How Much Do Yoga Teachers Make?

Transcript

foreign [Music] often when people start practicing yoga as I did they become extremely passionate it actually changed my life and from that point I started to think about whether or not I could make teaching yoga full time as a realistic career so I'm going to talk a little bit about my story and especially some of the big questions that always come up when teaching yoga full-time how much money can I expect to make can I support myself how much money can I make teaching classes teaching privates teaching workshops teaching yoga retreats and maybe even eventually teaching teacher trainings yourself so let me tell you a little bit about my story to give you some insight onto how I made the leap from my full-time job in government to teaching yoga full-time I was teaching yoga part-time in only two classes a week and I was loving it so much that in the back of my mind I started to wonder if I can really do this full time at the moment I had a newborn child at home I was married and we shortly after found out we were about to have a second child so when I was thinking about this I had to lay out all those questions and whether or not I could financially support not only myself but my family as well so in this video I'm going to tell you a little bit more about my story about how much I was making at the time and how much you might expect to make if you're thinking about making this transition yourself is it possible to support yourself as a yoga teacher when you're first starting out so the question that you need to ask yourself at first is how much money do you need to live where you live and to support the lifestyle that you want versus are you happier with making a little bit less money potentially teaching yoga but having much more freedom in the way in which you work and live your life and that was the question that I asked myself when I first made that transition from teaching from working full-time to starting to teach yoga in fact I started teaching yoga part-time and kept my full-time job at first so I was just dabbling and dipping the toe a little bit seeing if teaching yoga full time could potentially be a career and when I was doing that I started to realize that each and every day when I went into work in my full-time job I was thinking about teaching those yoga classes over and over and over again so at some point that passion became so strong that I realized I needed to let go of my full-time job and start to make the transition but in that decision I knew that I was willing to make a little bit less money at first when I made the transition because I wanted the lifestyle and the freedom that teaching yoga would give me and in that freedom I was able to do what I love I was able to make my own schedule and I was actually able to build my own business on the principles that I was passionate about so in the next few prompts we're going to talk a little bit more just about how much money you can expect to make when you're first making that transition so now we're going to get into the details of exactly how much you can expect to make if you want to transition to a full-time yoga teacher there are a number of different factors which include how much experience you have as a yoga teacher what's your education level are you 200 hours certified are you a 500 hour certified yoga teacher another factor is where do you live do you live in an urban area in which there's a lot of full-time yoga teachers or do you live in a suburban area where there's less Studios or even a rural area where there might be even less Studios and students another factor that you need to think about is where are you going to teach are you teaching at a yoga studio are you teaching at a gym are you teaching in a corporate environment are you renting your own space from a coffee shop or dance studio each of those factors also will weigh heavily on how much you can expect to make as a yoga teacher the other thing to think about is typically on average across all of those scenarios a yoga teacher makes between thirty dollars an hour on the low end to maybe eighty dollars an hour on the high end but that's on average you can even make less in some cases than 30 an hour and you can actually make much more in some cases on average depending on how or where you're teaching so we're going to go into even further detail now about what those numbers might look like based on experience where you're teaching and how you're being paid so now let's talk about how much money you can actually expect to make from yoga studios teaching classes because most likely if you're thinking about teaching yoga full-time you're thinking about teaching yoga classes group classes at a studio so yoga studios and gyms typically pay in a few different ways and since I've been teaching over 18 years I've had the experience of being paid in all these different ways and I have a little insight to share with you so the probably the most typical way that yoga studios and gyms Pay Teachers is just paying a flat rate per hour so that flat rate would most likely depend on your experience so if you were a new teacher you would be at the the lowest level flat rate if you're an intermediate teacher you would make a little more per hour and of course if you were an experienced teacher you would probably make the highest per hour that hourly rate for a new teacher might be as low as thirty dollars an hour and for an ex experienced teacher could be eighty dollars to a hundred dollars per class so that's one way in which you can get paid as a new yoga teacher is just receiving a flat rate for your class now that flat rate of course doesn't take into account how many students are coming to those classes so if you're a new teacher who fills up your class with 30 or 40 students you're still going to get paid that flat rate if you're an experienced teacher who has maybe only a few students in your class for some reason they're also going to get paid just that flat rate so some studios are starting to move away from that flat rate paid scenario to what is called a flat rate plus some type of