Tutoring rate calculator
Start from the income you need, not from what everyone else charges. Enter your goal, your teachable hours and your time off — get the hourly rate that actually funds your life.
Your hourly rate
€40
That covers your €31.91 teaching rate plus the unpaid prep and admin around each lesson (€39.89 exactly, rounded up to a rate you can actually say out loud).
- Teaching hours per month
- ≈ 78 h
- Rate before counting prep time
- €31.91
- Rate with prep time priced in
- €39.89
The same take-home on a 25%-commission marketplace
You'd need to charge €53.19 per hour — the commission at your volume adds up to €12500.00 a year. Independently, that money stays yours.
How do you calculate a tutoring rate?
Work backwards from the income, not forwards from a guess. The calculation has three honest steps: your yearly teaching hours are your weekly lesson hours times your working weeks (52 minus holidays, sick days, and the weeks students disappear); dividing your income goal by those hours gives your base rate; and pricing in the unpaid minutes around each lesson — preparation, notes, messages — turns it into a rate that pays for all your time, not just the time on camera.
Most tutors who feel underpaid skipped step one or three: they divided by 52 weeks nobody actually works, or priced the lesson and donated the prep. The calculator makes both visible. For the conversation side of pricing — including word-for-word scripts for raising rates with existing students — see how to set your tutoring rates and the rate-raise conversation.
Why is your rate higher than you think?
Because an employee's salary hides costs that your rate has to carry openly. Nobody pays you for holidays, sick days, or the August when half your students travel — so the weeks you don't teach must be funded by the weeks you do. Nobody pays for the fifteen minutes of prep around each lesson, the invoice you write, or the “can we move tomorrow's lesson?” messages — so the lesson price has to. A rate that looks generous next to a local salary is usually just a salary doing its accounting in public.
That's also why the cheapest way to “raise” your rate is to shrink the unpaid work itself: fewer scheduling back-and-forths, invoices that write themselves, prep that builds on a record of what each student did last week. Every unpaid minute you automate is a real pay rise at the same advertised price.
What does a marketplace commission do to your rate?
It quietly splits your advertised rate from your real one. Marketplaces typically keep 15–33% of every lesson, so a tutor charging €30 on a 25%-commission platform takes home €22.50 — and matching an independent €30 take-home means advertising €40. The slider in the calculator shows your own numbers, including what the commission adds up to per year at your volume. Whether that's a fair price for the students a marketplace brings you is a real question — we've laid out both sides honestly in Tuton vs tutoring marketplaces.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good hourly rate for online English tutoring?⌄
There's no universal number — rates vary enormously by market, specialism and experience, and anyone quoting you 'the average' is guessing. The more useful question is the one this calculator inverts: what rate funds the income you actually need at the hours you can actually teach? That gives you a personal floor. From there, specialists (business English, exam prep) reliably command more than general conversation practice, because the outcome is worth more to the student.
Should new tutors charge less while starting out?⌄
A modest founding discount is fine; a bargain-basement rate is a trap. Price low and you attract price-shoppers who leave for the next discount, while anchoring yourself so low that doubling your rate later feels impossible to existing students. A better pattern: charge near your calculated rate from day one, and offer your first few students a clearly-labelled founding rate that you both know is temporary.
How often should I raise my tutoring rates?⌄
Review yearly; raise for new students first. New students never knew the old rate, so there's no conversation to have — your booking page just shows the new number. Existing students get notice a month or two ahead, ideally with the framing of everything they now get that they didn't when they started. Our rate-raise scripts post has word-for-word ways to do this without losing anyone.
Why should prep time change my hourly rate?⌄
Because the lesson isn't the whole job. If every lesson hour comes with fifteen unpaid minutes of preparation, notes and messages, a €24 lesson actually pays €19.20 per hour worked — a 20% silent pay cut. Pricing prep into the rate is how tutors with identical calendars end up with very different incomes. (The other fix is shrinking prep itself, which is much of what tutoring software is for.)
Do I need a higher rate on a tutoring marketplace?⌄
Yes, mathematically. If a platform keeps 15–33% of every lesson, matching an independent take-home of €30/hour requires charging roughly €35–45 on the platform. The calculator's commission slider shows your exact numbers. Marketplaces earn that cut when they bring you students you couldn't reach; the question is whether that's still true once your schedule is full of regulars.
Whatever rate you set, keep all of it.
Tuton charges a flat subscription and 0% commission — students pay you directly, and the unpaid admin your rate has to cover (invoices, scheduling, lesson records) mostly does itself. See pricing.