Most teachers set their rate by asking around, landing somewhere near the middle, and then not changing it for four years. It is an understandable way to arrive at a number and a poor way to run a business, because it tells you what other people charge and nothing at all about whether you can live on it.
There is a better order: work out what you need to earn, divide by the weeks you actually teach, and only then look sideways at what everyone else is doing.
Start from your income, not from the market
A published rate card is a useful sanity check and a terrible starting point. Two teachers with the same hourly rate can end up thousands apart, because what decides your income is not the rate — it is how many weeks a year you teach, how many of those lessons actually happen and get paid for, and how much unpaid work sits around each one.
So start from the other end. Decide what you want the teaching to bring in over a year, then let the arithmetic tell you the rate that produces it. If the answer is uncomfortably high, that is information: it means the shape of your week, not your pricing confidence, is the thing to change.
The sum, worked through
Here is the whole calculation, with a worked example. Say you want teaching to bring in £30,000 a year before tax and costs.
The instinct is to divide by 52 weeks. Suppose you teach 25 half-hour lessons a week:
- £30,000 ÷ 52 weeks = £577 a week
- £577 ÷ 25 lessons = £23 a lesson
But almost nobody teaches 52 weeks. Three twelve-week terms is 36 teaching weeks; school holidays, half-terms and your own holiday account for the rest. Run it again on the weeks you actually work:
- £30,000 ÷ 36 weeks = £833 a week
- £833 ÷ 25 lessons = £33.33 a lesson
The same target income, the same diary, and a rate that is 44% higher. Dividing by 52 is the single most common pricing mistake in private teaching, and it is why a lot of teachers feel busy and underpaid at the same time: they priced for a year they do not work.
Do this with your own numbers. Count the weeks you genuinely teach, not the weeks in the year. If you would rather not do the arithmetic by hand, the lesson rate calculator does exactly this sum, free and with nothing to sign up for.
The hours nobody charges for
Twenty-five half-hour lessons is twelve and a half hours of teaching. It is not twelve and a half hours of work.
Add preparation, travel between houses, writing up notes, planning for exams, chasing invoices, answering messages about whether Thursday can move. If that comes to five hours a week, your working week is 17½ hours, and the £833 is really:
- £66.67 per contact hour, which is the number you would quote
- £47.60 per hour actually worked, which is the number you are living on
That gap is where the feeling of being underpaid comes from, and it is worth knowing because some of it is recoverable. Travel is the expensive one: four students in one street is a different business from four students across a town. Admin is the other, and it is the part you can shrink without teaching a single extra lesson.
What comes off the top
Before comparing your rate to an employed salary, take off the things you pay for that an employer would have covered: room hire if you do not teach at home, public liability and instrument insurance, tuning and maintenance, professional membership, sheet music, exam fees you front, software subscriptions, and the share of your phone and car that the teaching uses.
These are individually small and collectively not. Add them up once a year and take them off the top before you decide whether the number is good. On tax and what you can claim, talk to an accountant or read HMRC's own guidance rather than a page like this one — it is genuinely specific to your circumstances, and getting it wrong is expensive.
Checking yourself against everyone else
Now look sideways, with the number you have already worked out in hand. Two sources worth more than asking in a Facebook group: the Incorporated Society of Musicians (opens in a new tab) and the Musicians' Union (opens in a new tab). The ISM surveys what its members actually charge rather than recommending a rate, and in its 2026 survey of 1,084 teachers the median private lesson rate was £40 an hour, with answers ranging from £9 to £105. Half of those teachers had raised their rates since September 2024, by an average of £3.20 an hour.
Treat that £40 as a midpoint, not a target, and check the current survey rather than this page — figures quoted in articles are exactly how out-of-date rates get passed around. The spread is the more useful half of it anyway: a range from £9 to £105 tells you that almost nothing about this number is fixed by the market.
Then adjust for the things a national figure cannot know. Where you teach matters more than anything else. So does whether students come to you, whether you prepare people for graded exams, and how long your waiting list is. A full book with people waiting is the clearest signal in the whole business that you are charging too little.
If your worked-out number lands well above local rates, you have three honest options: teach more lessons, cut the unpaid hours, or accept a smaller income from teaching. Quietly charging below what you need is not a fourth option, it is the first three deferred.
Putting your rates up
Rates need to move, and the longer they have not, the harder it feels. Three things make it straightforward:
- Give a term's notice, at a term boundary. "From September, lessons will be £35." Never mid-term, never with less than a few weeks' warning.
- Do not justify it. One sentence, no apology, no explanation of your costs. Explaining invites negotiation; parents accept a stated rate far more readily than a defended one.
- Raise everyone together. Grandfathering old students onto old rates feels kind and creates two classes of student and a rate you can never fix.
Expect to lose almost nobody. The people who leave over a modest rise are usually the ones who cancel most, and their slot is worth more to somebody on your waiting list.
Once the number is set
Once you have a number, the job is making sure it is the number you actually receive. That is a different problem: lessons that happen but never get invoiced, cancellations absorbed out of goodwill, and invoices that quietly go unpaid all pull your real rate below the one on your price list.
My Studio Tracker holds your default lesson price and length, so every new lesson and invoice starts from the right figure without you thinking about it, and you can set a different price per student where you need to. Marking a lesson attended is what puts it on an invoice, so nothing taught goes unbilled, and your cancellation policy is applied as you record each absence rather than decided in the moment.
The dashboard then shows what you have actually collected against what you invoiced — which, once a year, is the only honest check on whether your rate is real.