bonus structure and it is exactly how it sounds so typically you would get paid the flat rates that I just mentioned but you would also be compensated based on the number of students who are coming to your class and usually there's a minimum before that bonus structure kicks in and I've seen that minimum number of students be somewhere between 8 to 10 students before the bonus structure starts to kick in let me give you an example as a new yoga teacher if your flat rate was 35 dollars per hour and there were 15 students in your class and the rate was you get 35 dollars for the first nine students at the 10th student you get an additional three dollars per student so for students 10 11 12 13 14 15. so five more students you would get three times five so that would be fifteen dollars plus the original thirty five dollar flat fee that you're guaranteed so for that class of 15 students you would be paid fifty dollars yoga teachers typically like this scenario because it gives them a guaranteed rate for showing up for putting in the time to plan out their class to plan out their music so they're guaranteed to get that flat rate regardless of how many students come and yet they also get a bonus for the additional students that come to their class for example if they're always promoting their class if they become a very popular teacher that students love usually these teachers the ones that are very dedicated to Growing their class growing the studio being part of the community and their class numbers rise very very quickly and a bonus structure plus a flat rate is a great way to give yoga teachers stability because they know they're going to make a certain amount of money but also give them a little bit of confidence to continue to grow their own classes to take that one step further there's also some studios and gyms that only pay based on bonuses so there's no flat rate meaning that you could have zero students and you might not make any money so in that case you would get paid per head for every single student that shows up and I've seen this per head rate range from could be three dollars per head four dollars per head five dollars per head sometimes it's even 50 of the value of each student's class card so if a class was twenty dollars a teacher can get paid ten dollars per head for example so in that scenario there's no guarantee of making any money whatsoever so that could be a little um stressful for teachers who are making a transition from teaching full-time to part-time because they don't know what they're going to make class to class week to week month to month however if they're very confident in themselves and growing their community and growing their classes you can make a couple of hundred dollars per class depending on how big the studio is if you have 20 or 30 people or 40 people in a class you can make hundreds of dollars in that per head uh type of pay rate situation so there's pros and cons to it I think the the prior one of a flat rate plus a bonus structure takes care of both the stability and also the incentive for yoga teachers however just a flat bonus structure could be very enticing because you can make a lot of money uh teaching that way lastly there is one other way in which yoga teachers are starting to make money on their own and that's by renting out their own spaces so if there's a coffee shop or a gym or even a yoga studio that you know of that has some free time on their schedule that's being underutilized you can approach those businesses and ask them to rent their space so that you can host your own yoga classes now this is a great way again if you're confident in taking the risk that you're going to build your community that you're gonna get the word out about your classes and that you can cover your expenses because you will be taking on the cost the usually you'll have to sign a lease a month-to-month lease to rent that space so you're taking on the cost maybe it's fifty dollars an hour a hundred dollars an hour up to even 200 an hour sometimes to rent a studio space from one of these places so that means you would have to get 5 10 20 students just to cover your expenses and then also make the additional money that you can make for your own profit so that scenario is a little riskier especially for newer yoga teachers but for experienced yoga teachers I've seen this work really really really well and in that case those experienced yoga teachers can sometimes make three four hundred dollars for one class because they rented a space for a hundred dollars an hour they might have 30 or 25 or 40 students in the class and they charge each of those students twenty dollars per class so if you think twenty dollars per class times thirty students that's 600 dollars minus the hundred that they rented the space for that teacher just made five hundred dollars for One Yoga class so I think that scenario works great for experienced yoga teachers it's probably a little more challenging for new teachers to take that on at first because there's a lot of risk involved so those are the ways in which um Studios and gyms paid teachers right out the gate or if you're thinking about starting this career those are the ways in which you can make some money as a new yoga teacher but that's not the only way to make money as a yoga teacher and this is really important because if you are only teaching group classes most likely you wouldn't make enough money to make a living so now we're going to talk a little bit about those additional ways in which you can make money which is teaching corporate yoga classes teaching yoga privates teaching workshops teaching Retreats and maybe even teaching yoga teacher trainings so now let's talk about some of the additional waves as a full-time yoga teacher that you might make money that is more than just teaching group yoga classes because in all honesty how many group yoga classes realistically can a new teacher teach and expect to make a living so if you're teaching even 10 group yoga classes and only making thirty dollars an hour on average that's only 300 a week and maybe you can make a living on that but in most areas