Some of Us Scrape the Floors, Others Can Afford the Apartment: A Hard Look at Yoga Alliance's Executive Pay
Gustave Caillebotte, Les raboteurs de parquet (The Floor Scrapers), 1875, oil on canvas, held at the Musée d'Orsay. Public domain
Have you ever walked into a bakery that made the French cookie, macarons, from scratch? Those tiny, flaky, chewy, delicious cookies usually run $4-$7 per cookie and are roughly the size of a small child's palm. The first time I looked at those cookies before buying one, I thought, "this cookie better be the best thing I have ever tasted for that price".
Anyways, according to Yoga Alliance’s own 990 tax forms, the Yoga Alliance CEO, Shannon Roche, earned approximately $519,881 across all sources in 2024.
Across all sources means $473,451 from Yoga Alliance directly, plus $8,730 from its sister Foundation and $37,700 in other compensation.
<pauses for dramatic effect, so you can read those last two sentences twice.>
<For real, go ahead, take a beat. I know I had to.>
Now I hate to yoga-teacher you, but once a co-regulator, always a co-regulator. If what you just read, which is a small part of what I am going to talk about today in this article, made you hot…go ahead now and drop your shoulders. Pause. Take some long, deep breaths. These techniques work. We know they work because we have taught them to our students and clients for ages.
Also, according to the Yoga Alliance 990s, the employee workforce of Yoga Alliance lost just over 25% of its staff from 2023 to 2024.
<Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to make you annoyed again.>
Go ahead and do that breath thing one more time.
Then we will talk about CEO salary, what a trade organization could (and should) do for you, and where we go from here. Because anger is a necessary, and sometimes useful, emotion if we know what we are looking at and what we want to do about it.
Let’s start at the very beginning. It is a very good place to start.
Here are the basics. The Yoga Alliance is a 501(C)6 organization. This means they are required, legally, to advocate for the interests of their members and their profession.
The mission of the organization is as follows:
“Our mission is to advocate for yoga, in its wholeness, and for all human beings in theirs.” (Yoga Alliance website)
This reads very differently from other trade organizations, for all of whom members are the entire reason for them to exist. When I was thinking of different trade organizations I could compare the Yoga Alliance to, I decided first to look at massage therapy. There is a lot of overlap in the yoga and massage therapy world, and it seems like they would be a good benchmark comparison. Maybe this is all normal behavior?
From the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) mission statement:
“To serve AMTA members while advancing the art, science and practice of massage therapy.”
And because I love to take a comparison of who is an outlier from the health and wellness space, but is adjacent in some capacity, here is the mission statement of the American Dental Association (ADA).
“The ADA's mission is to help dentists succeed and support the advancement of the health of the public."
When taking a moment to compare the three organizational mission statements, you might notice something that becomes incredibly obvious as you read them. The Yoga Alliance’s mission statement makes no mention of the members of the organization it claims to serve.
Now, as reasonable adults who are proud of the work we do in yoga, we have to agree there is no need to talk about member service 519,881 times…<blinks slowly>…but the once would be nice.
As I started combing through the 990s of the Yoga Alliance (EIN 38-3849013) and the Yoga Alliance Foundation (EIN 94-3079524) I also noticed another bit of an eyebrow-raising moment. The Yoga Alliance itself would seem to have been operating at a loss as an organization for the last three years. For the year of 2024, the last filing year for them, the Yoga Alliance operated at a -$241,449 loss. They also operated at a loss the previous two years: -$506,082 in 2022, -$678,516 in 2023. While I understand that the Yoga Alliance keeps much of its funds in its sister company ($17-18M in the Foundation vs. roughly $3.1M in Yoga Alliance itself) with overlapping board and oversight (that means that the folks who run one organization for the most part also run the other), it does seem interesting that an organization with a CEO who has such a large salary would be taking a loss.
But what do we know about the CEO of the Yoga Alliance, Shannon Roche? We know she is a longtime student of yoga, but her biography on the Yoga Alliance’s website does not state that she has ever had any experience working on the mat, like the rest of us. She has a job history of working in the non-profit sector, and was a part of the Obama administration’s economic policy team.
In my state of the profession report, Tick Tock, I talked about institutional abandonment and how that has impacted our work greatly. I believe that one of the greatest institutional abandonments lies in the hiring of someone who has never had our job to lead an organization designed to advocate for the people who have that job.
