LMA Belt Testing: To Fee or not to Fee?

This is a scenario that we've seen time and time again in countless martial arts schools:

You sign up for, let's say, $75 a month. Uniform is maybe $50. Maybe there's a $50 registration fee too. Every 2-3 months, the instructor pushes you to do a belt test, and there's a fee for that too. Let's say it's $50 for yellow belt. It might be a little higher for the belt after that, and the belt after that. Quite often, at black belt, the fee jumps up by a lot. Perhaps $600. The next year you might be tested for 2nd degree, $1200, 3rd degree, $2000 (even though the test isn't any more work for the instructor), all while still paying the same $75/month everyone else pays.

Generally, the more invested the student is in the style, the more the school can get away with charging them.

You might be pressured to take additional classes, such as black belt classes, weapons classes, etc, and for fees that are higher than the regular class. What started as a reasonable sounding $75 per month can (and all too often does) turn into $300+ per month down the road.

So, back the question. Belt Testing: Fee or No Fee?

While it makes logical sense to charge a fee for the extra time instructors take to do a belt test, there's no real reason that cost can't be worked into the regular monthly fee. Additionally, if the cost is worked into the regular monthly fee, instructors are not motivated to push students to promote faster for financial gain. What this means for the student, is that when they are promoted, the instructor likely believed that student really deserved it, and there's no financial incentive to cast doubt on that. Furthermore, if there's no test fee paid in advance, the instructor feels less of a sense of pressure to pass the student.

Long story short: We do not feel the need hide the cost of training by having separate belt test fees. Additionally, your rank is generally more meaningful if you didn't pay to test.

Charging for belt tests (and even the colored belt system itself) is not traditional either. It is a phenomena created by modern martial arts schools (within the last 50 years or so) to allow the school to disguise the true cost of training, and, in some cases, to commit actual fraud. Tax fraud, that is. Sometimes gyms only report the monthly fees to the IRS, and they keep the belt fees tax free. One hint that a gym might be doing this is if they accept a credit card for the monthly fees, but the belt fees are cash only.

Check out this article: "WHY I QUIT CHARGING BELT TESTING FEES
By Mike Massie"