that's probably not enough I've met yoga teachers over the years that we're teaching as many as 20 yoga classes per week just to get by but doing that over a long period of time is not physically sustainable and I definitely don't recommend doing that so somewhere besides teaching group yoga classes yoga teachers who are transitioning into a full-time career have to start making money in other ways and the way ways in which they're doing that is teaching private yoga clients teaching corporate yoga clients offering workshops at yoga studios and even teaching yoga retreats either locally or all over the world so I'm going to talk about each one of these specifically and give you a little insight on how much money you can expect to make by taking on these other areas in which you can make money as a full-time teacher so the first one I want to talk about now are taking on private clients this is a very lucrative way in which yoga teachers can make more money than just teaching group classes you can make teaching private clients anywhere between 75 dollars an hour probably on the low end all the way up to 200 an hour on the high end and that's only for one student if maybe you're teaching a husband and a wife or two roommates or two friends or maybe even a small group of three to five students you can probably charge charge up to 150 to almost 300 an hour depending on how many students you're teaching in these private or small group settings now the challenge is is getting those private clients for me personally private teaching wasn't something that fit in my lifestyle at the time as I said earlier when I transitioned from having a full-time job to teaching yoga full-time I already had two small kids so traveling to people's homes traveling into New York City traveling basically anywhere a private student lived to get those lucrative clients didn't just work in my schedule when I was doing it however I've met many yoga teachers who teach very very few group yoga classes but have a very lucrative Private Client business and they can actually make a living just teaching private clients where they can make way more than teaching those group classes I would suggest one thing teaching group classes becomes the feeder in which you're going to get your private clients so even though you might make a lot more money teaching private clients at their homes you do need to probably have a few group classes to introduce yourself to a larger public in order to get those private clients and start to teach them on a regular basis one other downside about having a lot of private clients is the consistency group classes you know you're going to teach that class every single week probably for a long period of time as long as you continue to show up and the students continue to show up private clients can pretty much cancel at any time or they go on vacation or they move or their schedule changes so the consistency of having private clients isn't as good as Studio classes but they are very very lucrative so it's good to have a number of private clients when you're starting out teaching full-time just to bringing some higher hourly rates to support yourself and sustain yourself when you're trying to earn a living the second way in which full-time yoga teachers start to make additional income outside of teaching group classes or even private students are teaching workshops and this is a great way to introduce yourself to more students than just the ones that are showing up for your regular classes a workshop is a an area or a specialty an area of expertise that you might really be passionate about in the whole subject of yoga for example you might love restorative yoga or Yoga Nidra where you might have some insight on how to practice challenging yoga poses like handstand or an arm balance like Crow pose and you would present teaching a workshop at the yoga studio that you're teaching at in which a specific subject would be presented and it would be maybe once a month or once every couple months the benefit of this is that typically yoga studios pay somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the revenue in which that Workshop would bring in minus any expenses that they might incur so for example if you teach a two-hour workshop on how to practice handstand you and they charge fifty dollars per student you can expect to make 50 percent of that 50 so you might make twenty five dollars per student and in that case just teaching that one two hour Workshop if you have 10 students you can make two hundred and fifty dollars if you have 20 students you can make five hundred dollars just from that one Workshop however you probably can't teach these workshops on a weekly basis I would say if you're lucky you can teach a workshop once a month but that is regular income that's higher than your group classes so as soon as you start teaching and you get on a regular schedule at a yoga studio or a gym you should really start to think about workshops that you might want to present to the larger yoga community in which you're part of because you can make a little bit more money and also those students that show up at your Workshop will eventually start trickling into your classes as well and then from those classes some of them could even be private clients and you start to build your own community of students that not only take your group classes but come to your workshops become your private clients maybe come on yoga retreats with you which we're going to talk about next and then even one day take a yoga teacher training with you so now let's talk a little bit about teaching yoga retreats this is a great way for yoga teachers to live the lifestyle that they're trying to create as a full-time yoga teacher you get to travel around the world teaching yoga in these beautiful places really anywhere you choose anywhere that you're passionate about once you have a yoga community that you've built of students I guarantee you they would be willing to travel with you almost anywhere and to study yoga and practice yoga in a smaller setting because they love what you're offering so much now there's