Inside a CorePower Yoga studio on any given evening, the scene is the same. The lights are dimmed, the room is heated to about 98 degrees, and participants are flowing through sun salutations. At the front stands the instructor who designed the sequence, curated the playlist, and arrived half an hour early to clean the studio and check students in at the front desk. For this hour of work, and for the unpaid preparation that preceded it, she might take home as little as $27 per class, CorePower’s stated floor, for what amounts to two hours of labor. That rate falls below the $22 national median for fitness instructors, and in New York, California, and the company’s home state of Colorado, below minimum wage.
This is CorePower Yoga, a chain its late founder Trevor Tice aspired to make “the Starbucks of yoga.” With more than 200 studios nationwide and unlimited memberships running as high as $260 a month, he succeeded. But on February 1, 2026, the teachers who power those studios launched a coordinated strike, demanding wages that match the work they put in.
That same day, a viral video from the Minneapolis studio showed a hostile confrontation directed at staffers over a corporate policy decision, while an instructor announced she was quitting because her values no longer aligned with the company.
The CPY worker movement began with a MoveOn petition in December 2025, calling for $30 an hour for instructors, $20 an hour for cleaners, and quarterly deep cleans of studios where members had reported ringworm, roaches, and black mold. In response, CorePower announced what it called a 16 percent market-specific wage increase effective January 1, 2026, stating that base pay now ranges from “$27 to $112 a class before performance metrics are factored in.” But with each class requiring two hours of labor, the floor remained well below what the workers had asked for. So the strike moved forward.
The Same Conditions, Everywhere
The r/Corepower subreddit became a clearinghouse for universal grievances, with instructors across markets reporting the same poverty wages, unpaid prep time, overcrowded studios, and infested mats from Denver to D.C. One studio coordinator who had worked at multiple locations elaborated on the dire working conditions hidden away from customers. Mats had no way to hang and dry after cleaning. Straps used in class were never sanitized. Blocks sat on wet studio floors, creating what the coordinator called “the ideal environment for things like Staph, MRSA, and Ringworm to thrive.” She had contracted ringworm twice herself said management deflected when she reported it. “CPY is really good at putting lipstick on a pig. They play into the fact that the majority of their employees are women, they exploit us, and pay us nothing because they know society has conditioned us to accept less.”
A Colorado instructor named Dani had started the petition in December, hoping for 200 signatures from her local community. By January it had gone national. Then TikTok creator Carter Martin brought the conversation to a wider audience when her video garnered over 170,000 views in two days.
“I go to CorePower. I’ve gone on and off for years,” Martin said in the clip. “My best friend used to be an instructor, and I always thought it was insane that she got $20 to teach the yoga class. You’re not just working the desk. You are literally teaching a specialized class based on specialized training that you’ve done and paid for through CorePower to be an instructor.”
That training, a 200- or 300-hour course, runs prospective teachers $1,400 to $4,000. Martin noted that an instructor would need to teach upwards of 150 classes just to break even. Organizers reported participation across multiple markets including New York and the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Some members began freezing their memberships in solidarity.
This marks CorePower’s third major organizing attempt. Previous efforts in 2019 and 2020 failed to gain traction, though the 2019 campaign resulted in a major wage theft lawsuit.
A Series of Concessions
In January 2026, just weeks before the strike, many instructors received sudden raises. On December 23, instructors were notified via email that their wages would increase effective January 1. According to. an email obtained by reporters, the company said this was “in addition to our annual wage progression planned for July 1, 2026.” Anna, a New York-area instructor who asked that her real name be withheld, saw her hourly wage go from $20 to $25, while an LA-based teacher’s rate jumped from $18.30 to $20.58. “They gave us all a $2 raise for New Year’s,” organizer Dani said. “Usually the raises are like 30 cents.”
Former instructor Annie Williams went viral describing the substantial unpaid workload that includes orchestrating original sequences every two weeks, curating playlists, coaching students, prepping the studio before class, and cleaning up afterwards. “All of that work to get paid $20 to teach a class,” Williams said. “It would just drive me insane when someone would come in and they had to pay $40 to take it.” At Solidcore, instructors can earn up to $100 per hour when revenue share is factored in. At Equinox, base class pay starts around $60 to $80. CorePower instructors have recently been asked to pay $2 per shift to rent a towel.
Organizers have requested competitive pay, adequate staffing, and clear job responsibilities where “teaching is not paired with uncompensated operational and custodial labor.” In 2019, CorePower paid $1.49 million to 2,180 instructors over these exact claims. Prior to this, a separate 2018 case cost the company $1.4 million for similar violations.
