At the Chagrin Hunter Jumper Classic in Ohio, one class draws a crowd that has nothing to do with jump height. The Grooms' Class asks entrants to bring a fully tacked, show-ready horse into the ring and be judged on cleanliness, braiding, boot application, and the state of their grooming box. It pays out $5,000 across its hunter and jumper divisions, with no entry fee. It is, by the standards of a sport that rarely puts its labor in the spotlight, a genuine tribute.
It is also, per two years of peer-reviewed research out of the Netherlands, closer to the exception than the rule.
What the Charter Promised
The FEI has not been quiet about grooms lately. In 2022, it formally recognized the International Grooms Association (IGA) as the sport's dedicated voice for the profession. That same year brought the #ChampionsAsOne campaign, a groom-specific award at the FEI World Championships, and the Cavalor Best Groom Award. In April 2024, at the FEI Sports Forum, the federation went further, signing the Grooms' Charter and approving a Stage 1 Action Plan built around education, welfare, and access to basic facilities — food, water, and serviced washrooms — at every FEI show from one-star to five.
On paper, it reads like a federation taking a profession seriously. The question researchers Susanna L. Ole and Inga A. Wolframm of Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences set out to answer was simpler and less comfortable: did any of it land with the people it was for?
The Study the Recognition Campaigns Didn't Survive
Ole and Wolframm's first paper, published in the International Journal of Equine Science in March 2024, surveyed 1,389 working grooms. The finding that made headlines across the sport-horse press: 58.5 percent said the FEI's flagship recognition initiatives — the IGA's founding, the World Championships award, #ChampionsAsOne, the Cavalor prize — held no personal relevance to them. Not opposition. Not resentment. Irrelevance, which is arguably worse for an initiative built to make people feel seen.
The follow-up, "What Does It Take? Changing the Tide on Staffing Issues in the Equestrian Industry," published in April 2025, went back to the same population — more than 1,300 grooms worldwide — and asked why. The answer, consistently, was not a lack of gratitude. It was pay, hours, and a lack of legal protection: the structural floor of the job, not its ceremony. "Addressing grooms' concerns is not merely a workforce issue but a matter of industry credibility," Ole and Wolframm wrote, arguing that it is integral to maintaining the industry's social license to operate.
Social license to operate is not a phrase equestrian sport uses lightly these days — it is the same language applied to whip rules, noseband tightness, and rollkur. Ole and Wolframm's point is that it belongs here too. A sport that asks the public to trust its welfare standards is, in the same breath, asking that same public not to look too closely at who is holding the horse.
The Numbers Underneath the Ribbon
In Britain, where the British Grooms Association has tracked the profession longest, its research — cited in British Equestrian's own State of the Nation 2024 report — found that 64 percent of grooms lack a formal written employment contract, and 46 percent are paid below the National Minimum Wage. These are not fringe operations; they are the barns supplying riders to the same FEI shows the Charter was written for.
The American picture is harder to pin a single number on, but the range tells its own story. Full-time grooms in the United States typically earn between $25,000 and $40,000 a year, according to a 2026 salary survey from The Plaid Horse — with hunter/jumper and dressage barns at rated shows sitting at the higher end, and small local operations at the lower. That ceiling, at a rated A-circuit show, sits well below what the horses in their care are worth in a single vet bill.
1,389 grooms surveyed by Van Hall Larenstein University (2024) — 58.5% found FEI recognition initiatives personally irrelevant
1,300+ grooms surveyed in the 2025 follow-up study — pay, hours, and legal protection cited as the persistent concerns
64% of UK grooms report no formal written contract (British Grooms Association / British Equestrian, 2024)
46% of UK grooms report pay below the National Minimum Wage
$25,000–$40,000: typical annual salary range for full-time US grooms (The Plaid Horse, 2026)
Why This Is an Owner's Problem, Not Just a Barn Manager's
It is tempting, from the client side of a hunter/jumper barn, to treat this as someone else's line item. It is not. The horsemanship that keeps a $150,000 hunter sound through a winter circuit is not primarily supplied by the trainer giving the lesson; it is supplied by the person who notices the filling in a tendon before it becomes a vet call, who knows which horse needs an extra ten minutes of hand-walking and which one needs to be left alone. That knowledge takes years to build and, per Ole and Wolframm's research, is leaving the industry faster than it can be replaced — not because grooms stop loving the work, but because the job's structural floor has not kept pace with what is asked of it.
A charter is not nothing. Neither is a $5,000 class in Ohio, or an e-learning course, or a line in a press release about grooms being the backbone of the sport. But recognition and reform are different instruments, and the research is now specific enough to say which one the profession is actually asking for. The federations built the first. The data says the second is still owed.
The sport has gotten better at saying thank you. It has not yet gotten better at paying for what it is thanking them for.
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