I'm curious to know what the varying prices of group and private lessons are. My daughter's lessons (she was 5 when she started riding, were £12 for an hours group lesson - when she turned 6, they went up to £14 an hour - same pony, same instructor - same everything! She had one private 1/2 hour for £18 and the following week the price went up to £20 for half an hour!! I have since moved her to another school where the lessons are £12 for an hour (group). It seems ludicrous to me that some schools can charge so much. I pay £20 for an adult hour private - how does this compare with other schools?
Cost of Lessons
- Thread starter Gilly
- Start date
Price
I dont know how these compare, but standard price for us is $25-30 for private and about $20 for group
I dont know how these compare, but standard price for us is $25-30 for private and about $20 for group
The lessons I take cost £26 per hour, private on own horse. They are worth every penny. In practice, I usually share a lesson with my daughter, which is still very good and only half the price! I have learnt more with these lessons than in any others I have ever had.
My prices are probably useless since I'm in the US, but here goes...The stable I ma at now only gives private lessons, no group ones. It is $15/half hour and $25/hour this is a saddleseat barn, riding on actual show horses, not school plods, and the instruction is wonderful. The barn I first took lessons at was a jumper barn with $20 hour group lessons and $30 hour private, and $15 half hour group and $25 half hour private. I stopped going there once I got my own horses, and then didn't go back because it was too expensive.
Allie
Allie
Now I think the prices I pay for riding are expensive. It costs £16 for a group lesson, which can have anything up to about 10 people in it, and the same goes for a hack. However, private lessons cost £22 for half an hour.
As a yard owner, I can tell you that the cost of running premises is enormous, so much so that if I wasn't too soft to part with my horses, under no circumstances would I run my own yard. It would be far more profitable to run my courses/clinics from other people's yards and let them deal with the overheads!
It is not just the day to day running costs of feed/shoeing etc, it is the huge rates that many premises face, the minimum wage, vets fees (my vets fees alone last year were around £4500), insurance costs which have risen drastically due to more claims being made as people are more aware of litigation these days. Buildings and land are like a bottomelss pit, swallowing money at the rate of knots. I have spent thousands just converting our farm into a stable yard. If you did not know the place beforehand, although it is a very tidy and workable yard here, it is not yet prettied up to make it look like a smart stable yard, and so you probably wouldn't even know how much had been spent, all of which had to be paid back to the bank.
I have not even been able to provide for my future with a decent pension because every penny I earn still goes straight back into the yard.
Sorry to whinge, but running a riding school as I did for 25 years, (and which I would never do again) is an often thankless task. On a hot summers day, we would get loads of cancellations at the last minute as families headed off to the beach and couldn't stay behind for the one child that wanted to ride.They didn't think of the fact that I still had to pay the bills whatever. Oh we had all sorts of excuses, but it wasn't until I had to insist that any appointment broken within 24 hours of it had to be paid for. You should have heard the fuss!
Sorry to whinge, but I feel for the genuine riding schools that are struggling against considerabe odds to stay in business, often because they put the welfare of their horses first and don't try to cut costs.
Heather
It is not just the day to day running costs of feed/shoeing etc, it is the huge rates that many premises face, the minimum wage, vets fees (my vets fees alone last year were around £4500), insurance costs which have risen drastically due to more claims being made as people are more aware of litigation these days. Buildings and land are like a bottomelss pit, swallowing money at the rate of knots. I have spent thousands just converting our farm into a stable yard. If you did not know the place beforehand, although it is a very tidy and workable yard here, it is not yet prettied up to make it look like a smart stable yard, and so you probably wouldn't even know how much had been spent, all of which had to be paid back to the bank.
I have not even been able to provide for my future with a decent pension because every penny I earn still goes straight back into the yard.
Sorry to whinge, but running a riding school as I did for 25 years, (and which I would never do again) is an often thankless task. On a hot summers day, we would get loads of cancellations at the last minute as families headed off to the beach and couldn't stay behind for the one child that wanted to ride.They didn't think of the fact that I still had to pay the bills whatever. Oh we had all sorts of excuses, but it wasn't until I had to insist that any appointment broken within 24 hours of it had to be paid for. You should have heard the fuss!
Sorry to whinge, but I feel for the genuine riding schools that are struggling against considerabe odds to stay in business, often because they put the welfare of their horses first and don't try to cut costs.
Heather
Was going to add my twopence worth until I read Heather's posting, who has said it all really .... and an awful lot depends on where you live ... overheads in Surrey and probably everywhere in South East and London, are enormous, and I just don't know how riding schools in particular carry on! Lessons at livery yards are on the whole cheaper, for obvious reasons, but even there it's hard for owners to keep going and they rarely make a profit.
Sorry, but if you have a good instructor, I'm afraid I don't think £20.00 is expensive, for an hour. It's hard I know if you're on a tight budget, but although I've had my complaints about attitudes etc, they don't include cost of lessons for the reasons Heather outlined ....
Anne
Sorry, but if you have a good instructor, I'm afraid I don't think £20.00 is expensive, for an hour. It's hard I know if you're on a tight budget, but although I've had my complaints about attitudes etc, they don't include cost of lessons for the reasons Heather outlined ....
Anne
I agree with Anne about cost. Currently I pay £32 for a private lesson - sounds hugely expensive, but (a) it's in London (b) the horses at the school are excellent, all of them forward going and not one of them dead to the leg (c) I have a really good teacher who has spent a long time going over the basics of a good position and who is very happy to give me lunge lessons (which were brilliant). It would be a different matter if I was charged that much for a poor teacher, unhappy horses etc.
