How Much Should I Charge for Horse Boarding? Full, Partial, Pasture

October 31, 2026 · Pricing a service business

What you should charge for horse boarding is the sum of three costs per stall a month - your own labor, the horse’s feed and bedding, and its share of the barn’s bills - divided by one minus the margin you want. In the illustrative 12-stall barn below, those costs come to $936.98 a stall, so full board at a 15% margin is $1,102.33 a month, partial board $659.33 and pasture board $309.25. Whether that is profitable then comes down to one thing: how many stalls are filled.

Every figure here belongs to one made-up barn. None of it is a market rate, and none of it is feeding or care advice: hay, grain and bedding quantities come from your own records, your vet or the feed label. The arithmetic only multiplies the quantities entered.

The horse boarding price formula

labor per stall   = (income to keep / (1 - tax set-aside)) / 12 / stalls
feed per stall    = hay bought incl. waste + grain + bedding + extras
facility per stall = (the year's barn bills / 12) / stalls
cost              = labor + feed + facility
board price       = cost / (1 - margin)

Partial and pasture board use the same formula with only the share of labor, feed and facility you actually supply.

Step 1: your own labor per stall

The example owner wants $40,000 a year kept after a 20% tax set-aside, which needs $50,000 of profit. The barn takes 35 hours of chores a week plus 5 hours of billing, ordering and boarder calls, for 52 weeks: 2,080 hours a year. That makes an hourly floor of $24.04, and $4,166.67 of pay a month. Spread over 12 stalls, labor is $347.22 per stall a month. The 35 chore hours work out to 25 minutes per horse a day, a useful check against your own log.

Your pay is a cost line here, not whatever happens to be left over. That is the difference between a board price and a guess.

Step 2: feed and bedding per stall

The example feeds 20 lb of hay a day for a 30-day month, and 10% of the hay bought is trampled, spoiled or refused. So the barn buys 666.7 lb to get 600 lb eaten. With 50 lb bales at $12.00:

$16.00 of the $160.00 hay bill is hay that never got eaten, and it stays in the price because it was paid for. A feed line built from the pounds eaten alone comes in short every month.

Step 3: the barn’s bills per stall

Yearly bills are spread over twelve months, and the $18,000 of tractor and equipment is spread over the 10 years it is expected to last:

These bills do not stop when a stall is empty. Each stall’s share is a cost whether a horse stands in it or not.

Step 4: full, partial and pasture board prices

Full board carries all three costs. Partial board here has the boarder doing some of the work and supplying some feed, but still uses a stall, so it carries the whole facility share. Pasture board uses less of everything. The shares are the example’s own terms, the kind you set with each boarder:

Full board sits $443.00 above partial. The 15% margin is profit as a share of the price, on top of costs that already include your $347.22 of pay per stall. If you prefer to price with no margin, the cost row is the floor: below it, the stall is paid for out of your own pocket.

Is horse boarding profitable? The empty stall decides

The price above spreads your pay and the bills over all 12 stalls. In a month with 10 filled and 2 empty, $2,204.66 of full board is not coming in. The feed you do not buy saves $672.86, so the empty stalls cost $1,531.80 a month, or $18,381.60 over a year at that occupancy. Their $506.66 share of the barn’s bills falls on the filled stalls: $50.67 more per horse just to cover the bills.

Break-even turns this into a count. Each full-board horse leaves $765.90 after its own feed and bedding. Paying $3,040.00 of bills and $4,166.67 of your pay, $7,206.67 a month, takes 9.41 horses, which is 78.4% of the stalls. Horses come whole, so it takes 10, or 83.3% occupancy. The bills alone need 4.

That is the real answer to whether horse boarding is profitable. In this example, 10 full-board horses clear bills and pay by $452.33 a month. At 9 horses the barn falls $313.57 short of paying the owner in full, even though it still covers its bills. The price and the occupancy have to be set together: a lower board price raises the number of horses it takes, and a barn that cannot keep that many stalls filled needs a higher price or lower costs.

Add-on services, priced by the minute

Anything outside the chore hours in step 1 is not paid for by board. At the $24.04 floor plus a 15% margin on add-ons, a 5-minute blanket change is $2.36, a 10-minute extra turnout $4.71, and a 30-minute hold for the farrier or vet $14.14, the dearest of the three. One horse taking 30 blanket changes, 20 extra turnouts and 2 holds in a month adds $193.28 for 6.83 hours of your time. Time each task yourself; the minutes are the example’s.

Did the month pay?

Prices on paper are one test; the month’s bank account is another. Say the barn had 8 full-board horses at $1,100, 2 partial at $650 and 1 on pasture at $300, each charged a little under the price built above, plus $180.00 of add-ons: $10,580.00 in. Hay, grain, bedding, supplies and the barn’s bills came to $6,380.00, leaving $4,200.00 for the owner’s 165 hours. That is $25.45 an hour against the $24.04 floor, so the month clears it, but only by $233.40: income that paid exactly the floor would have been $10,346.60. Comparing the feed actually bought with step 2’s figures is also the quickest check on your quantities.

How these were calculated

Labor per stall is the income to keep divided by one minus the tax set-aside, over twelve months and the number of stalls; the floor is the same profit over the hours worked in a year. Hay bought is pounds fed divided by one minus the waste share, priced per pound of bale; grain is pounds fed priced per pound of bag; bedding is bags a week over the days in the month. Facility cost is each year’s bills divided by twelve, equipment over its expected years, then over the stalls. Each board price is its cost divided by one minus the margin. Break-even horses are bills plus pay divided by full board less feed, rounded up to whole horses. Labor, feed and facility are carried into the board prices to the cent, as the spreadsheet shows them, and each board’s cost and each add-on’s price is held to the cent before it is used again, so every line can be checked by hand from the line above.

Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the pack below and once by an independent program that counts the hours week by week, prices feed by the pound and counts break-even horses up one at a time, and the two agree. All inputs are illustrative, not market prices, measured chore times or feeding, health or care advice. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

To run this on your own barn, feed receipts and stall count, the pack below has eight linked calculators, from your hourly floor to a check on whether a month paid.