Most private teachers are paid by bank transfer, and most of them have a mental list of the families who are always two weeks late. Card payments are not a magic fix for that, but they remove one specific obstacle: the gap between a parent deciding to pay you and being somewhere they can actually do it.
Whether that is worth a percentage of every lesson fee depends on things you can work out for yourself. Here is how to decide.
What your options actually are
Four ways a private teacher realistically gets paid, with the trade-off in each:
- Bank transfer. No fee, universally understood, and entirely dependent on the payer remembering. Reconciling it is manual: you match a reference against an invoice, and half the references say "PIANO" or nothing at all.
- Cash. Immediate and free, but only works in person, produces no record unless you make one, and quietly stops working the moment you teach online.
- Card, via a pay link on the invoice. A fee per transaction, and it gets paid at the moment of intent, on a phone, in the two minutes after they read your message. Reconciliation is automatic because the payment arrives attached to the invoice.
- Direct debit or standing order. Best for a fixed monthly amount that rarely changes. It is the most reliable of the four, but it fits termly and per-lesson billing badly, because the amount moves.
These are not exclusive, and the usual sensible answer is a card link on the invoice with bank details printed underneath it, so the people who prefer a transfer can carry on.
What it costs, and who should pay it
Card processing costs a small percentage plus a few pence per payment. Rates change and vary by card, so check Stripe's published pricing (opens in a new tab) rather than trusting a number in a blog post, including this one.
The way to think about it is not "what does the fee cost me" but "what does not being paid cost me". Work out your own numbers: take a term's invoicing, and estimate how many are settled in the first week versus the fourth. If a meaningful share of your money arrives a month late, the fee is buying you that month, plus the evenings you would have spent chasing. If everyone pays you promptly already, it is buying you very little, and you should keep taking transfers.
On passing the fee to parents: you can, and most teachers do not. A surcharge on a lesson fee is a conversation on every invoice, it is capped by law for consumer cards, and it makes the cheap option look like the awkward one. If the fee genuinely bothers you, the cleaner move is to price it in once and stop thinking about it.
What Stripe asks you for
Stripe is what most small UK teaching businesses end up on, because it will onboard a sole trader without a company. Expect it to ask for your name and address, your date of birth, what the business does, and the bank account it should pay out to. It will usually want a photo of an identity document. That is all standard identity checking, and it is the same whether you teach two students or forty.
Two things worth knowing before you start. First, money does not land instantly: there is a delay on the first payout while the account is verified, and a rolling schedule after that. Second, the account is yours, not your software's — payments go from the parent to Stripe to your bank, and anything you connect it to is only creating the charge. If you stop using that software, the Stripe account and its history stay with you.
For what the connection looks like in My Studio Tracker, and what each Stripe status means when it goes wrong, see Card payments with Stripe.
When a card link is not the answer
A card link is the wrong answer in a few cases, and it is worth saying so plainly:
- A large termly invoice to a family who would rather transfer it. The fee scales with the amount, and on a few hundred pounds a transfer is genuinely cheaper for you and no slower for them if they intend to pay on time.
- Cash-in-hand teaching you are happy with. If you teach four students in your front room and they hand you a twenty, adding a payment processor solves nothing.
- A fixed monthly fee that never varies. A standing order costs nobody anything and needs no reminding.
The strongest case for cards is the messy middle: variable amounts, invoices sent by email, parents who mean to pay and forget.
What changes day to day
What actually changes is smaller and more useful than the marketing suggests.
You stop reconciling. A card payment arrives already attached to the invoice it paid, so the question "has the Robinson family paid for last term" has an answer on a screen rather than in your banking app. You stop sending bank details, because they are on the invoice. And the reminders you send become one-tap rather than a set of instructions — which matters, because a reminder that requires the person to go and find their card reader gets postponed.
What does not change: people who were not going to pay still do not pay. Cards shorten the gap for the willing; they do nothing about the unwilling. For that, see How to chase unpaid lesson fees without losing the student.
Card payments without the admin
In My Studio Tracker you connect your own Stripe account from Settings, and every invoice after that carries a pay button alongside your bank details. The money goes straight to you — it does not pass through us and we take nothing on top of Stripe's own fee.
When a payment lands, the invoice marks itself paid, the reminders stop, and your dashboard updates. Students never make an account or sign in to anything; they tap a link in an email or text and pay. Cash and bank transfers still work alongside it, and a student can tell you they have paid by another route, which pauses the chasing until you confirm it.