The number of times, from so many different people, I have heard the story that yoga professionals wouldn’t have the talent or experience to take the helm of an organization designed for their own advocacy—that is truly a large number. From implying that people from the yoga industry don’t really see the big picture, to saying the collective of yoga professionals are outright unintelligent, many people do not believe we have what is needed to take charge of our profession.
I do not now, nor have I ever, agreed with that assessment of us. While I agree an understanding of non-profit governance is helpful for this role, I personally know many yoga people who understand this.
What the CEO of the Yoga Alliance cannot have, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how skilled at nonprofit governance, is the understanding of what it really feels like to teach a 6 a.m. class for $30, to worry about liability insurance you can't afford, to wonder if this profession will ever pay you enough to stay in it. That's not a character flaw per se. It's just not her experience. And it's exactly the experience that this organization exists to advocate for.
What Have You Done For Me Lately?
When looking at trade organizations, it is helpful to ponder what a well-run member-forward organization could actually accomplish for the industry. So let me establish a system of measurement that we can apply to all organizations, not just the Yoga Alliance.
What could these organizations do for us, based on what other trade organizations do for their members? Let’s take a look.
[I want to take a moment to acknowledge that yoga is a worldwide profession, but many of the items I am about to list are especially important to United States citizens. We are not the only people teaching yoga, obviously, but the Yoga Alliance is founded in the US, and the organizations I am using as comparison benchmarks also live here too.]
1. Insurance.
There are two kinds of insurance policies I want to talk about in this section. The first is liability insurance. The AMTA (American Massage Therapy Association) provides liability insurance to its members, as do many other associations. This one benefit would be a logical offering that any organization that cared about the legal liability of its membership would consider.
There is also a precedent of AHPs, or Association Health Plans, that allow member organizations, unions, and chambers of commerce to provide healthcare insurance to their members. In the United States, specifically, access to healthcare for independent contractor workers is something critical to the vitality of the workforce. Gone should be the attitudes that yoga people should all be well from now until forever. Yoga practitioners get sick, just like people from other professions. It is in our workforce’s best interest to have accessible, reasonably priced insurance available.
2. Retirement.
We should not be required to work until we die. If in the course of our years teaching and sharing yoga, we decide we would like to continue working for as long as our bodies let us, that is one thing. It is another thing entirely to face the impending years of retirement without a savings account, access to a financial planner, and the grim reality that there is little to no savings to be had to cushion a hard year or a physically trying period.
Multiple Employer Plans (MPEs) exist in the trade association space, and allow for a trade organization to sponsor a 401K-like plan that people can buy into. So the legal structure for retirement plans already exists, is actively used by other trade associations, and is specifically designed to include sole-proprietor independent contractors — that is the exact structure most yoga teachers operate under. Nothing in Yoga Alliance's public materials suggests either was ever explored.
3. Financial Literacy for 1099 Contract Workers
Something that would be incredibly useful for most yoga teachers working across multiple venues and offering several different classes and workshops at multiple places would be some actual financial literacy around that classification.
Yoga studios can, and likely should be, classifying their workers as employees, but most yoga teachers are creating a patchwork of opportunities for their careers. A trade association could be providing advice about how to manage multiple employers, venue rental negotiations, and more. A growing number of states (22 as of 2026) now run retirement savings programs for workers without an employer-sponsored plan, and several explicitly allow self-employed and independent-contract workers to opt in voluntarily. A trade association could be helping members navigate which states offer this and how to set it up.
Tax filing, irregular income management, and the realities of self-employment could all be covered here as well.
4. General Business Support and Career Resources.
This is a very common slam dunk for trade associations. The AMTA provides this, as does the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA). American Yoga Council's (AYC) model, structured around business coaching and a revenue-share system for mentors, points toward something like this
5. A Specific Track for Studio Owner Support
There are a lot of financial realities that studio owners have to deal with that a general independent yoga teacher does not. Not only things like employee management, marketing for yoga studios, and client retention, but also things like the legal liabilities of running a studio, offering retreats, what to do when a former client harasses you or your business, and more.
The AYC does offer this for their members, taking the attitude that full studios create overall industry satisfaction for the workforce. We should note that the Yoga Alliance could have been doing this the whole time and didn’t.
