where you’re standing, because you’d be weighing a number you picked against a cost you’ve never worked out.
The question underneath is duller and far more useful. What does an hour of your teaching actually cost you?
Sixty pounds for a class sounds all right. It keeps sounding all right until you count what the class actually took.
The hour in the room. Forty minutes planning. The drive there and back. Twenty minutes early to open up and set out. Messages afterwards about next week. That’s most of an afternoon.
Nearly every teacher carries a number in her head that only counts the hour. That isn’t carelessness — in truth the rest of the time is spread out, doesn’t feel like work, and nobody ever asked for it to be written down. But it’s why teaching can feel busy and still not add up.
What should you count when pricing a yoga class?
Four things.
- Billed time. The hour you’re actually paid for.
- Unpaid time. Planning, travel door to door both ways, setup and pack-down, bookings and messages, and recovery if there is any.
- Direct costs. What this class costs to run — room hire, parking, mileage, props you replace.
- Annual costs, divided down. Insurance, professional membership, CPD, phone, website, accountant. Add up the year, divide by classes taught in a year.
What is the sum?
Fee − direct costs − annual share, divided by (billed hours + unpaid hours)
That’s your real hourly figure for that class. Not for your teaching in general — for that class.
Why cost each class separately?
Because this is where the useful information is.
A village hall class with a forty-minute round trip and six regulars sits on a completely different figure from a studio class ten minutes away with fourteen people in it. Same fee on paper. Not remotely the same work.
Most teachers have been carrying one average in their head and making decisions with it, while one or two slots quietly absorb everything. Costing them separately makes that visible in about an hour.
What do you do about a poor number?
Three options, and none is automatically right.
- Raise the fee. Straightforward, and worth doing on a schedule rather than in a panic.
- Cut the unpaid time. Two classes at one venue instead of two venues. Blocked planning instead of starting from scratch weekly.
- Let the class go. The option people don’t consider, and often the right one. A slot that costs an afternoon and returns very little isn’t neutral — it’s taking the evening you’d have spent on something that does work.
What if you teach for a studio?
Then the number is not entirely yours, and any article that pretends otherwise is doing you a disservice.
A studio can only pay out what comes in. Six people at ten pounds is sixty pounds, and out of that comes the rent, the heat, the insurance, the cleaning, the card fees and the person answering the emails. I’ve been on both sides of this — I ran a studio in Edinburgh for years as well as teaching — and the arithmetic is genuinely tight. It isn’t meanness. It’s money in, money out.
So when you take your costed number to a studio, the useful conversation isn’t *this is what I’m worth*. It’s *this is what the class needs to generate to work for both of us.* Same arithmetic, pointed at the class rather than at you.
And if the numbers don’t reach, that tells you something about the model rather than about your teaching. A class that can’t carry a fair rate at that attendance is a class that needs more people in it, a different slot, or a different arrangement entirely. That’s information, and it’s a great deal more useful than feeling underpaid and saying nothing.
Is this treating yoga as a business?
It’s arithmetic, and it usually leads somewhere the opposite of commercial. The most common outcome isn’t a price rise. It’s a teacher dropping one draining class and getting an evening back.
Knowing your numbers is what makes it possible to keep teaching for twenty years rather than five.
You may do all of this and leave your number exactly where it is. Plenty of teachers do, and it’s a perfectly reasonable outcome. The point was never that your number is wrong. It’s that you’d been deciding without it.
Frequently asked questions
How much do yoga teachers charge per class in the UK? Rates vary widely by region and by whether a studio pays you a flat fee or you keep the takings from a hall you hire. Rather than matching a figure you’ve heard, work out what an hour of your own teaching costs. Two teachers on the same fee can earn very differently per hour.
Should I charge per class or per block? It changes who carries the risk of an empty space. Drop-in gives students the most freedom and you the least certainty. A block moves some of that back. Neither is universally better — but they build very different weeks, so choose deliberately.
Should I count travel time when pricing a yoga class? Yes, door to door, honest version. Travel is usually the largest piece of unpaid time attached to a class, and it’s what most often separates a class that works financially from one that doesn’t.
Why does my teaching feel busy but not sustainable? Usually one or two slots are absorbing far more time than they return, and the average in your head hides it. Costing each class separately makes it obvious. The fix is often not a price rise but moving or dropping a single class.
Where this sits
YogaPros has been the professional body for yoga teachers since 2006, with over 10,000 members across 100+ countries. The Business collection in the member Learning Hub covers pricing, visibility, finding work and building a career that lasts — including the full version of this costing, with a worksheet.
*This article is general professional guidance. It is not a substitute for professional legal, tax, or insurance advice specific to your situation.*