I think when people look at the price of livery, they forget that people actually have to make a living out of this. You don’t elaborate on the level of service you are getting for your full livery, so it is difficult to tell if you are getting value for money.
Before they even begin to pay a groom, the yard owner has to pay for:
Rent/mortgage
Rates
Insurance
Water
Electricity
Repairs
If they are doing only the bare minimum, it will still probably take them at the very least half an hour a day to turn out, bring in, feed, put in hay, and muck out. If your yard owner employs a young groom they could get away with paying them as little as £4.55 per hour - so the labour will cost about £60 per month. There will be costs associated with having an employee - holiday pay/cover etc, unless they are paying piecemeal and treating their staff poorly. If the yard owner is doing the work themselves, and are over 21, it is going to cost more like £110. But that doesn’t cover the labour costs of yard maintenance, which can be very time consuming. I only have 3 horses and keep things very simple, but I spend hours each month repairing broken fences, plumbing and the like. There are hedges to cut, harrowing and rolling in the spring, fertiliser spreading, muck heap removal, paddock topping, gateway repairing. These things all need doing on a much bigger scale in a yard. It is likely that your yard owner needs to run a vehicle such as a tractor or quad to maintain the yard. If they don’t, they will be paying someone else to do the jobs you need a vehicle for. You don’t say if hay and bedding are included, but if they are even buying in bulk that’s a fair chunk of cost.
I would say if your horse takes less than half an hour a day to do, and you are not getting any bedding or hay, your livery would have to be costing at least £250 per month for the yard owner just to break even. Minimum quantities of low quality bedding and hay would add about £50 to that. Just to break even. At £500 per month your yard owner would be bringing in less than £50 per week per horse profit. Multiply that up by the number of horses on your yard, and that’s her profit. They will have to pay themselves something out of that too, and put aside some money to cover large one-off or emergency bills.
As you can see, you might not think you are getting value for money, but your yard owner is not getting rich on it either. Everyone deserves some time off each year, and at every yard I have ever kept a horse on the horse owner covers Christmas Day and Boxing Day. You can get more elaborate livery, but it will cost more and rightly so. Unfortunately keeping a horse, whatever age it is, is not cheap. I am astounded at people managing to get full livery for £300 a month - how does that even work?