Speaking of the Yoga Alliance, look back at these topics and see which one of these the Yoga Alliance does the best job of providing as a trade association, and what is lacking or absent. This is a system you can apply to any trade association you might consider getting involved in—but for the purposes of this article, what is the Yoga Alliance doing for YOU that would justify a $519,881 salary to the executive director? I can’t answer this question for you, but I can offer you the opportunity to look through the information and decide for yourself.
Advocacy, Part 2.
I want to take a moment to talk about the advocacy work that the Yoga Alliance has stated they are involved in. From their 2024-2030 strategic plan:
“We are committed to “advocating” for yoga in its wholeness, and working to dispel common misconceptions such as: yoga = asana; yoga is (solely) an exercise practice; yoga is only for people of certain body types, races, ethnicities, religions, genders, and other identities. We are similarly committed to advocating for greater access to the kind of “whole-person wellness” that yoga enables, including broadening public understanding of what it means for someone to be “well,” who is deserving of wellness, and the role a yoga practice can play in one’s wellness.” (page 5, Yoga Alliance 2024-2030 strategic plan)
I have mentioned before on multiple channels, and in Tick, Tock, that this strategic plan is conspicuously absent of any advocacy for the professionals from whom the Yoga Alliance takes membership dues from. In fact, in this entire page there are several references to advocating for yoga, and exactly zero mentions of anything that would support yoga teachers in their working challenges.
From Tick, Tock the trend report:
It is shocking, even as a long-time yoga organization observer who has more than passing experience in how organizations are run, to see a 20 page document of a strategic plan that has literally zero plans for worker advocacy.
Nothing. No wage protections, no professional rights, no retirement, nothing that refers to worker advocacy. And let me remind us all, that is the entire reason they exist and collect dues.
I did a word search in this document. Here are the words related to worker advocacy and how many times they appear in the document.
Compensation: 0
Wages: 0
Salary: 0
(This remains the biggest issue facing all yoga workers–our ability to make enough money to live)
Employment: 0
Career Stability: 0
Income: 0
Labor: 0
The real humans that pay dues to the organization are found nowhere in the strategic plan. These real humans who are often, if not overwhelmingly, trained by Yoga Alliance-registered schools (schools that pay the Yoga Alliance for the privilege of using the Yoga Alliance registration that means very little)—these humans come out from teacher training only to find that there is no advocacy for them. That they have been forgotten, encouraged to pay their dues to a machine that cares enough to take their money but not enough to go to work for them.
It is as if a dental association was advocating only for clean teeth, and not the people cleaning those teeth.
Lest we be critical of this attitude of the Yoga Alliance, their strategic plan also covers possible this on page 7:
“These perspectives may run counter to what is best for the community and for yoga as a whole, though they may be conveyed by community members with considerable influence or standing. Our team is vulnerable to the same human tendencies, of course, and our organization has made poor choices in the past in the name of some of these pressures. To ensure Yoga Alliance remains in integrity, we will center yoga’s needs overall, alongside those of our human community members, supporters, detractors, funders, and others, and transparently hold any resulting tensions.”
In case you missed it, those “human community members” are the ones not mentioned in the organizational mission. But don’t blame the Yoga Alliance; they are only human. Humans sitting on around $17 million dollars in liquid assets in their sister organization, the Yoga Alliance Foundation. Humans who paid their CEO $519,881 in 2024. Humans who could have built an insurance program for its human members, but didn’t.
The Pay Trajectory
This section is going to get more technical than you might want, but it puts the framing for a salary assessment into context that I believe will be important going forward.
In 2023, Shannon Roche's total compensation from Yoga Alliance was $313,300. In 2024, it was $519,881. That is a 63.2% increase in a single year. When we zoom out further, the salary arc is even sharper. Her compensation has risen 81.1% since 2019, her first full year as permanent CEO.
That 63.2% pay raise landed in the same fiscal year Yoga Alliance's workforce shrank by 25.5% — from 51 employees to 38. That is thirteen jobs gone, in the same twelve months the CEO pay grew by nearly $200,000.
If you run the organization's full payroll, not just hers, then the picture clears further. Total salaries and wages across all staff fell from $5,156,062 in 2023 to $4,377,842 in 2024. That is a drop of $778,220. Her raise absorbed roughly $197,851 of that drop.
So the layoffs didn't just make room for the pay raise. They generated over half a million dollars — $580,369 — more in savings than her raise cost, with no public accounting of where that surplus went, as far as we can see.