Hi,
I live in the Manchester area, and have been paying
£12.00 per hour for a group lesson. I am having private lessons now at a different school and I am paying £10.00 for 1/2 hour private
Beverley
I live in the Manchester area, and have been paying
£12.00 per hour for a group lesson. I am having private lessons now at a different school and I am paying £10.00 for 1/2 hour private
Beverley
costs
i live in a very different place far away from UK but i can convert the currency to pounds.
for me, 12 group lessons (1 stage) cost 242 pounds. that means 1 lesson is about 20 pounds. a priv. lesson costs 36 pounds.
but at my place here, there will be no refunds for absentees, regardless of any reason we have to give. but there WILL be refunds if the instructor is the one who cannot attend the lesson or if there a lesson happens to fall on a public holiday.
i live in a very different place far away from UK but i can convert the currency to pounds.
for me, 12 group lessons (1 stage) cost 242 pounds. that means 1 lesson is about 20 pounds. a priv. lesson costs 36 pounds.
but at my place here, there will be no refunds for absentees, regardless of any reason we have to give. but there WILL be refunds if the instructor is the one who cannot attend the lesson or if there a lesson happens to fall on a public holiday.
Thanks Heather, for putting things straight.
Just remember, you are not just paying for instruction and picking the brains of your instructor, but you are also hireing saddle and birdle, at a good place
you get the use of about £800.00 worth of equipment each time you ride. Then you get the horse, which, in most cases, is going to cost the best part of £1000.00 for the school to buy.
The facilities, if you ride in a covered school, this is one heck of an expense. (we are having one built at the moment)
So next time you finish your lesson take time to think of these things, also who is doing the grooming, tack cleaning, mucking out, pasture maintainence, fence repairs, paying feed bills, shoeing bills worming, vaccinations,tack repairs and replacement, I won't go on I'll get depressed.
We are lucky, if the weather turns hot we have the beach a short ride away, no excuses!!
Just remember, you are not just paying for instruction and picking the brains of your instructor, but you are also hireing saddle and birdle, at a good place
you get the use of about £800.00 worth of equipment each time you ride. Then you get the horse, which, in most cases, is going to cost the best part of £1000.00 for the school to buy.
The facilities, if you ride in a covered school, this is one heck of an expense. (we are having one built at the moment)
So next time you finish your lesson take time to think of these things, also who is doing the grooming, tack cleaning, mucking out, pasture maintainence, fence repairs, paying feed bills, shoeing bills worming, vaccinations,tack repairs and replacement, I won't go on I'll get depressed.
We are lucky, if the weather turns hot we have the beach a short ride away, no excuses!!
I pay sixteen pounds per lesson, or fifteen pounds if I buy a book of five vouchers. Each lesson is either an hour in a group or half an hour private. (I'm in Cambridge, which is quite an expensive part of the country for most things.) Although, since I'm on a tight budget I occasionally have to miss out on a lesson or two, I still think it's great value, as it compares really well with other forms of tuition where you might have to provide your own facilities, eg music lessons. I am a postgraduate student at a university and get paid eighteen pounds an hour for supervisions I do occasionally; for my fifteen pounds I not only get to use the school, tack, a well-trained horse, etc, but I also get the benefit of my instructor's wisdom which is far beyond anything I can offer my students!
(Not to mention that it's much cheaper than therapy, and vastly more helpful!)
Rebecca
(Not to mention that it's much cheaper than therapy, and vastly more helpful!)
Rebecca
Thank you all, for your replies - it makes interesting reading. Yes of course I do appreciate the overheads of running a yard - I think my main gripe here really was the rise from £12 - £14 from one week to the next when my daughter suddenly turned 6! £2 is very little but I couldn't see the reasoning behind it as everything else stayed the same (except my daughters age!)
When I was taking lessons over 13 years ago, I am sure the group hour lesson cost about 10 to 12 pounds.
I now attend a group adult lesson for an hour at a school near Glasgow and it costs 11 pounds!! Granted the training we get is a bit sloppy but I think it is terrific value for money! I am haivng my first private lesson tomorrow with this school, so I shall see how I get on with that and how much it costs.
For comparision, I have just attended a eq.cnetre near Ayr who charged 14 pounds an hour for a group lesson and the instruction was class A!
I now attend a group adult lesson for an hour at a school near Glasgow and it costs 11 pounds!! Granted the training we get is a bit sloppy but I think it is terrific value for money! I am haivng my first private lesson tomorrow with this school, so I shall see how I get on with that and how much it costs.
For comparision, I have just attended a eq.cnetre near Ayr who charged 14 pounds an hour for a group lesson and the instruction was class A!
I used to take lessons for a really low price and there would be many riders. It was dirty, flies were everywhere, the horses were dirty, and where ever you went it was dusty. My mom made me stop taking lessons there. She said it was unhealthy to take lesson in a bad enviornment because you breathe in all that dirt can cause some lung and breathing problems later. We went to look at some other palces until we found the "perfect" place it was $25 private or group what ever you choose. I took the private lesson. It was clean, the people were nice, and the place was spacious where you didn't have to have large group lessons in one area. After this I realized that it doesn't matter how much it cost but the enviornment you would like to be in.
I go to a really good school. An hours hack costs £8, an hours lesson (but it usually stretches to an hour and a half or two hours) is £10 with a maximum of six in the class and a private lesson is £15/hour. It's the best price I've found and I don't think it can be beaten.
Loobyloo ... I think I can beat you !! I live in Ireland and take riding lessons regularly. The yard I attend charge IR£7 for a group lesson, which at the current Sterling/Irish Punt exchange rate is just over £5 sterling. We have good indoor and outdoor facilities and the instructors are great, but my one gripe is that quite often there can be up to 10 in a group, so individual attention is at a minimum then.
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