Most first retreats are priced the same way: find a beautiful house, take the weekly rate, divide by ten, add something for yourself, round it to a nice number.
Then the actual costs arrive one at a time over four months, each one small enough to absorb, and at the end of the week the host discovers they worked for six months and earned about what they would have made teaching an extra class.
Here is the full shape of it, including the lines nobody puts in the first spreadsheet.
The lines you already know
Accommodation. Almost always the biggest number, and usually booked as a whole property with a minimum. This is the line that creates the risk, because whole-venue booking means you owe the same amount whether nine people come or fifteen. Read the contract for what the minimum actually is: some venues price per person with a floor, some price the house flat, and the difference decides how bad a half-full retreat is.
Food. Either bundled into the venue rate or a cook you hire separately. Three meals a day for seven days for twelve to fifteen people, including you and your co-teacher, plus the fruit, tea, snacks and one celebratory dinner that nobody ever budgets.
The room you teach in. Sometimes included. Sometimes a separate daily rate for the shala, which appears on the invoice and not in the brochure.
Those three are the ones everybody counts. They are usually somewhere around two thirds of the true cost, which is exactly why dividing the villa rate by ten produces a price that looks fine and is not.
The lines nobody budgets for
Your co-teacher. If someone is holding half the week, they are being paid, and you need to know before the deposit whether that is a flat fee or a share of what is left. That conversation belongs in its own room, but the number belongs in this spreadsheet from day one.
Your own travel and your own bed. You are also a person who has to fly there and sleep somewhere for seven nights. First-time hosts leave themselves out of the costs entirely, then wonder where the money went. If you are also arriving two days early to set up, that is two more nights.
Transfers. Twelve people arriving on nine different flights is either a minibus you pay for twice, or four hours of your own driving, or a WhatsApp thread you manage for a fortnight for free. All three are costs. Only one of them shows up on a bank statement.
Payment fees. Card and platform fees run roughly two to four percent, more when people are paying across currencies or in instalments. On a retreat turning over fifteen thousand euros that is a few hundred you never see, and it comes out of your margin, not theirs.
Refunds and cancellations. Someone will cancel. Somebody's mother will be ill, or a flight will be cancelled, or a relationship will end in March. Your written policy decides whether that lands on them or on you. If you have not written a policy, it lands on you, and you will refund in full because you are a decent person and it is easier than the conversation.
Insurance. Public liability for the week, and travel and medical cover for yourself. Small money. It is the line that turns an incident into an inconvenience rather than the end of your teaching life.
Foreign exchange and bank charges. If you collect in one currency and pay the venue in another, you lose on the spread twice, once on the way in and once on the way out.
The stuff. Props if the venue has none, a first aid kit, a decent speaker, candles, printed schedules, a welcome thing, blankets you end up buying locally on day one because the mornings are colder than the website suggested.
Getting the word out. Usually zero if you fill from your own students. Not zero if you end up paying to be listed, or paying someone to build the page.
Your own time, which is a real cost
Four to six months of evenings. Answering questions, chasing payments, building schedules, sorting dietary requirements, talking two nervous people into coming and one anxious person out of cancelling.
Nobody pays you for that and nobody will. You should still put a number on it, once, honestly. Not to bill anyone. To know what the week actually earned per hour of your life, because that is the number that tells you whether to do it again, do it differently, or stop.
Plenty of teachers do the arithmetic and decide the retreat was worth it anyway, for reasons that are not financial. That is a fine answer. It is only a fine answer if you know what you chose.
Rules of thumb, marked as rules of thumb
Nobody can give you real figures, because a farmhouse in Portugal in October and a beach place in Costa Rica in January are not the same business. But the proportions tend to hold.
Accommodation and food together usually eat somewhere between half and two thirds of the guest price. The forgotten lines above, taken together, are often another ten to twenty percent, which is precisely why they matter: they are the difference between a decent fee and no fee. Whatever contingency you have set aside, something will go slightly over, so ten to fifteen percent on top of your total is not pessimism, it is arithmetic.
If a venue quotes you a per-person rate that looks cheap, ask what is excluded. The answer is usually the room you teach in, transfers, and drinks.
Price from your costs, not from what everyone else charges
Look at what similar retreats charge, by all means. Use it as a sanity check at the end, never as the starting point. You do not know their venue deal, their headcount, or whether they made any money.
Work it the other way. Total your costs at the headcount you are actually willing to run at, not at a full house. Divide. That is your break-even per person. Then add your teaching fee on top as a line, not as a remainder.
This is the single most important structural decision in the whole thing. If your fee is whatever is left after costs, you have quietly made yourself the shock absorber for every surprise, and there are always surprises. The cook wants more. The transfer costs double. Two people cancel late. In that structure, every one of those comes directly out of your pay, and you find out in the last week.
Put your fee in the costs. Let the surprises come out of contingency, and let everyone above your minimum headcount be margin.
When the money arrives, which is not when you spend it
A retreat can be profitable on paper and still leave you overdrawn in March, because the costs and the income do not happen at the same time.
The venue wants a deposit early and the balance often before you arrive. Flights are cheapest when booked months out. Guests, meanwhile, pay in instalments, and the last instalment usually lands weeks before departure, which is after you have already paid for most of it.
Two things fix this. Take a meaningful deposit from guests rather than a token one, and make it non-refundable in plain language, so it covers the money you have already committed on their behalf. And set your instalment dates to fall before your own payment dates, not after. That is a five-minute decision when you write the booking page, and it is the difference between a comfortable spring and lending the retreat two thousand euros of your own money for four months.
The number that actually matters
Not the price. The break-even headcount.
If you need eleven people to not lose money, eleven is the number you are managing from the day you sign until the day you arrive. It decides whether you take the venue at all. It decides whether you extend the early rate or hold the line. It decides whether you cancel in March, calmly, or hope through April and cancel in May, expensively.
Write it on the first line of the spreadsheet, in a bigger font than everything else.
Then work out one more thing while you are calm: what you lose if you cancel at each stage. The deposit alone in January. The deposit plus the balance in April. Knowing those two numbers in advance turns a panic into a decision.
The reason to know all this before you commit
Because the cheapest moment to discover that eleven is more people than you can find is before the venue has your money.
Once the deposit is paid, the break-even headcount stops being information and becomes pressure. Pressure changes your pricing, it changes how often you post, and it is audible in every sentence you write about your own retreat.
The spreadsheet is not admin. It is the thing that lets you talk about the week you are actually excited about.