Here is what makes this timing harder to write off as coincidence. Yoga Alliance's own audited financial statements disclose that "a new agreement was entered into in 2023, effective as of January 1, 2024". That is a fresh, renegotiated employment contract for the CEO. Yet the organization's federal tax filing for that same fiscal year — the Form 990 covering 2024 that is publicly available on ProPublica, Candid, and the IRS's own website too — states, in the organization's own words, that "the last review took place in May 2019." Two of the organization's own official documents, filed within months of each other, do not agree on when Roche's compensation was last reviewed.
How could this happen?
Well, board turnover could be one reasonable explanation. If you have ever sat on a non-profit board, you know it is difficult to get the lay of the land for the first year. You are busy reading the bylaws and trying to figure out what they mean in the real context of the work you just signed up to do. So when board members turn over quickly, like within a couple of years, it is difficult to rely on people who might have time and experience as a guiding star.
The quick board member turnover matters for CEO salary reviews for a very specific reason that a lot of folks might not know about.
Under IRS rules, a nonprofit board earns a "rebuttable presumption of reasonableness" on executive pay only if three things happen every time compensation is set: an independent body reviews it, that body relies on real comparability data, and the process is documented in writing at the time. If Yoga Alliance's board did all three when it approved the 2024 contract, its own federal filing for 2024 doesn't say so.
If it didn't do this, then the organization may not have the legal protection it would need if this compensation were ever challenged as unreasonable.
I thought long and hard about whether I was going to add this upcoming sentence to this article. I want to say clearly that I am here as a writer and owner of an independent media company, not someone who is advocating for the readers to “do” anything. But here is what I feel obligated to tell you. Do with the following information what you will.
So, to answer the question your head is asking: yes, anyone can formally flag suspected excessive compensation for non-profits to the IRS using Form 13909. It is titled Tax-Exempt Organization Complaint (Referral) Form. This is a referral form specifically designed to report nonprofit misconduct, including private benefit and excessive insider pay. State attorneys general (in Yoga Alliance's case, Virginia's) also have independent authority to investigate nonprofits incorporated in their state, giving any possible concerned members a second avenue of action beyond the federal one.
If you are considering doing this, please read the rest of the article before you continue. I want you to know what I know. Because the question we all should be asking at this point in our journey isn’t “is this too much money?” it is “Is this a normal salary for a trade organization CEO?”
At least that was the question I was asking. I have never been a trade organization CEO, and so I figured I would go searching and see if I could figure it out.
Comparing Notes.
All of the trade organizations that I am about to reference have been referenced previously in this article. I will be highlighting the American Massage Therapy Association, the National Strength and Conditioning Association, and the American Dental Association. (You will see in a moment when I am talking about dentists so much).
Yoga Alliance's CEO, Shannon Roche, was paid $519,881 in 2024, across all sources — 5.03% of the organization's entire $10.3 million in revenue for that year. That number alone can sound abstract. It becomes concrete only next to what similar organizations, serving similar workforces, actually pay.
The American Massage Therapy Association doesn't have one CEO listed in its 2024 filings, it has two. Lisa Stegink, CEO and General Counsel, was paid $276,906 in fiscal 2024. Jeffery Flom, also carrying the title of CEO and listed as the organization's principal officer, was paid $269,172. Combined, that's $546,078 for AMTA's top office — and even counting both salaries as one line item, it comes to just 2.27% of AMTA's $24 million in revenue. Yoga Alliance pays one person more than twice that share.
The National Strength and Conditioning Association's CEO made $373,682 — 2.6% of NSCA's $14.4 million.
Both organizations are trade bodies for licensed or certified practitioners facing many of the same legitimacy battles yoga teachers face. Both pay their chief executives less, as a share of what the organization brings in, than Yoga Alliance does.
Then there's the American Dental Association. This organization was deliberately chosen because its CEO is the only one on this list who makes more in raw dollars than Roche does. In 2024, ADA's Executive Director, Dr. Raymond Cohlmia, was paid $870,723. That's a bigger number than Roche's by a significant margin. But ADA is not a $10 million organization; it is a $237 million one. Cohlmia's pay amounts to 0.37% of ADA's revenue. Run the same math on Yoga Alliance's much smaller budget, and Roche's compensation is more than thirteen times that share.
It is also worth noting that Dr. Cohlmia was a 20+ year practicing dentist before moving into an administrative role.
