06/01/2026
It’s happened, Lauren Mauldin writes. Maybe at the office during a work lunch. Maybe a family reunion with a distant cousin. One of the peripheral people in your life who only knows one fact about you (she rides horses!) has asked a dreaded question: how much do horses cost anyway?
I hate this question. It’s not because I’m secretive about money. I like having straightforward conversations about finances because I think it takes away some of the mystery and power around financial stability. But with horses? That’s totally different. How do I even begin to answer this question?
I want to answer everything. They cost everything. Your time, your heart, and definitely all your disposable income. It doesn’t even matter how much extra money you have, they cost all of it (and then some). They cost in ways you don’t care about, like an extra $20 bag of treats from the tack store because you’re running low on bestest ponykins favorite horse muffins. They cost in ways that break you, like when you’re finally about to finish rehab and your horse reinjures the same ligament you’ve been nursing back to health for the last 8 months.
But the sales manager you’re sitting next to at this conference didn’t ask how much horses cost so you could sob into your coffee about lost savings and lost dreams, so you get back to the original question.
“Well, there are different kinds of horses…” I start to say. I want to simply explain that there are show horses and pet horses, and pleasure horses, and all of them have different costs associated with them, but then I realize I don’t even know what a safe pleasure horse costs these days. Early in my riding career, you could find a decent safe horse for $3,000 in the local newspaper back in 2000, but now my social media feed is flooded with grade horses selling at Amish auctions for $35,000 and kind semi-retired trail horses for “Private Inquiries Only.”
I decide to stick to what I know, and speak on the hunter/jumper show world. Which might be a mistake, but I start out with a metaphor, I think they’ll understand—“While there’s a big range, my horse costs as much as a crossover SUV… not a fancy one or—”
They’ve cut me off, flabbergasted that a horse can cost as much as a car and that I have paid as much as a car for my single horsepower, very slow 0 to 60mph, not even hybrid, horse.
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