The 70/30 Rule: Yoga Industry Economics
A senior teacher contacted us recently asking about workshop revenue splits. She’d been invited to run a weekend intensive at a studio with new owners, lovely people warmly supportive of her teaching, and she assumed the split she’d always known. Seventy percent to her as the guest teacher, thirty to the studio for the space, the students, and the marketing that got them through the door.
The studio offered fifty-fifty.
Both parties were acting in good faith and had different ideas about what convention existed in their part of the country. The teacher rang around her city. Most colleagues said seventy-thirty was universal, and a few mentioned sixty-forty cropping up now and then.
When international teachers visit Australia some studios take no cut at all, covering costs and letting the visitor keep the rest, because somebody who has flown halfway around the world to build an audience in a country that isn’t home shoulders most of the risk and everyone in the room knows it. Yoga Australia runs its own fifty-fifty when it publishes CPD short courses, half to the contributing Level 3 teacher and half back into the not-for-profit to keep the lights on. Different splits, different reasons, each one openly arrived at.
A studio we know hit a thin patch a few years back and needed cash flow, and they were open about it. They sat their regular guest teachers down and said look, we need to move to sixty-forty for a while, we’re stretched. The teachers understood, because they knew the studio’s rent kept arriving every month regardless of how the quarter had felt, and when the studio’s circumstances changed the split changed with them. Nobody had to be talked into anything.
Sometimes the split favours the teacher, sometimes the studio, and it moves because it tracks something real underneath, which is who brought what to the room and what each side needs to make the thing work. The industry has always run on this kind of flexibility and it is one of the things that makes the community what it is. The convention survives as long as the exchange behind it stays candid.
New owners don’t inherit the unwritten agreements that came before them. A teacher who moves cities finds that “standard” means one thing in Melbourne and another in Perth. People remember the same conversation differently, in perfectly good faith, and a year on the difference is suddenly money. Most teachers who’ve been at it a while know a story or two, a tenancy cancelled over a personality clash, super that never got paid, a workshop that ran at a loss because nobody quite nailed down who was covering the shortfall.
So write it down. A confirmation email does the job. A shared spreadsheet both parties can see does the job. Something like Punchpass tracks the agreement as it runs, and where the arrangement grows heavier or more complex, Studio Legal sells affordable templates that cover the standard scenarios and save the bespoke legal work for when partnerships grow properly involved. The form barely signifies. What counts is that the arrangement got named while everyone was clear, and the writing is only there so both of you remember exactly what you shook hands on, together, before anything had a chance to drift.
A teacher rings up and asks, a studio answers plainly, and if circumstances shift later the two of them talk about it again. That is the whole mechanism, and the seventy-thirty figure is shorthand for an exchange both sides keep wanting to repeat.
For all your legal needs Yoga Australia recommends Studio Legal. A boutique law firm with a suite of templates and policies designed specifically for yoga teachers.