a lot that goes into leading a yoga treat typically a yoga teacher has to take on the expense of securing the place in which they're going to host the yoga retreat and this could be thousands and thousands of dollars depending on where you want to teach you know if you're teaching somewhere locally where students can drive maybe it's a little less expensive but if you're talking about leading international yoga retreats it gets a little tricky and I've led a number of Retreats all over the world by this point in my career and I've always had someone help me plan and organize the yoga retreat because contracts need to be negotiated you typically have to guarantee a certain number of students that are going to show up at this Yoga Retreat and that means you as the yoga teacher are the host of the retreat has to front that money before you actually start collecting any money from your students I would say you should start thinking about hosting a yoga retreat if you've been teaching at least two years full time because by that point you've taught plenty of group classes maybe you've taught workshops maybe you teach classes at a few different Studios so your own personal Community has grown to the point where you have a large number of students that you can draw from that will hopefully go on a yoga retreat with you one other thing I would recommend is if you are worried about filling up your yoga retreat and taking on that expense for every Yoga Retreat I've ever taught I've taught it with a second teacher and with that second teacher we basically share the risk in taking on the expense of fronting the money to host the retreat now let's talk about how much money you can make at a yoga retreat so the least amount of money that I need on a yoga retreat was three thousand dollars and that was for a long weekend from a Thursday to a Sunday I teach here in the New York City area I led a fall Yoga Retreat up in Vermont and it was in October and we left on a Thursday afternoon we got up there Thursday night and we all came home on Sunday and for that three-day experience I made about a thousand dollars a day I hosted a yoga class on Friday Saturday and Sunday we went on a couple hikes all the food was included we stayed in a beautiful Victorian home up in Vermont I hosted it with another yoga teacher so we both made about three thousand dollars that was a great great um easy trip to plan for my first Yoga Retreat and if you're thinking about hosting your first Yoga Retreat you might want to do something more local like that because the logistics are a little easier to handle now when I taught my first International yoga retreat was in Mexico and when I taught that Retreat I had someone help me plan it because I needed to coordinate departures and arrivals from the airport I needed to coordinate food allergies I needed to coordinate the contracts in another country I needed to send money through a wire transfer in another country so I had someone help me plan it and in exchange I offered that student a free spot on my yoga retreat so there wasn't an expense there and that student was willing to help me organize the retreat and they came on my retreat for free in that scenario I also hosted it with another yoga teacher and I made ten thousand dollars for seven days on that Yoga Retreat and typically on my International yoga retreats that's about the average average that I've made between seven and ten thousand dollars for a one week Yoga Retreat in those situations though I did have to put up a large amount of money to secure the place which is a risk that by that point in my teaching career I was willing to take on because I knew the benefit the financial benefit that was there at the end but you have to have already been able to build up your own yoga Community to take on that risk but teaching yoga retreats once you've secured some stability in your teaching and have a good Community is a great great way to make a good amount of money in a short period of time as a full-time yoga teacher so now that we've looked at group classes private clients teaching workshops and teaching yoga retreats I'm going to just talk a little bit about teaching corporate clients if you're transitioning from teaching full-time or having a full-time job to teaching full-time my guess is that you're coming from a corporate environment or a government environment I found many many teachers over the years that I were friends with that when they left their full-time job to teach full-time the first private clients that that they um were teaching to was at their former place of employment and that's a great in way in which you can start to get corporate clients the other thing is that corporate clients they pay a very very lucrative hourly rate when I was teaching my corporate clients a few years ago in 2018 my rate was 200 an hour that rate can go up to as much as 300 or 350 dollars an hour to go into a corporate setting on a regular basis and teach those corporate employees a weekly yoga class so they're typically hard contracts to get but if you came from a corporate career or you have resources that are in corporate environments lean on those resources to see if you can offer a weekly yoga class in those corporate settings it's just a great way to have a little higher hourly rate and it's also outside of the box of just teaching group classes so if you can make those in row votes in the corporate setting it's a great way to boost your your income as a full-time yoga teacher one downside in that is that as soon as the economy starts to slow down the first thing that usually gets cut are these supplemental offerings that businesses are offering their employees like yoga classes like wellness Services anything extra they're typically the first ones to get cut but if you can secure them early on and have a good run they're a great resource for you as a full-time yoga teacher so let's talk a little bit about leading your own yoga teacher training I've trained many many many students over the years I've been teaching both in person and online to the point now that some of the people I have trained