How Much to Charge for Yoga Classes: Drop-In, Packs and Memberships

Start from what a class costs, then price each product so the price per visit falls as commitment rises. In the invented model below, an $88 class breaks even at six $18 drop-ins, a $145 ten-pack earns $14.50 a visit, and a $79 membership beats the ten-pack from six visits a month. ChatGPT can build the spreadsheet.

Pack breakage, the classes people pay for but never use, can make a pack look better than it is. When an assistant drafts the sheet, check its weeks-per-month and breakage formulas, because both are easy to get wrong.

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What one class costs, and how many students cover it

Price from cost, not from the studio down the road. A class has costs that stay the same whether three people turn up or fifteen, so list them per class. This is a made-up teacher renting a room for a 60-minute class, ten classes a week.

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If you own the studio and teach, still charge the class for the teacher line. Otherwise the studio quietly runs on unpaid labour, and every price below looks better than it is.

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Card fees come out of takings rather than costs. Assume 3% (check your own processor's rate), so the class must take $88.08 ÷ 0.97 = $90.80. How many students that means depends on what each one pays on average. Divide by the revenue per student, not by the headline price.

Round up every time: 5.04 students means six, because five leaves you short. And read the table against your room. With 16 mats, a break-even of ten students at $10 each means the class is 63% full before it earns anything, and an average of nine would lose money.

When one class costs more than the rest

Not every class has the same cost. Take a 90-minute restorative workshop with a visiting teacher: teacher fee $75, room $45, cleaning $4, insurance $3, software share $2.08 and marketing $6. That is $135.08 a class, so takings must reach $139.26 after card fees. With 12 mats, ten students means $13.93 each, eight means $17.41 and six means $23.21.

At the $18 drop-in, then, the workshop needs eight students (7.74 rounds up), and a class that cannot reliably reach eight needs a higher price. There are three honest ways to handle it. Charge $24 at the door, which needs six students. Count it as two credits on a pack, which makes it $29 a head on a ten-pack and needs five. And keep it out of the unlimited membership, or ask members for a surcharge, because $79 a month was never priced to cover a class that costs $135. Whatever you choose, write it in the terms: unlimited should mean unlimited regular classes.

A price ladder where each product wins for a different student

Four products make a ladder: a drop-in at $18, a five-pack at $80 that expires after 8 weeks, a ten-pack at $145 that expires after 12 weeks, and unlimited classes at $79 a month. Per class that is $18, $16 and $14.50, with the membership depending on how often someone comes. The test of a ladder is simple: for every frequency, one product should be clearly the cheapest, and the cheapest one should change as people come more often.

The pack columns assume the student uses every class, which the next section questions. Even so, the crossover points are clear. The membership beats drop-ins from the fifth visit in a month ($79 ÷ $18 = 4.4), the five-pack from the fifth ($79 ÷ $16 = 4.9) and the ten-pack from the sixth ($79 ÷ $14.50 = 5.4). So in this ladder, a student who comes weekly (about 4.3 visits a month) does better on the ten-pack, and one who comes twice a week does better on the membership.

That is a decision, not an accident. If you want weekly regulars on a recurring payment, the membership has to sit near $63, which is 4.3 visits at $14.50. Then a twice-weekly member making 8 visits a month yields $7.88 a visit to you, so you are trading predictable income for revenue per visit. Pick which student the membership is for before you pick the number. Software that holds packs, expiry dates and recurring plans is covered in the yoga studio software checklist, and a sister tutorial models session packs for a personal trainer with the same logic.

The tempting way to move weekly regulars onto memberships is a price cut. At $59 the membership's crossover with the ten-pack falls to 4.1 visits a month, so weekly regulars now do better as members. What that costs depends on the whole weekly mix, so the sum comes after the mix below, and it is larger than the switchers alone suggest, because every existing member gets the cut too.

