State of Yoga 2026
Yoga Today · Industry insights
State of Yoga 2026
Josh Pryor·19 June 2026
One
Clearing the Air
In 2026 the yoga market is smaller than it was five or ten years ago, and more serious with it, which is exciting in its own way. Private health is back, the big news of the last couple of years, and it lifts the standing of senior teachers a good deal closer to physiotherapy. Most of the funds are yet to release the product suites that admit yoga as a rebatable treatment, and the hard work is already done, a year of negotiations and back-end systems with the insurers and companies like Medibank, so it unfolds over another year or two.
Set that against the boom of the 2000s and the 2010s. That was the making of a new kind of market, a gym workout joined to mental health and wellness and relaxation in a way that had not existed before, premium priced and sometimes run on a donation model. Fifteen good years, and then the pandemic burst the bubble, which it probably needed to do anyway. A couple of years of stagnation and lockdowns followed, with online stepping in as a stand-in for the room, to varying success.
So 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, about a fifteen-year turn each time. Right now we are on the edge of the next phase, which is the exciting part, and the question I put to the panel for Yoga Week, three teachers who built careers across thirty years, was where to from here, and what a new teacher can do to hold respect for the tradition and for themselves alongside the innovation that always comes.
Private health coming back has raised the floor, and accreditation keeps it there. Registration gives a teacher standing as yoga moves closer to allied health, and it lets a fund tell a registered teacher apart from someone who did a weekend course.
The asks are small and practical. Show the Yoga Australia member badge where members can see it, use the protected terms accurately, and keep an eye on the AQF claims that creep into course names and promotion. None of it is glamorous, and all of it is what the private-health win was built on.
Two
Sustainability
Pay is where the gloss comes off, and the industry numbers tell the same story the teachers do. Australian Pilates and yoga studios turned over about 630 million dollars in 2025, down close to nine per cent a year since the 2019 peak, while the number of studios kept climbing past 3,700. More operators are splitting a smaller pie, and a new teacher’s rate sits at the thin end of that.
The squeeze comes from outside the industry too. Across the same decade the cost of living outran wages, and a yoga teacher’s rate has tended to sit under even that wage line.
The first lesson ___ was about the body, not the bank. ___ taught fifteen classes a week for six months to keep ___ studio open, and it utterly destroyed ___ body. So the advice ___ was the same, build slowly.
When the class builds, add another, and drop the other work as appropriate, rather than finishing a training, quitting the job, hiring a hall, and discovering resentment and a stack of bills inside a year. The glamour wears off fast once the job is cleaning toilets and hauling props, and what is left is the customer, and the teacher meets what the room in front of them needs.
Start with one class of your own, make it fit into your life.Amelia Disspain, Yoga Bellingen
A full-time living almost never comes from classes alone. It comes from diversifying or picking a niche, and ___ had the examples to prove it, a graduate who paired a 200-hour training with early-childhood teaching and now builds yoga programs for childcare centres, teachers who run trainings, others who keep a parallel career and teach a few classes a week and are all the better in the room for living a normal working life. Most yoga teachers ___ know are not full-time yoga teachers, and that is a feature of the job rather than a failure in it.
One change comes this year that every studio owner should diarise. The free clearing house most small studios use to pay super closes on 1 July 2026, with Payday Super commencing around the same time, so super is paid on every payday rather than each quarter. The detail sits in the resource below.
Resource
Super, contractors and the 2026 changes
Paying super, the contractor question, the clearing house closing on 1 July 2026, and Payday Super commencing around the same time.
Super for yoga teachers →Three
Emerging Paths
The market has split into two directions.
Precision and therapy is one. Strength work, functional mobility, the yoga therapy credential, the private health rebates, the clinical and allied-health rooms, corporate wellness with a return attached. It asks for skills most 200-hour trainings never teach, and it suits the teacher who wants the clinical edge.
Breath and the spiritual turn is the other. Breathwork, sound, trauma-informed and somatic work, nervous-system regulation, the slow practices the boom stripped out and the market is asking for again. It suits the teacher drawn to depth over intensity.
Both are opening at once, and a new teacher does well to pick the one that fits and build toward it.
Pathway
Breathwork
The dedicated prāṇāyāma and breathwork page, with resources launching now.
Breathwork →Pathway
Meditation
A meditation page so new teachers can take meditation into a class with more confidence.
Meditation →Pathway
Yoga therapy
The yoga therapy credential and the community behind it, pushed hard this year off recent wins.
Yoga therapy →Four
Custodianship
The strongest start in this tradition is rarely a job ad, it is a senior teacher noticing a new teacher and asking them to cover a class, or offering an apprenticeship, the same gift I was given in Newcastle, and it is how all three of the panel came up.
The impostor feeling never fully clears, and that may be the point. Amelia put the size of 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 has watched it move in waves over twenty-five years. Early on she wished she had her teacher’s five years of experience, and five years on, standing beside that same teacher who now had ten, she wished she had ten, and the wish is never satisfied. One of her early teachers, the power-yoga man Baron Baptiste, told her there will always be someone in the room with something to learn from you even when you do not feel you know enough, and that line kept her going. Stuart calls it 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
A teacher can take a question away, do the reading, and come back to the student with it, rather than answer everything on the spot. And when the praise comes, and it will, Nicole tells her apprentices to say thank you and let it pass through, because it is yoga rather than them, and the teacher is the vessel that brings it into the room.
Nicole sees too many teachers a year or two in who have let their own practice slide, who say they practise when they teach, and teaching is not practising. She calls it the surest road to burnout, and tells them to protect their own practice first.
Five
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.Josh Pryor
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
What she tells her graduates is 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. A new teacher needs to be front of mind. Amelia looks for the same thing in the teachers she takes on, someone who comes in and sticks around, rather than a message that reads “got any work” with no name on it.
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.
Six
Modelling Leadership
Ailsa Gartenstein taught across Brisbane for half a century and kept doing CPD into her seventies, often the oldest in the room at a conference and glad to be there, taking what she learned back to her students. She came to yoga through Roma Blair and ran her own school to high standards. She was, as her student Suzanne put it, a big CPD fan who led by example. She died in November 2025 at ninety-two.