Finally, Back To Us.
I also want to frame this salary relative to what we, as an industry, make. Salary aggregator sites for yoga teachers are notoriously unreliable, so I am showing you the work of my math, and you can decide where you sit on this scale. You might make more; you might make less.
Here is the math on a working yoga teacher's year: $50 a class, 15 classes a week, 52 weeks a year. In this scenario, there are no sick days, no holidays, no vacation, because independent contractors don't get paid for the weeks they don't teach. (It is crappy, I know. But let’s talk about that later.) That's an annual total salary of $39,000.
Shannon Roche made $519,881 in 2024.
That's 13.3 times what that teacher made. The difference — $480,881 — is more than twelve of that teacher's entire years, stacked one on top of the other, for a single year of Roche's.
What that means is it would take that teacher (and possibly you) twelve years to make what she made in one year running a trade organization whose own published strategic plan does not include the word salary once.
What Comes Next?
I have spent a lot of time during the research process for this article thinking about hope.
Hope and anger.
My instinct as a long-time yoga teacher and yoga therapist is to write some lines to give you hope. To find the inspiring thing to say. To find a poem or sutra to soothe your wounded soul. I am well known for calling for collective action in my writings and on my podcast as that next logical step.
But can I be honest? I don’t feel like doing that as I write this article.
Mostly, I feel sad.
I feel sad because I know SO many wonderful people who teach yoga. I know incredible yoga studio owners who care about every single one of their employees and are dedicated to their members. The feeling those owners would have if they were able to pay each of their teachers $150 a class – which would be roughly $117,000 a year in salary with 15 classes a week – would be overwhelming joy.
I know they want that for their staff, and for themselves.
And what I have come to you with is the thing you can’t unsee. A large salary. A reduced staff. And an industry of the rest of us very much struggling with poverty. We scrape the floors. We can’t necessarily afford the apartment.
So while I believe incredibly strongly that this information is vital and important to us shaping our future—I also want to say I am sad. I am sad that an article which I thought would be a simple salary and benefit comparison turned into so much more.
I am sad because we deserve better.
But also…our work is too important not to fight for it.
Glimmers.
During the writing of this article, I have had the opportunity to sit down with Andrew Tanner, the CEO and founder of the American Yoga Council (AYC), to talk about all sorts of things—including executive salary.
The AYC is a benefit-corp, a corporation that is designed to benefit the public good, and thus he is not required by law to reveal his salary the way non-profit executives are required to.
He revealed it anyway. Andrew Tanner, CEO of American Yoga Council, makes $60,000 a year.
His organization was already mentioned above for their dedication to not only certifying (not registering like the Yoga Alliance—there is a difference, but we don’t have time for that; I’ve put you through enough already.) yoga professionals but providing them with the business coaching that we desperately need.
If you feel yourself being cynical about yet another yoga organization, please know that I a) feel you and b) am going to write a whole other article just on that feeling. But don’t let that prevent you from checking out what they might have to offer. And they didn’t pay me to say that. (I get paid by you, or more specifically, the subscribers of Inside Yoga Magazine).
Choices.
Salaries for any organization are a choice. Executive pay is a choice. Where the money a nonprofit brings in during the year goes, whom or what it is spent on, and how it is used to push forward a mission or ignore a mission — that's a choice too.
And a twenty-page strategic plan for the future of an entire profession that never once mentions the word wages is also a very specific choice.
My final example of a choice? Let's go back to those macarons from the beginning. If you made the most beautiful and delicious cookies in town, and could sell them with the appropriate markup for $4 a piece, but instead sold them for $7 a piece — well, that is the classic definition of a choice.
And that choice is absolutely yours to make, legally. Nobody can stop you.
But then the question we all get to ask is: should you?
And finally, you should know, for your own understanding, that the Doctors Without Borders CEO, Avril Benoît, made $292,639 in total compensation in 2023. And in case you were not already aware, Doctors Without Borders sends trained medical professionals into war zones to help save lives and provide aid.
<Drop your shoulders. Breathe.>
If you want to support the work of independent media outlets like this one so we can keep doing work like this, let me encourage you to share this with people who need to read it.
Also, please consider subscribing to the magazine (www.thesunlightexperience.com/insideyogahome),
and most importantly…go find colleagues and sit down with them and talk about this.
Give each other one of those warm and kind of weirdly extended hugs that all of us yoga folks are known for.