State of Yoga
2026
1
Clearing the Air
In 2026 the yoga market is smaller than it was five or ten years ago, and more serious as a result. Private health rebates have returned, the most significant development of the past two years, lifting the standing of senior teachers closer to that of physiotherapists. Most funds haven’t yet released the product suites that admit yoga as a rebatable treatment, but the hard work is done. A year of negotiations and working on back-end systems with insurers like Medibank is behind us. The rollout will play out over the next year or two.
Yoga is no longer the hot new thing it was in the 2010s, and we have seen this cycle a few times. It was hot on the Midday Show in the seventies, and hot again with Bryan Kest and power yoga in the nineties. Right now we are on the edge of the next phase, which is the exciting part! During Yoga Week we hosted a panel with three teachers who built careers across thirty years. The question we put to them was, “where to from here, and what can a new teacher do to hold respect for the tradition and for themselves alongside the innovation that always comes”.
We identified three pathways that are expanding throughout the industry. These are Breathwork, Yoga Therapy, and Meditation. We’ll explore and expand on the significance of the pathways later in this article.
2
Sustainability
Australian Pilates and yoga studios turned over about 630 million dollars in 2025, down about nine per cent a year to 2024 and near flat in 2025. But the number of studios kept climbing to about 3700, so more operators are splitting a smaller pie, and new teachers often feel the brunt of it. Across the same decade the cost of living outran wages, and a yoga teacher’s rate has tended to sit under that wage line.
The squeeze is felt beyond yoga as well, with Hnry’s Sole Trader Pulse showing health and wellness sole trader sentiment, while increasing in October 2025, jumping again in March as the strongest of any industry group, then plummeting to 105 in June 2026. AusPlay’s 2025 figures show Pilates participation up 26% per cent to 1.63 million while yoga held roughly flat at 1.15 million, up only 4% per cent.
Sources, IBISWorld, Pilates and Yoga Studios in Australia, 2025, ABS Selected Living Cost Indexes (employee households) and Wage Price Index (total hourly rates), June quarters, Hnry Sole Trader Pulse Australia, Resolve Strategic, October 2025 to June 2026 cycles, and AusPlay By Sport Data Tables, January to December 2025, released April 2026.
The Fitness Industry Award sets a casual Level 2 instructor at $31.19 an hour from July 2025, the legal floor for a rate negotiation. Self-employed teachers charge studios and gyms between $50 and $100 a class, and a registered Yoga Therapist can charge over $100 for a private session. About 60 per cent of Australian yoga teachers work as contractors, and our Super Contributions for Yoga Teachers article covers the contractor question in more detail. Changes to Private Health help our cause, with formal recognition promising to lift senior teachers’ rates.
For new teachers, a recommendation for success is to start with one class and build up gradually: add another as the first one grows, and drop other work as appropriate. The alternative of finishing a training, quitting the job, and hiring a hall all at once, tends to end in overwhelm and a stack of bills within the first year.
Start teaching with one class of your own, make it fit into your life.
Amelia Disspain, Yoga Bellingen
For those who commit to teaching yoga full-time it often involves diversifying or picking a niche. We have known people who paired their training with early-childhood education and are now running yoga programs for childcare centres. But few yoga teachers are full-time, and for many that is a feature of the job. Many teachers keep a completely parallel career, simply teaching a few classes a week.
Resource
Super, contractors and the 2026 changes
Until recently, the ATO offered a free service Small Business Superannuation Clearing House. That service closed on 1 July 2026. Studios now need to pay super either through their payroll software (if it has super built in) or through a separate paid clearing house. On the same day, a new rule called Payday Super also came into effect, now super has to be paid every time wages are paid, not just once every three months.
3
Emerging Paths
Thousands of years over an enormous field, with more lineages than can be named. Yoga is indeed vast, and Yoga Australia, as the national peak body, has a duty to span a corpus ancient and contemporary, a focus on public and professional interest. In 2026, three streams are of particular importance.
Breathwork is the first path. Historically, prāṇāyāma has been withheld from beginners and intermediate students, and from the other side, Westerners have often displaced prāṇāyāma as less important than physical postures. So breathwork emerged, sometimes slightly apart from yoga, but it is, by and large, yoga, so we are bringing it into clarity.
Yoga Therapy is the second, with a formal syllabus for the therapeutic application of yoga recently relaunched. Inspired from the Krishnamacharya lineage and its development in the West, Yoga Therapy is the personalised application of yoga. Our vibrant community recently welcomed new members from the former Australian Association of Yoga Therapists.
Meditation is the third, and the true jewel in the crown of yoga. For reasons much like breathwork, yoga’s temporary physical predominance shifted focus away, and similarly secular societies can struggle to make sense of deified symbology, sliding into a reduced sense where management of the brain is conflated with spiritual expansion. Truly, yoga is samādhi, and samādhi comes about by meditation.
Yoga is the very definition of pluralism, with styles rising and plateauing on a timing far beyond individual concerns. Great outcomes gather great gravity, and our purpose is to help people opt in, discern, and energise according to their will, not because they are fenced in according to trend or tort. On the following pages you will find scope guidance and resources for yoga teachers exploring specialisation to uplift their standing.
