How to price Pilates privates, duets, groups and mat classes
Most teachers set their prices by checking what the studio down the road charges and knocking a pound off. It is understandable, and it is usually wrong. That studio has different rent, different machines, different teachers and a different idea of what it needs to earn. Its prices tell you what the local market will bear. They tell you nothing about what your own hour costs.
A better method starts from the inside. Work out what an hour of your room costs before anyone is paid, add what the teacher earns for that hour, and only then decide what each person in the room should pay. Every figure below is illustrative, for an invented small studio, to show the arithmetic. Your numbers will differ, sometimes a lot, and London rents can change them out of all recognition.
Step one: the cost of an hour in the room
Start with everything you pay each month whether or not anyone books.
| Monthly fixed cost (illustrative) | £ |
|---|---|
| Rent and service charge | 1,800 |
| Business rates, utilities and insurance | 400 |
| Booking software, music licence, cleaning and laundry | 200 |
| Equipment amortisation (four reformers and small kit, £18,000 over five years) | 300 |
| Total | 2,700 |
Amortisation is the line people leave out. Machines wear: springs need replacing on a schedule, straps fray, upholstery splits, and one day the whole reformer goes. Spreading the purchase price over a working life, here five years, puts that cost into every session instead of letting it ambush you later. Our guide to what makes good Pilates apparatus covers what wears and when.
Now divide by the hours you actually sell, not the hours the door is open. If the room is taught in for about 28 hours a week, roughly 120 hours a month, each hour costs £22.50 before a teacher is paid. At 20 hours a week, around 87 a month, the same costs come to about £31 an hour. That is why filling quiet slots often does more for a studio than raising prices. An off-peak rate a pound or two below the evening price, for mid-morning or early afternoon classes, is one of the few discounts that pays for itself, because an hour that would otherwise sit empty still costs the full £22.50.
Step two: teacher pay
If you employ or contract teachers, the usual models are a flat fee per class, a share of the fee (more common for privates), or a base fee plus a little extra per head. For the worked example, assume £35 for a private (half of a £70 fee), £38 for a duet and £32 for any group or mat class.
If you are the owner and the teacher, put your own pay in anyway. Otherwise what looks like profit is really your wage, and you will find out the hard way when you try to hire a second teacher at the same prices. Ruth Abernethy's piece on teaching as a second career looks at what the money is like in the early years, and it is worth reading alongside your spreadsheet.
Step three: the worked table
Card and booking fees vary by provider; 2.5 percent is used here as a round illustrative figure.
| Format (illustrative) | Places | Average attendance | Price per person | Income | Room cost | Teacher pay | Fees at 2.5% | Left over |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Private | 1 | 1 | £70 | £70.00 | £22.50 | £35.00 | £1.75 | £10.75 |
| Duet | 2 | 2 | £45 | £90.00 | £22.50 | £38.00 | £2.25 | £27.25 |
| Small reformer group | 4 | 3 | £28 | £84.00 | £22.50 | £32.00 | £2.10 | £27.40 |
| Mat class | 10 | 8 | £13 | £104.00 | £22.50 | £32.00 | £2.60 | £46.90 |
A few things jump out. The private is the most valuable session for the teacher and the least valuable for the studio. That is fine if the teacher is you, and a problem if you are paying someone else and filling the diary with privates.
The duet is the quiet winner. Two people booking together, often friends or a couple, bring in more than a private for only a little more teacher pay, and they may cancel less, since each has someone counting on them. Price it so each person saves noticeably on a private while the pair pays clearly more than one private does: here, £45 each against £70.
The small group is fragile. Two people in a four-person reformer class bring in £56, which after fees covers the room and the teacher by about ten pence. The third person is the whole margin, and an empty fourth place is £28 that never comes back.
The mat class looks best on paper because each extra person adds nearly the full price, about £12.68 after fees. It also depends most on attendance. With five people instead of eight, the same class leaves under £9.
And 'left over' is not profit. It has to pay for the hours of admin, marketing and cleaning nobody books, the repairs the amortisation line did not foresee, a reserve for a bad month, and tax. If the studio is registered for VAT, a sixth of every VAT-inclusive price goes straight to HMRC, which changes every row above; talk to an accountant well before you approach the registration threshold.
Packs and memberships
Packs reward commitment and bring cash in early. A ten-class mat pack at £120, or £12 a class, is a modest saving of about 8 percent on the £13 drop-in rate, enough to feel worthwhile without gutting the margin. Five privates for £325 works the same way. Put an expiry date on every pack, say three months for ten classes. An unused pack is money you have already spent for classes you still owe.
Memberships give you predictable income, and members usually attend more steadily than pack holders. A fixed allowance, such as four mat classes a month for £44 by direct debit, is easy to plan around. Unlimited memberships are riskier in a small room, because your most enthusiastic members take the places that pack holders would pay more for. If you offer unlimited, price it for the people who will actually use it most.
Intro offers that lead somewhere
The point of an introductory offer is to lower the barrier to a first visit, not to fill the timetable with people who never pay full price. A first mat class at £8, three classes within fourteen days for £30, or a first private at a reduced rate that includes a proper conversation about history and goals: all sensible. Limit each one to one per person, put a clear end date on it, and make sure it leads naturally to a pack or membership on the last visit.
Steep vouchers on deal sites are a different matter. My view is that they mostly bring people who are already shopping for the next deal, and they teach your local market that Pilates is worth half what you charge.
Six discounting traps
- Pricing privates below cost to win clients. A private at £50 in the example above loses money if the teacher still earns £35 for the hour, and raising it later feels like a betrayal to the people who booked at £50.
- Matching the big club down the road. A twelve-machine room spreads its rent over many more people per hour, and offers a different product, as I argued in what one teacher can see in a class of ten. Its price is not yours.
- Packs that never expire. They pile up as a debt of classes owed, and the people holding them tend to book your busiest slots.
- Stacking concessions. A student rate, an off-peak rate, a loyalty rate and a friend discount are each defensible. Combined on one booking, they can take a class below cost. Decide on a floor price and never go beneath it.
- Not charging late cancellations. Set a clear window, such as 24 hours for privates and 12 for groups, put it in writing and apply it kindly but consistently. An empty private still costs the room and, usually, the teacher.
- Never raising prices. Rent, insurance and springs go up whether you do or not. Small rises every year or two, announced a month or more ahead, with existing packs honoured at the old price, are far easier for clients than one large jump after five years of standing still.
Show your prices plainly
Put the full price list on your website and on the wall, including packs, memberships and the cancellation policy. Clients notice transparency, and a clear price list is one of the things our guide on how to find a good Pilates studio tells readers to look for.
Before you change a single number, write down three: what an hour of your room costs, what you pay the teacher in it, and how many people you actually average in each format. If a price does not cover the first two at that average, no offer will fix it.