have now just started leading their own yoga teacher trainings this is a great way in which you can not only solidify yourself as a respected teacher but also probably the most amount of money that you're going to bring in as a full-time yoga teacher when you teach a yoga teacher training the average cost for a 200 hour teacher training in person is probably somewhere between two thousand dollars on the low end could be all the way up to five thousand dollars on the high end I've even seen some trainings go all the way up to ten thousand dollars especially if they're off off-site um International yoga teacher trainings in which you travel somewhere spend a week or two weeks or even a month and you just do that teacher training those trainings have a very high cost almost as much as ten thousand dollars in order to start leading your own teacher trainings you at this point have to have built up a good yoga Community by teaching yoga classes teaching private clients teaching workshops you also have to have the right education you need to have a 200 hour certification and you need to have taught a certain amount of hours basically a thousand hours in order to be an experienced registered yoga teacher with the yoga Alliance so you need experience you need education and you need a community and at that point you have knowledge you have experience you know a lot about yoga and you should offer your own yoga teacher training and in doing so you can make a pretty good living just teaching yoga teacher trainings and right now I probably offer two or three sometimes four teacher trainings in person in in one year and then also now with the online and digital business you can also put up a digital online yoga teacher training as another resource so your students and the potential of people that are available to you and not only limited to what you can do in person but also digitally and that widens your community so much more so once you have the experience the education and your community the next and probably last step in which you will continue to fulfill your career is training people to become yoga teachers because I know for me when I did my first 200 hour teacher training outside of my children being born and getting married it had the most transformative experience in my entire life doing my teacher training led me to teaching yoga part-time led me to leaving my job full time and then becoming a full-time yoga teacher led me to then opening up my own yoga studios led me to leading international yoga retreats led me to teaching my own teacher trainings in person and now teaching online teacher trainings to people all over the world and it all started once I did my own teacher training and made that transition that life-changing decision to leave my full-time job which was scary and I had to make choices and I hopefully today laid out all the factors that you need to consider before making that transition but when I did it and I looked at all those steps and I made it possible I blazed my own path and here I am today sharing my experience and my story with you especially if you're thinking about making that transition yourself as I mentioned earlier teaching yoga full-time doesn't mean that you need to teach 20 or 25 group yoga classes in a week that will just lead you to burnout and exhaustion most people when they're transitioning from their full-time job to teaching yoga full-time start to pick up a few group classes but then also have something what you might know as a side hustle and this side hustle is a great way to compensate between your yoga teaching schedule and additional Revenue in order for you to make a living teaching yoga and doing what you're passionate about now when I first started transitioning I had the opportunity to actually keep my full-time job but make that into a part-time job but why I didn't do that was because it really wasn't linked to yoga I really wanted to make the transition to teach yoga and make teaching yoga part of everything thing I did in my life so I decided not to keep my government job as a part-time gig but I started to take on other jobs that were yoga related and these jobs are actually very very readily available and if you've been around yoga studios or you're practicing at a yoga studio or a gym you might look around and notice that they have social media they write blogs they have website content they you know have a number of different scenarios in which you might be available to do hourly work to help your not only your career but also the community you're part of and this is a great balance between teaching classes and having some other creative Outlet in which you can make a good living teaching yoga but also having a little bit of a side hustle so for me when I decided to leave my full-time job and start teaching yoga full-time I actually became an acupuncturist So Not only was I teaching yoga but I also then had a full-time acupuncture business so I became a full-time teacher and a full-time acupuncturist and those two careers Blended so well together that it allowed me to do what I was passionate about help people teach people about yoga and spirituality in all aspects of my day-to-day life becoming an acupuncturist might not be the path that you choose but there are so many paths that are in the space of Yoga and Wellness related becoming a massage therapist becoming a Blog writer doing website design or graphic design these are all additional jobs that are available in the yoga world that you can have as a side hustle to balance out your teaching schedule so thinking about some of those things and planning that out before you make the leap from leaving your full-time job to becoming a full-time yoga teacher is really really important for the success of making that transition because it is a scary scenario it's a risk that you're taking and my experience has been the more planning I did the more information and knowledge I had available to me when I left my job made the transition much smoother much easier and gave me way more confidence that I knew that I was going to be successful at this transition foreign