How much do yoga teachers earn in the UK?

You’ve finished your teacher training, the certificate is safely in a drawer, and somewhere between the last assessment and your first paid class a quieter question arrives. Can I actually make a living from this?

It is a fair thing to wonder, and the search results don’t help much. They are all over the place, mostly because yoga teachers earn in three quite different ways.

Teaching someone else’s class usually pays a flat fee, often somewhere around £25 to £35 a session. Your own classes pay whatever comes through the door, minus the room. And one-to-ones, when they come, are often £60 to £100 an hour.

The middle one is where you have the most say over what you earn. It is also the one nobody publishes figures for.

Why the numbers online don’t agree

You may already have come across £71,175 a year, the figure on Indeed. It is an average of salaries in job adverts, which suits employed jobs and fits freelance teaching rather badly. Of the eight cities the same page lists, London has the joint lowest figure, level with Oldham, which tells you how thin the data underneath it is.

The National Careers Service simply says “Variable”. Less satisfying, but closer to the truth. It gives a clear £21,000 to £27,000 for a fitness instructor, so the gap isn’t carelessness. Salary surveys measure what employers pay, and most yoga income doesn’t come from an employer.

The most useful published figure comes from the Scottish careers site PlanitPlus, run by a group of Scottish local authorities. It puts what teachers charge at £15 to £30 a class, and up to £50 an hour for individual tuition. A charge rather than a salary, which is the right way to think about it.

All the figures here were checked at the end of September and the start of October 2026. They do move, so glance at the date on any page you land on too.

Teaching someone else’s class

A flat fee, and clean money. You turn up, you teach, and you are paid the same whether two people come or twenty. The room and the advertising are somebody else’s worry, which leaves you free to find your feet and to work out whether you’d like a class of your own one day.

What it won’t do is grow. A full class pays the same as a quiet one, and the hours arrive one at a time around other people’s timetables. That’s the part an annual salary figure quietly assumes away, and it is why the other two matter so much.

Running your own classes

Here the sums are yours. They turn on four things: how many classes you run, how many people come, what you charge, and what the space costs.

One thing changes how you see all four. The room costs the same whether six people come or sixteen. Once it is paid for, nearly everything the next person pays is yours. So filling a class you already run usually does more for your income than putting your prices up. The class pricing calculator works this through with your own numbers, and the class capacity and revenue calculator shows how full a class needs to be to cover the rent.

Which makes the room the place to start. Few halls put their prices online, but the ones that do give a sense of the range. A main hall at Aldham Village Hall in Essex is £9.50 an hour midweek at the commercial rate. The London Borough of Harrow says its community halls “range from £17 up to £86 per hour”, depending on the size of the hall, the day and the time. Ring three places near you and compare. It is a pleasant half hour, and it may change your sums more than anything else.

A few questions to ask while you’re on the phone, because most price lists leave them out:

Is there a regular rate? Plenty of halls do a better deal on a weekly slot. Liss Village Hall in Hampshire publishes a separate, lower rate for a Regular General Hirer, and Hunsdon Village Hall in Hertfordshire has a whole scale of charges for “a recurring class, activity or business”, with a minimum of eight sessions.

Which rate would I be on? Many places have a community rate and a commercial rate, and the gap can be large. Norfolk County Council charges £20 an hour for a library room at its commercial rate, and £10 for charities. Halls differ on where a paid class sits, so ask before you agree a price.

What do evenings cost? Farnham Royal Village Hall in Buckinghamshire charges £25 an hour after six, with a two-hour minimum, so a sixty-minute class costs you two hours. Evenings are often when people can get to a class, so it helps to know this before you set your price.

Is anything else on the bill? Frome Town Council adds £18 an hour for a steward on any booking outside the centre’s working hours, which takes a £22 hour to £40.

Once those are settled, the sums get a good deal friendlier, because the only number still moving is how many people are on the mats.

One-to-ones

Often the best-paid hour in a teacher’s week. Private sessions often go for £60 to £100 an hour, though PlanitPlus puts individual tuition at up to £50, so where you teach and who you teach make a real difference. Either way, it is two or three times a class fee for the same hour, usually in a much smaller room.

The catch is that you can’t count on them. You might have none in October and three a week by March. They tend to grow from people who already come to your classes, so it helps to make them easy to book: appointment booking stops a handful of regulars turning into a second job of texts and diary clashes.

The number you can plan with

Rather than an annual salary, start with what one session brings in. A cover class is the fee. Your own class is the takings minus the room. A private is the hour minus whatever the space costs. Multiply each by the sessions you feel confident you can fill in a week, and add them up.

That gives you a figure that belongs to your diary rather than to a national dataset. It also shows you where the slack is, and more often than not it’s the four or five empty mats in a class you are already paying for, more than your prices.

A few related questions

Can I teach yoga part-time? Yes, and most of this work is part-time by its nature. It is built from hours across more than one venue, plus whatever you run yourself, which is exactly why an annual salary figure sits so oddly on it.

What should I charge for my first class? Start from the room rather than from what the studio down the road charges. Put your hire cost and a realistic number of students into the class pricing calculator and it will give you a floor to price above.

Do I need insurance to hire a hall? Often, yes. A hall’s own insurance may only cover charities and community groups, and some halls’ terms ask anyone else to arrange their own. It is worth asking when you book. There is more on what the different policies cover in this piece on yoga teacher liability insurance.

Nobody can hand you your number without knowing your hours and your area. But the next time you see a figure online, you’ll know which of the three kinds of teaching it is describing. So, of the three, which is your week built from today, and where are the empty mats?

If you are still deciding whether to teach at all, there is more on starting to teach yoga classes, and a companion piece on what Pilates instructors make in the UK if you teach both.