How Much Money Can You Make as a Tutor?

How can you make money as a private tutor?

One of the most-asked questions with any job, whatever the sector or industry, is ‘how much will I get paid’? And it is an important one. Although in a perfect world we would all chase our passions without a thought to money, we all still have bills that need to be paid.

If you are self-employed then you will be able to decide your pay rate, however high or low you want it to be. Just make sure you do not go miles above the average as this will cut off a large amount of your potential customers. Similarly , a very low hourly rate could lead people to question your expertise in the area and your trustworthiness as a tutor.

Prospects outline that as a private tutor, you can expect to make between £30 and £42 per hour. Be aware that this number will be only for your teaching hours and not for the work you do to prepare outside of them.

Advertising yourself online

To earn any money in the first place you need to have customers who will pay for your services.

One of the most successful means of gaining new customers will be advertising your tutoring services online. This can be particularly effective through social media which is often seen as the new word of mouth. You can start small by posting a short description of who you are and what you can offer as a tutor to your personal Facebook, appealing to your friends to share the post in order to reach a wider selection of people.

Another manner of advertising yourself online is to get a website that you fill it with information about you and your services. It does not have to be an expensive venture, with GoDaddy offering a free website builder.

You can also try pay-per-click (PPC) advertising which allows you to bid on specfic keywords on a given platform (Google AdWords is one of the most popular). For example, you will be able to bid on a keyword like tutoring near me so your website is seen by thousands of people searching for exactly that every month.

How to decide on an hourly rate

How much you charge for each hour is entirely up to you but you can look into a few things to help you decide. Average hourly charges can vary based on the subject you choose to teach, your level of expertise and your previous experience.

When settling on your hourly rate for a student you also need to factor in travel expenses, cost of any extra materials and the frequency they have lessons. You can talk with the parents and outline all of these reasons for your rate or discuss them in order to come to an agreement you both are happy with.

What you don’t get paid for as a tutor

Similar to teaching within schools, as a tutor you will do a lot of preparation that you won’t necessarily be paid for.

A large proportion of your time will be spent planning lessons and researching the subject matter. As you gain more experience, you will get quicker at this as you will have been able to build up a good repertoire of course material. However, you will still need to think about your student’s individual learning style, needs and expectations.

So...how much are private tutors paid?

As established above, this is not always a simple question to answer. It is best to think about what hourly price you think is fair to both your customer and yourself and draw up a mock schedule. Then add all these hours together, factor in any outside costs and there you have a very rough estimate of how much money you could make as a private tutor.