When Yoga Became Big Business
In 2019, CorePower Yoga was acquired by TSG Consumer Partners, a private equity firm that now manages approximately $20 billion in assets. The company generates over $100 million in annual revenue. One month after the acquisition, over 1,500 instructors joined what would become a major wage theft lawsuit. In January 2020, Niki Leondakis was appointed CEO.
In a February 2020 video obtained by Defector during the previous union drive, Leondakis can be heard strategizing about how to deflect from low wages by emphasizing workplace camaraderie. “We should just change the conversation,” she said. “Let’s just talk about what the value of being a CorePower Yoga instructor is that’s outside of monetary, because there’s real value in that. And let’s just confront the fact that they’re making minimum wage directly but maybe describe the other intangible values of being a part of this community.”
That same year, then-Chief Yoga Officer Heather Peterson sent an internal email discouraging employees from signing union cards. “Most importantly, a union’s interest is not aligned with our shared passion,” she wrote. “We come to work every day excited about the opportunity to positively impact people’s lives through the transformative power of yoga. This aspiration unites us all into a community of people working toward a common mission. A union has no such aspiration.”
When the pandemic shuttered studios nationwide in March 2020, CorePower conducted temporary layoffs of instructors and staff. According to one former manager, leadership announced the decision via Zoom by explaining that the CARES Act had passed, so it was “a good time to just lay everybody off” and let workers collect the extra $600 a week. Then when studios began reopening, leadership required instructors to reaudition for their old jobs. In Atlanta, former studio manager Leana Marshall said only 35 of 90 instructors were ultimately hired back. She had taught at CorePower locations in Hawaii, Atlanta, and Washington D.C., and said the layoffs allowed her to speak freely without fear of being “blacklisted” by the company. She described being “always labeled as the angry Black woman because I was trying to stand up for things that were right.”
The Wellness Economy’s Dirty Little Secret
The global wellness economy reached $6.8 trillion in 2024, according to the Global Wellness Institute, and is projected to approach $10 trillion by 2029. That market now surpasses the pharmaceutical industry, tourism, IT, and the green economy combined, representing over six percent of global GDP. Yet the instructors fueling this growth remain some of its lowest-paid workers.
Former CorePower instructor Emmy, who got her 200-hour certification through the company about five years ago, pointed out “CorePower isn’t the only yoga studio doing this. This is a much bigger issue in all of group fitness,” she said, describing studios that “look like a boutique experience” but “are actually corporately owned, so they are run like a corporation.” Her husband, she said, calls it ‘big yoga.’ “For these businesses, the priority at the end of the day is the bottom line. Not the teachers, not the staff, not even the students.”
Emmy’s ‘big yoga’ framing holds up at scale, given that boutique fitness now commands nearly half of the U.S. fitness market and private equity completed more than 70 mergers and acquisitions in the sector in 2024 alone. L Catterton, the LVMH-backed firm whose portfolio includes CorePower Yoga, Equinox, SoulCycle, and ClassPass, acquired Solidcore for up to $700 million that same year. The franchise model scales rapidly by design, but compensation for the people teaching the classes does not.
At SoulCycle, similar lawsuits have alleged instructors were required to work off the clock without compensation. In late 2025, workers at Movement, a PE-backed climbing gym chain, filed unfair labor practice charges. Yet the lawsuits tend to settle quietly, and the underlying pay model persists. CorePower has paid nearly $3 million in settlements without altering its pay structure. Its training program has certified more than 50,000 instructors for 200 studios, so the pipeline never runs dry.
“The passion principle” is the engine of “big yoga.” Workers who love what they do are susceptible to being targeted, perceived as willing to take on more responsibilities without more pay. Through this mechanism, workers are conditioned to prioritize community and purpose over basic demands like living wages.
“Yoga without ethics is not yoga. It is a product,” the organizers stated. “CorePower has a choice: to continue extracting value while distancing itself from the principles that give yoga its meaning, or to meet this moment with accountability and care. We are calling on leadership to choose integrity.”
Anna hopes the organizing push will motivate corporate leadership to make substantive changes. “I hope people get what they deserve to be paid. I hope the studios get cleaned,” she said. “And I hope that no one is getting ringworm anymore.”
Reporting Note
This article draws on contemporaneous reporting, company communications, legal filings, and publicly documented statements to examine CorePower Yoga’s labor practices within the broader context of corporatized wellness and private equity–backed fitness.