Pack breakage: the classes nobody attends

Breakage is the share of prepaid classes that expire unused. It depends on how fast the student attends compared with the expiry date, so you can estimate it: breakage = 1 − (classes used before expiry ÷ pack size), where classes used = the smaller of the pack size and visits per week × weeks to expiry.

The first row is the warning. A student who comes every other week uses six of ten classes and pays $145 for them: $24.17 a class, against $18 at the door. She would have saved $37 by buying drop-ins, and she will work that out. You earned more per class; you also taught someone that packs are a bad deal for her.

Treat breakage as a bonus, not a plan. Price the pack so it works at 0% breakage: $14.50 a visit comfortably clears the $10.09 per head you need at nine students ($90.80 ÷ 9). Then lapsed classes are a pleasant surprise, not income you budgeted. To keep goodwill, offer an extension for illness and tell buyers the expiry date in the receipt as well as the terms. Rules about expiry dates on prepaid passes and vouchers differ between places, so ask a qualified adviser what applies where you trade before you rely on lapsed classes at all.

Memberships: heavy users, empty mats and displaced drop-ins

A membership is a flat fee spread over however many visits the member makes, so your revenue per visit falls as they attend more.

The twelve-visit member earns $6.58 a visit, below the $10.09 per head you need at nine students. Is that a loss? Only if the mat could have been used by someone else. The class costs $88.08 whether or not that member comes, so on a half-empty class a member's visit costs you roughly the card fee. On a class that is already full it costs you the $18 drop-in who found no mat.

That gives a capacity rule. With 16 mats and an average attendance of nine, members are almost free income. For classes that regularly fill 13 or more of 16 mats (about 80% full), do something deliberate: raise the drop-in price for that slot, require members to book in advance, or cap the number of member bookings. Ten drop-in visits a week that turn into member visits cost you $58.46 a week, or $5.85 a class, so you should know when that exchange is happening and why.

Where a typical week's 90 visits come from

Now put the four products together. Ten classes a week averaging nine students make 90 visits, and the split below is how a small studio's bookings might fall. The split is invented; use your booking report for the real one. Pack visits use 10% breakage, and members average 6.5 visits a month.

That is $137.40 a class. After 3% card fees it is $133.28, and subtracting the $88.08 cost leaves $45.20 a class, $452 a week, about $1,959 a month (52 ÷ 12 weeks). Break-even attendance at this mix is 90.80 ÷ 15.27 = 5.95, so six students.

Four what-if sums show how fragile that profit is.

• Attendance falls to seven. Revenue per class drops to $106.87 and profit to $15.59, a 65% fall from losing two students.
• Attendance rises to twelve. Revenue is $183.20 and profit $89.63, so three extra students add $44 a class and nearly double the profit.
• Breakage is zero, not 10%. Pack revenue falls by $66 a week, $6.41 a class after fees, which is 14% of class profit. This is why it is dangerous to build a plan on lapsed classes.
• The membership drops to $59. A member visit now brings $9.08 instead of $12.15, so the 32 member visits lose $98 a week. If ten of the 30 ten-pack visits also switch to membership, each falls from $16.11 to $9.08, another $70. Revenue drops by about $169 a week, $16.88 a class, and profit per class slips from $45.20 to $28.83, down 36%, unless the cheaper price fills enough empty mats to make up the gap. Try a cut as a limited founding-member offer before you apply it to everyone.

The slot that loses money: read the timetable, not the average

An average of nine hides the classes that lose. The Tuesday 11:00 class might average five students and the Thursday 18:30 class thirteen. At the mix's $15.27 a visit, Tuesday takes $76.34, keeps $74.05 after card fees and costs $88.08, a loss of $14.03 a class and about $645 over 46 weeks. Thursday takes $198.47, keeps $192.52 and earns $104.44. The Thursday students are quietly paying for the Tuesday room.

Decide what to do with a loss-making slot before it has been losing for a year. Give it eight weeks and a stated target, such as seven students (profit $15.59 a class at that mix). During that time aim the intro offer at that slot, because empty mats cost almost nothing to fill. If it still misses, change its costs, with a cheaper room slot or a teacher fee that has a per-head element, or move the class to a time that works. Cancelling it is a legitimate answer, and a better one than letting a class drift.

