Horse loan- please help!

I’d say £15 per day

In my (very long) experience, an honest, reliable loaner/sharer are worth their weight in gold and are far more valuable than any monetary contribution.

It was £25 per week for 3 days (including a weekend day) 8 years ago for a DIY loan. I'd say £30 for 2 days full livery is good. Will it be week days or weekends? Weekends are more of a premium here, but I guess depends on the age of the child?

An hour hack round here is £50 so to have a nice safe horse I could ride out, cuddle and groom and love without having to do the yard chores (I’m not as comfortable with stable management to take on DIY with someone else’s horse as I’ve never owned one). I think £15-20 a day would be reasonable but I’d consider paying more depending how much I liked the horse/owners and what opportunities were on offer to take the horse out and about. Also whether one of that days was a weekend day.

Dd has loaned ponies since she was 9, riding school ponies initially then a private loan. Cost here is £30-50 for 3 days (one of those weekend day) full livery.

I'm a horse owner and agree £20/25 per day depending on area. I would charge £10 per day at ours (grass kept and diy) so a sharer would do the jobs on their day(s) too.

I’ve found that whether you offer your horse for free or charge money, however much or little that may be, has very little correlation with the experience level or flakiness of the sharer. I have helpers. I don’t call them sharers, as I offer free riding in exchange for help keeping the horses fit. My horses are well schooled, nice natured, high performance animals who are currently competing at the highest levels of their sport. I currently have helpers I could not manage without. They are fabulous. Nothing is too much trouble, we work well together, and the relationship is a very successful one. I’ve had other helpers come and go who have also been fab, who have had to leave because they moved away (uni, job change, bought their own horse,) and I’ve been really sorry to see them go and generally we’ve kept in touch. I’ve also had complete and utter liabilities. There are people out there who are far more convinced of their own abilities than they have any right to. Warning bells for me start to ring when they start telling you the things that are wrong with your horse when I know there is nothing wrong with them.

Over the years I have had inexperienced and overconfident helpers’ actions result in me having to called out the vet more than once, permanent scarring to one horse, a significant period of reschooling to remedy development of bad habits in another and more. I’ve had one helper take a horse hunting when I explicitly told her she could not do this, and then badmouthed me on social media. I have had 2 teenager’s mothers tell me their brilliant child is a better rider than me and I should be grateful for them training my horse for me. I’ve discovered that one horse was lost loose in the countryside by Facebook of all things - at work and my phone started going mad with ‘have you seen this, has he been found’ messages from friends.

Despite all of this, sharing my horses and yard has found me some really good friends, and help that I need. In terms of money, there is no ‘usual amount’ just what you think is an appropriate amount to charge. The flakey riders could not pay me enough, and the brilliant ones are free to ride for nothing whenever they want.

I charge £300 per month for my horse my sharer has him 2 days he is on full livery - I came to the amount by asking an instructor what the going rate for a lesson was £55 per half hr asp that was my starting point

I am close to London and £25 a day is what people at my yard charge their sharers ..

Definitely mutual benefit is a huge thing

I got to ride a more experienced horse than I could afford, but I also had time and a love of hacking so horse got to do lots of what she loved
I miss her like crazy

£10 a day is pretty typical round here for a sharer. You might be able to charge more given that the horse is on full livery with good facilities.

I wouldn't use cost as a starting point though, think about why you want a sharer and what sort of sharer you want. What is your priority?

Many of the best sharers won't be in a position to pay much. Often the ones who are prepared to pay more are the ones straight out of a riding school. Are you happy to have a novice or would you sacrifice some of the money for an experienced rider?

Just as an example I know a sharer who is a qualified instructor who has competed at a decent level. I think it would be worth compromising on financial contribution for someone like that.

Some of the most successful shares I know of haven't involved money, they have been about mutual benefit.

£10 a day seems really cheap to me, would love to know where the yards are that only charge £70 or even £100 a week for full livery with good facilities in the Home Counties!

OP I'd charge 1/7th of your weekly livery bill for each day the sharer rides, obviously that isn't full keep costs as you have farrier, vets, insurance on top but it's better to charge a little less and get someone really reliable and flexible than go for top dollar and end up with someone demanding or flaky...

Having a fleet (ha, love the imagery) of horses for hire is much less of a thing than it used to be 75 or 100 years ago when the countryside/roads were safer for riding and health and safety culture more relaxed so it was possible to rock up to a stables on a whim and pay to take a horse or horses out for the day even if you weren't a very experienced rider. Essentially these days insurances and other business costs of running such a thing make it virtually untenable commercially - a single owner loaning their own horse to one person is not viewed as a commercial operation so doesn't have the same costs. Riding schools where you go for lessons or supervised riding are a different thing of course although many schools these days are struggling to turn a profit too.

