How much should you charge for tutoring?

Two tutors charging the same rate can be running completely different businesses. One preps ten minutes per lesson from materials she has taught for years; the other builds every worksheet from scratch and preps forty. One teaches forty-six weeks a year; the other loses six extra weeks to exam seasons and school holidays. Same rate, incomes a third apart.

A quoted rate also hides the cancellation gap. A tutor who charges for late cancellations keeps close to all of her booked income; one who quietly forgives them donates a slice of it back every month. None of this shows up in the number people trade in Facebook groups.

Decide what the practice must produce per month — before taxes, honestly chosen. Multiply by twelve. That is the yearly target.

Now count the lessons that will actually be paid. Realistic teaching slots per week, times the weeks you truly teach (fifty-two minus holidays, illness, and the dead weeks), times the share of lessons that survive cancellation. That product is almost always smaller than people assume, and it is the honest denominator.

Divide the target by the paid lessons. That is your rate — not aspiration, arithmetic. As a worked example, not a statistic: a tutor wanting €2,500 a month, teaching 20 slots a week for 46 weeks with a tenth lost to cancellations, needs about €36 a lesson, not the €31 the naive division suggests.

A 60-minute lesson with 30 minutes of preparation is 90 minutes of work. If your rate only covers the visible hour, you are paying yourself two-thirds of what you think. Either the rate carries the prep, or the prep has to shrink — those are the only two honest options.

Shrinking it is partly a materials problem: if your exercises live in books you already own, the bottleneck is finding and assembling, which is exactly the hour tools can take over. That is the premise Halgo is built on, but the arithmetic holds whichever tool you use — or none.

The clearest signal is a full roster with a waiting list: at that point your price is measurably below what your time clears at. Raising for new students first is the low-drama path — existing families keep their rate for a term, new enquiries hear the new one, and the roster reprices itself over months without a single awkward conversation.

When existing families do move to the new rate, say it early, plainly, and once: the date, the number, and no apology paragraph. Families leave over surprises far more often than over prices.

The framework above is a two-minute calculation. We built a small calculator that runs it with your own numbers — prep, holidays and cancellations included, no signup, no email gate: the lesson rate calculator.