Build the sheet with ChatGPT, then check three weak spots

All of this fits in a three-tab sheet, and ChatGPT can draft it from a description. Paste in costs and rules only; no student names. State your formulas in words, because an assistant that has to guess them will. This prompt names the breakage rule but leaves the weeks-per-month figure to the assistant, which is where the first slip comes from. The second comes from a rule that never said a pack cannot supply more classes than it holds.

Build a three-tab spreadsheet for my yoga classes. Use Google Sheets formulas and
show them next to the results.

Tab 1, Inputs (one labelled value per cell): teacher pay per class 45, room per class
30, cleaning and laundry 4, insurance and music licence share 3, booking software
90 a month, marketing per class 4, classes a week 10, card fee 3% of takings, mats 16.

Tab 2, Class economics: cost per class (software = monthly fee / classes a month);
break-even takings after card fees; students needed to break even at revenue per
student of 18, 15, 12 and 10.

Tab 3, Offers: drop-in 18; five-pack 80, expires after 8 weeks; ten-pack 145, expires
after 12 weeks; membership 79 a month. For visits a week of 0.5, 0.75, 1, 1.5 and 2,
show breakage and price per attended class for each pack, and price per visit for
the membership.

Breakage = 1 - classes used / pack size. List every assumption you made that I did
not give you.

A first answer might read like this (illustrative; the exact layout will differ).

Tab 2  Class economics
   Cost per class        88.25   (software = 90 / (10 x 4))
   Break-even takings    90.98
   Students needed at 18 / 15 / 12 / 10:  5.05 / 6.07 / 7.58 / 9.10

Tab 3  Ten-pack, 12 weeks
   0.5 a week    breakage  40%   $24.17 per attended class
   0.75 a week   breakage  10%   $16.11
   1 a week      breakage -20%   $12.08
   1.5 a week    breakage -80%   $8.06
   Membership at 1.5 visits a week: 79 / (1.5 x 4) = $13.17

Assumptions
   - Used 4 weeks per month for monthly conversions
   - Classes used = visits per week x expiry weeks (no limit applied)

The assumptions list gives away both slips, and two of the numbers look wrong on sight: a negative breakage rate cannot be right. Fix three things before you trust the sheet.

• Weeks per month is 52 ÷ 12 = 4.33, not 4. The cost per class moves by only 17 cents, but the membership per-visit figure at 1.5 visits a week is really $12.15, not $13.17, and a monthly profit built on four weeks understates it by 8% ($1,808 against $1,959).
• Cap the classes used at the pack size. A pack of ten cannot supply twelve classes. The corrected formula takes the smaller of the pack size and visits per week × expiry weeks, and it clears the negative breakage at once.
• Round students up. 5.05 students means six. Add a ROUNDUP to the break-even rows so the sheet never shows a fraction of a person.

Classes used    =MIN(pack_size, visits_per_week * expiry_weeks)
Breakage        =1 - Classes_used / pack_size
Revenue/class   =pack_price / Classes_used
Member/visit    =79 / (visits_per_week * 52/12)
Students needed =ROUNDUP(break_even_takings / revenue_per_student, 0)

If you would rather have the assistant work inside the sheet, OpenAI's help page lists its ChatGPT add-in for Excel and Google Sheets as available on every plan from Free upward, with limited use on Free and Go. The same page says to review formulas, calculations and changed cells before relying on them, and the checks above are exactly that. For prompts that stay in Excel, the ChatGPT for Excel guide is the longer read.

Intro offers: what a $25 trial costs and what it must earn

An intro offer of three classes for $25, for new students and valid for 14 days, works out at $8.33 a class, well below your break-even per head, so decide what it has to achieve. If the mats would otherwise be empty, a trial student costs you about the 75 cents in card fees, and everything else is a chance to sell. If one in four buys a ten-pack, each trial student is worth $25 + 0.25 × $145 = $61.25 in expected revenue.

