How much should you charge for tutoring?

Your rate is not a number you look up. It is a number you can defend — to a student who asks, and to yourself at the end of a long week. Most teachers set it once, by glancing at what everyone else charges, and then never revisit it. That is how a rate quietly becomes a pay cut.

Here is a method that takes an afternoon and holds for a year.

Start from the hour you actually work

The first mistake is pricing the lesson hour. You do not work lesson hours; you work teaching hours, and a teaching hour contains a lesson plus everything attached to it.

For one 60-minute lesson, write down your own honest figures:

Add them to the 60. If a lesson really costs you 90 minutes, then a €40 lesson pays €26.67 an hour — before tax, before the unpaid gap when a student cancels, before the August when nobody books.

That number, not the sticker price, is what you are actually earning. Almost every teacher who runs this exercise is surprised by it.

Then set a floor, not a price

Work out the minimum you need to make the week viable:

1. Your target annual income, after costs you carry yourself.
2. The teaching hours you can sustain — not the maximum you can survive, the number you can repeat in week 40. For most independent teachers this is far below 40.
3. The weeks you will actually teach. Subtract holidays, illness, and the quiet season your subject has. Nobody teaches 52 weeks.

Divide the first by the second times the third, then divide by the ratio you found above. That is your floor. It is not your price — it is the line below which the work stops being worth doing.

Let the market set the ceiling, not the price

Now look outward. Check what comparable teachers charge — same subject, same level, same format, same city or same timezone. Ignore the extremes at both ends.

What you are looking for is a range, and your position inside it is a decision about positioning, not arithmetic:

• Below the middle buys you volume and a full calendar. It also attracts the most price-sensitive students, who cancel most and stay shortest.
• At the middle is where most teachers sit, and where you compete on everything except price.
• Above the middle requires a reason a student can repeat to somebody else: a qualification, an exam record, a specialism, a way of working that visibly saves them time.

The floor and the range together give you your price. If your floor lands above the local range, you do not have a pricing problem — you have a market problem, and the fix is a different segment, not a smaller number.

Charge for the thing that is scarce

Two teachers with identical hourly rates can earn very differently, because they sell different units.

Selling the hour makes your income a function of hours, which are capped. Selling an outcome — an exam, a level, a term of structured work — lets you price on the value of the result and gives the student a reason to commit beyond the next lesson. A course of twelve sessions towards a specific exam is an easier thing to buy than "a lesson", and an easier thing to keep buying.

This is also the honest route out of the volume trap: you cannot add hours forever, but you can raise what an hour is worth.

Raising a price without losing the student

Rate rises fail on delivery, not on the number. Three rules make them uneventful:

• Give notice, in writing, once. Four to six weeks. Not an apology and not a negotiation — a statement with a date.
• Change the price for new students first. Let the new rate be normal for a few months before it reaches anyone who has been with you for years.
• Move existing students on a schedule, not a mood. Once a year, everyone, on the same date. A rise that arrives on a predictable date reads as a policy; a rise that arrives when you are frustrated reads as personal.

Expect to lose someone. A rate rise that costs you nobody was probably overdue and too small.

Make the price visible before the first lesson

The quietest source of money trouble is a price that was never quite stated. If your booking page shows the price of each subject and your cancellation terms before anyone books, every lesson starts from an agreement instead of an assumption — and you never have to raise the subject after the fact.

That is worth more than a few euros on the rate. A clear price, stated once and applied evenly, removes an entire category of conversation from your week — and it is the same discipline that keeps late payments from accumulating in the first place.