Breathwork
Prāṇāyāma is the ultimate amplifier of human potential, the intermediary between posture and meditation. Our dedicated prāṇāyāma page contains resources and guidance for yoga teachers eager to participate in current interest around breathwork.
Yoga Therapy
Yoga Therapy is the personalised application of yoga to health, wellbeing and participation in life. Practice is tailored to the person, cultivating self-awareness, self-regulation, resilience and the innate capacity for healing. Our dedicated Yoga Therapy page contains resources and guidance for teachers exploring specialisation.
Meditation
Meditation in Australia has narrowed, eight-week stress courses and a mental-health-first-aid version of something vast, drawing on a small part of an inheritance running back thousands of years. Our dedicated meditation page helps new teachers take meditation into a class with more confidence.
4
New to Teaching
Custodianship
The strongest start in this tradition is rarely a job ad, it is a senior teacher asking a dedicated student to cover a class, or offering an apprenticeship. This great gift is reflected in the stories of the three panelists in our recent New to Teaching panel discussion. We started by broaching the topic of imposter syndrome, I volleyed an opening idea that it probably ought never fully clear, and Amelia put it plainly:
Yoga is vast and huge, and you’re never going to get it all right. You’re never going to know everything.
Amelia Disspain, Yoga Bellingen
Nicole says that her feelings of personal expertise move in waves over twenty-five years or more. Early on she wished she had her teacher’s five years of experience, and five years later, standing beside that same teacher, she wished she had ten, and so on. The wish is never satisfied. One of her early teachers, the baron of power yoga, Mr Baptiste, told her there will always be someone in your class with something to learn from you, even when you do not feel you know enough. Stuart thinks of it as custodianship rather than mastery:
We’re a custodian of something that’s been a living system for five thousand years. We don’t have to be a living, walking ChatGPT yoga PDF.
Stuart Harrison, Western Wellness
Teachers are encouraged to receive questions, take them away and read up, study, and return to the student better equipped, rather than try and answer everything on the spot. And when praise comes, Josh relates his perennial instruction to apprentices to “be polite and say thank you but let it pass by, because it is yoga that made them so happy, and you are simply, hopefully, a competent transmitter”.
Nicole said she sees too many junior teachers let their own practice slide, especially in the early years. They tell her “they practise when they teach”, but teaching is not practising. She calls it the surest road to burnout, and urges them to protect their own practice first.
Panellists Amelia Disspain, Yoga Bellingen | Stuart Harrison, Western Wellness | Nicole Walsh, InYoga
Uncovered Opportunities
A new teacher learns the craft in gyms, community halls, aged care and corporate classes. Stuart calls the gym one of the best classrooms a young teacher can find, different bodies with different issues every week, and a young teacher learns to modify and adjust quickly. Amelia teaches in gyms and loves it.
I used to tell people that the real yoga happens in gyms, suburban gyms especially, there’s fewer options and people attend in good faith, despite the noise from the guys lifting weights.
Josh Pryor
Nicole tells her graduates to pick a couple of places they would like to teach, a gym, a studio, any other location, and go there, take a class, meet the owner or the manager, and be part of the fabric, because teaching yoga is a practice of being in relationship. Enthusiastic new teachers need to be visible. Amelia looks for the same thing in the teachers she takes on, someone who comes in and sticks around, rather than a text message that reads “got any work”.
I have received thousands of CVs and resumes over the years, and I have not employed one person from a CV resume.
Nicole Walsh, InYoga
Amelia also widened what she could offer. She came to Bellingen devoted to one style, found it served many people and not all of them, and trained in yoga therapy so she could meet the community where it was. That phrase, “meet the community where they are”, comes from her teachers, the Mohans.
5
Modelling Leadership
Continuing Professional Development is one of those things we agree to participate in at all levels.
Our revered teachers urge us to do so, to come back to the source, to study, it takes many forms but is a universal understanding. You must practice yoga, including the non-physical aspects, with dedication and persistence, unshaken even by the demands of teaching. Decades ago when lineage was the main avenue, CPD was delivered by the school or lineage. Now, with so much diversity in journeys, Yoga Australia often acts in that place, offering a well-rounded taxonomy for teachers to follow. Conveniently, it extends to the professional sphere as well, the latest science and legal parameters. Private health affirms this as well.
Yoga Australia strives to make CPD simple. We will always endorse CPD in the form of independent education, including: short courses and mentoring, self study and reflection. Our platform is constantly improved, the member dashboard, and the wonderful selection of CPD short courses, many of them free for members and the others quite affordable.
Teachers, please take your CPD seriously. We make a commitment on your behalf to insurers, governments, courts of law, and it behoves us to respect this baseline obligation.
As we continue improving the process and tools, your suggestions are always welcome.
A fitting conclusion to this year’s State of Yoga report is to highlight dearly departed Ailsa Gartenstein, who taught across Brisbane for half a century and passed away late in 2025 at age 92. She came to yoga through Roma Blair and ran her classes to a high standard. Crucially, Ailsa modelled the import of continuing education by participating her entire life, often the oldest person at educational events, engaging in constant practice and constant learning.
This is our path, and it is bliss.
Continuing professional development
Short course catalogue
63 short courses on the CPD platform, many free for members
Every word and every action
“Forget any goal… leave it. Being a leader, that is. Forget to identify ourself to anything, because the only fact of identification will bring a goal. Being nobody.”
Andre Riehl
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