The risk is displacement. A trial student in a nearly full class takes a mat from someone paying $18 or more. A simple rule: sell the intro offer only for classes that average under 11 of 16 mats, about 70% full. For the follow-up messages and offers that turn a trial into a membership, the intro-offer tutorial for Pilates studios has examples that carry over to yoga.

The rate card, and what to watch for eight weeks

Put the decisions on one card that students and your booking software can both use.

Late cancellations and no-shows need their own line, because a pack class that is booked and not attended has to be either forfeited or returned. The Pilates late-cancel wording tutorial shows how studios phrase that in terms students will accept.

Then watch five numbers for eight weeks before touching a price. Each has a plan and an alarm.

Once a month, export the booking report with student names removed, paste it into your assistant and ask it to calculate those five numbers and flag any alarm. It is only doing arithmetic on figures you can verify, and you still decide what to change. When you do change a price, move the drop-in first: it is the anchor every other product is compared with, and it touches the fewest regulars, because most of your visits come through packs and memberships.

Questions teachers ask about class prices

Should packs expire, and for how long?

Yes, with a date you can defend, because open-ended packs leave you owing classes indefinitely. Set the expiry from the pace of a typical buyer: 12 weeks suits a ten-pack bought by a weekly student. Allow a freeze for illness, and check which expiry rules apply where you trade before you rely on lapsed classes as income.

What should a membership freeze cost?

Allow freezes for set reasons such as illness or travel, free for a few weeks, and charge a small fee for longer ones. A freeze with no limit and no fee turns the membership into a free option on your room. State the number of freezes per year, how much notice you need, and what happens to the billing date.

Do specialist classes need their own prices?

Price a class by what it costs, not by its name. A small-group or specialist class with higher teacher pay has its own break-even, so give it its own drop-in price or a surcharge on packs and memberships. Work it out with the same sheet and the same card-fee assumption.

Further reads

• Can AI Write a Gym Membership Freeze Policy? What to Check First — What to check before writing freeze and cancellation terms.
• Can AI Write a Yoga Studio Policy? Injury and Refund Wording to Verify — Injury and refund wording to verify before publishing.
• Yoga Retreat Business Plan: Budget, Pricing and Break-Even With AI — Break-even sums for a retreat rather than a weekly class.
• What Is AI Churn Prediction and Can a Small Gym Use It? — Spot members drifting away before they cancel.
• Gym Membership Price Increase Letter: Draft and Test It With AI — Draft the letter when your prices rise.
• AI Receptionist for a One-Room Yoga Studio: Cost and Set-Up — Minute-based and flat plans costed for 60 calls a month, plus a step-by-step set-up and scripted trial-class and drop-in answers.
• Car Wash Pricing Strategy: Can AI Set Your Tiers and Memberships? — Cost per wash, a three-tier ladder, a membership break-even sheet and price tests, with AI building the sheets and you keeping the final say on every price.
• Yoga Class Descriptions: Level Guides Written Clearly With AI — How a yoga studio can define level, pace and heat once, then use AI to rewrite eight class descriptions and a timetable so beginners book the right class.
• Yoga Class Plan Template: A Term of Themed Classes With AI — A one-page weekly template, a ten-week term arc and the review checks that catch what AI-drafted sequences get wrong, for studio owners and teachers.
• Yoga Workshop Ideas: Plan, Price and Promote a Weekend With AI — A worked weekend workshop: the break-even ticket count, three price tiers, a fact sheet, three emails, five posts and a weekly sales check for studio owners.
• Artificial Intelligence for Yoga Instructors: Class Plans and Notes — A self-employed teacher's workflow: sequence prompts with a safety check, coded student notes, health-data rules and class descriptions that promise no results.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: OpenAI help article on ChatGPT for Excel and Google Sheets (checked 28 October 2026). All prices, costs and attendance figures are invented for illustration.