Free tool
Can your school string carry this week
Compare the horse hours your schedule demands with the hours your sound horses can honestly give before anyone gets sour.
Free tool, no sign up
What one lesson slot really earns you
Put in the price, the group size, the instructor rate and the cost of the horses in that hour, and see what the slot leaves behind.
A group lesson looks like straightforward money until you count what stands behind it. The instructor is paid for the hour. Four horses were caught, tacked, worked and put away, and each of them costs feed, hay, farrier, vet, bedding and tack wear whether they teach or not. The arena, the insurance, the fuel for the drag and the office time all sit against that hour too.
This calculator spreads those costs onto one teaching hour so you can see the margin on a single slot and the number of riders it takes to break even. It also takes out the riders who cancel late and are not charged, because that is where most lesson barns quietly lose the difference between a decent month and a thin one.
Your result
Cash collected for the slot
$192
What actually lands in the till once late cancellations are taken out.
Cost to run the slot
$121
Horses are counted as booked, because they were held for the slot either way.
Margin left on the slot
$72
What the teaching hour leaves before your own labor and any note on the property.
Riders needed to break even
1.5
How many paying riders the slot has to hold before it stops losing money.
Run it once for your beginner group and once for a private lesson, because the two rarely earn what owners assume they do.
Getting the horse cost per working hour right
Take everything one school horse costs you in a year: hay and grain, farrier every six weeks, routine vet and dentistry, bedding, supplements, his share of pasture upkeep and the tack he wears out. Then divide by the hours he actually works in a year, not by the hours you hoped for. A horse teaching ten hours a week for forty six weeks is around four hundred and sixty hours.
Owners are usually surprised by two things. The first is that a lightly used horse costs a great deal per working hour, which is an argument for a smaller, busier string within safe limits rather than a large idle one. The second is that pushing hours up to lower the cost per hour is exactly how strings get burned through in three years.
What the break even number is telling you
The break even rider count is the honest floor of your group lesson. If it comes out at two and a half riders and your groups average three, you are running a program with almost no cushion for a lame horse, a canceled week of weather or an instructor calling in sick.
Two levers move it. Raising the lesson price moves it fastest, and most lesson barns are priced under what their market bears because the owner set the number years ago. Lowering horse cost per hour by keeping the string sensibly busy moves it too, but only up to each horse's ceiling, which is a limit you should not trade away for margin.
Questions about this calculator
Should I count my own teaching hours as instructor pay?
Yes, at the rate you would have to pay someone to replace you. If you leave your own hours out, every slot looks profitable and you will never see that the schedule only works because you teach twenty five hours a week for nothing. Owners who do this often discover which lesson types are worth keeping.
Where do lesson packages fit in this?
Use the effective per lesson price after any package discount, not the list price of a single lesson. If a ten lesson package works out to less per hour, that lower number is what the slot is actually earning. Run it both ways to see what the discount is really costing you across a season.
My groups are different sizes every week. What do I enter?
Enter your realistic average over the last two months rather than the size you sell. Then run it again at your worst common case, usually a group of two on a rainy Tuesday. If the worst case is deeply negative, that lesson type needs a minimum rider count or a different price.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The school horse work card
One page per horse that tells any instructor in your barn what he does, who can ride him, how much he works and when to stop.
Make that horse hour ceiling hold in July
The figure on this screen is true until the next makeup lesson goes up on the whiteboard. In BarnBooked the ceiling you just used becomes the rule that declines the ninth hour for that horse, per animal, at ten at night with nobody in the office. Send your inputs over and we will walk them through a live week so you can see where this schedule is borrowing hours.