Like others have said a share arrangement is usually very much between one owner (and their beloved pet) and one carefully vetted and chosen sharer selected for their riding ability and personality match to the horse, often the main motivation is to ensure the horse gets exercised and cared for on days it's not convenient for the owner to go to the yard so the financial contribution is usually minimal. 'Sub letting' very much not encouraged or indeed allowed 😂on their designated days the sharer can usually ride for as long as they want to within the boundaries of the horse's fitness, TBH most riders are tired before the horse is. But like I say most owners wouldn't be delighted to find their sharer was making their money back by offering pony rides to any interested third parties lol!

Wow this seems cheap. I had horses for 25 years but haven’t since my old showjumper passed away.

The cost per day for that sort of yard will be a lot more than £10/day.

I’d pay £200/ month for a part loan that gave be access to 2 days a week (or say £120/month for 1 day a week). I’d be happy to contribute some of the care for that too and still consider it a complete steal!

@DuesToTheDirt

That make a lot of sense. I'll hold off on registering HrsShr or AirHorse and trying to create a disruptive peer to peer horse sharing market.

I was already to start tagging up lampposts and bus shelters to mark them as horse sharing spots al la ZipCar.

People do it for a mix of reasons. Owners often need their horses ridden more than they can manage, or they might do it in order to help with the finances or chores. Loaners do it for the low price, for the freedom of a loan compared to lessons and not having to commit to their own horse.

But it's not always easy to find the right match. The owner wants someone competent and reliable. I recently saw an advert of facebook by someone whose daughter had decided that lessons weren't for her - after about 2 lessons and starting to trot... would you lend your precious horse to that girl?

The sharer generally wants a horse they can have safe fun with, at times that suit them. Some of the horses up for loan are really not for novices and would chuck you off as soon as look at you. Some are only available midweek. Some have flaky owners who forget to buy feed or don't pay the farrier, so the farrier refuses to shoe the horse (yes, really!). The sharer doesn't have any say in how the horse is kept - they might think the horse needs a vet, but the owner won't call a vet. They might want to compete, but the owner won't allow it. They might think the horse needs more attention, or less hours being ridden, or any number of things, and at some point they may decide they'd rather have their own, regardless of the cost.

I'd say it depends on the reason for loaning. Do you have a lack of time? Money?

I think £10-£15 a day. The facilities sound great so if youre doing it to help cover costs you might ask for more.

I pay £140 a month for as many days as I want(currently do 2)

@Wenfy

I'm guessing that because of owners like this there isn't much of a market where someone has a stables and has a fleet of horses that they then lease out.

Is there a secondary market where someone could contract for four days/week leasing and then sublet the horse out for short periods at a higher rate?

How many hours per day can you use a horse for?

£10 a day for horse on full livery (ie no chores required) seems ridiculously cheap to me but i would try and work out a rough basic cost of what your horse costs you per day by adding up all costs for a year and dividing by days in a year or monthly costs if that’s easier.

Depends on if there are jobs to do and how good a rider the sharer is.

I've had several shares and never paid a penny for them. The owner gets a day off and their horse is exercised and looked after for them. They'd usually have to pay some to do this - the sharer gets a horse to ride in exchange for doing the jobs for the day. Win-win.

If the horse is on full livery or the sharer isn't such a good rider then, yes work out how much the horse costs per day and split it.

I charge £120 a month for 2 days a week. One wheelbarrow of poo picking a week in summer (horse out at night) and skipping out stable in winter when they’re in at night.

horse costs me £300 a month diy, plus hay, feed, bedding, shoes, wormers, vaccinations, dentist, saddler, physio. Sharer is happy and so am I. I don’t use share money for horses keep, I put it towards anything “extra” they need such as new rugs etc.

My dd loans and I used to loan. I would pay around £30 to £40 a week but that covered everything. Shoes, vets, clipping etc. I would ride 2/3 times a week and do a bit of poo picking, groom, wash when I was there. Only thing I'd pay out for apart from the weekly fee would be my own insurance.

I pay £15 per day without yard chores, London. Is about the going rate, but I doubt it even touches the sides of the costs of keeping a horse on full livery and vetted etc. Several other owners at the yard have opted to put their horses on working livery (it’s a large riding centre) rather than loan, as it’s far more cost effective and I suspect just as importantly, avoids a lot of sharer politics: I know that before me my owner had a succession of teenage girls who clashed personalities with her daughter etc and made the loan dynamic painful. Would a working livery be an option for your horse?