How Much Should I Charge for Online Tutoring

From teaching elementary-level students to helping university-level college students or professionals to prepare for their career, the opportunities in the space of online tutoring are endless. The global online tutoring market size is expected to grow at a CAGR of 14.7% till 2030. Getting into the online tutoring industry right now is the best choice you can take as an online educator. Choosing the right pricing is essential if your goal is to grow a profitable tutoring business.

How much to charge for tutoring is the common question that tutors ask when starting their online tutoring career. Deciding how much to charge for your online classes can be tricky, but it is significant as it influences your revenue.

The answer on how much should I charge for tutoring may vary depending on the subject you teach, your qualifications and experience, and various other factors.

In this blog, we are going to explore in detail all the important aspects that will help you decide on your tutoring rates.

How much to charge for tutoring

To understand how much to charge for college tutoring or any other tutoring service, let’s get straight into common numbers.

As an online tutor, you can choose to set your tutoring rates to anywhere between $20 to $100 per hour. Base your tutoring charges on the complexity of the niche you serve, the grade level of learners, your educational qualification, overall experience and expertise in the tutoring industry.

As with any other business there will be a lot of costs associated with online tutoring and you should overlook them when figuring out your tutoring charges.

Factors that can affect your tutoring rates

As we said in the beginning, there are a lot of factors associated with online tutoring that can affect your tutoring rates. Here are some of the aspects that can be taken into consideration when setting your private tutor rates.

Your tutoring experience and the time spent

When finding how much should I charge per hour for tutoring, your experience and time are important factors that can influence your pricing. Consider the total hours you spent in creating your lessons, and online classes. Calculate the hours spent on developing the resources for your online classes to decide the private tutor rates.

The cost to promote your tutoring services

The biggest mistake most online tutors make when setting your pricing is not considering costs related to promotions when pricing online classes. If you are brainstorming about how much to charge for tutoring, make sure you calculate the costs for paid promotions, advertising campaigns, and more.

The expected impact

When conducting online classes or selling an online course, you are selling an outcome that has an impact on your target learners' lives. When pricing your classes, ask, "How your target learners will benefit from your online classes." For example, if you are offering test prep classes for higher exams or classes for professionals to improve their careers, the expected impact is greater than a normal elementary level class. Hence, you can charge a high rate for your classes based on the final outcome.

Exclusivity of content

Your years of tutoring experience are considered as a high perceived value-adding content for your target audience. In the bottom line, learners pay to access something they value so that you can price your online classes accordingly.

Include multiple learning resources in your class bundle as it enhances the value of your classes so that you can price them higher. Add videos, workbooks, templates, eBooks, and online courses to ensure your learners are supplemented with different learning styles to learn effectively. Integrating different eLearning resources and content formats is also a great way to convince your learners to believe you are offering them more value than what they have paid for.

Tips on how to price your online tutoring sessions

Pricing your online classes is a tricky task by itself; you can use these tips when planning for how much to charge for tutoring.

Understand your target market

Conduct market research to identify and understand your target audience and their needs. When setting tutor hourly rates, don't make the mistake of copying the pricing strategy of another tutoring business. Yes, average pricing based on industry standards can indeed work as a great reference point, but the value of each online class differs based on the following factors.

• Your unique subject expertise.
• The final results your learners will get.
• The purpose and value of your online courses.
• The number of tutors your online tutoring platform has.

Focus on the transformation you will offer

If your classes deliver a measurable impact or transformation, you can charge higher for it. Let's explore some of the transformations that learners won't mind paying more for.

• Personal fulfillment
• Betterment of career.
• Better life quality
• Mastering a new skill

Analyse your revenue goals

How much to charge for tutoring per hour greatly depends on the revenue you need to generate. For example, if your end goal is to earn $6000 per month by teaching your students, and your fee is $30 for a course, you will have to sell 200 courses every month. As you can clearly see, this is not a realistic figure which means you need to price your courses higher.

Calculate the perceived value

Most tutors make the mistake of automatically assigning a small tutoring fee thinking that they will get more conversions. But this is a wrong attitude. Lower tutoring charges doesn't always imply more sales. It might devalue your course as your target learners might feel the lower price is due to the lower quality.

Understand the value of your offerings and the value that you are offering your learners. The more value you offer to your learners, the more you can charge as tutoring fee.

Allocate the budget for promotions

Regardless of how great your teaching style is, it isn’t easy to bring sales with just organic promotions. You will have to perform marketing activities to promote your online tutoring platform and this service. Make sure you allocate $1000 or even more on paid promotions like advertising.

Offer payment choices

Like I said earlier, if you ask how much do tutors make per hour, it greatly depends on the price set for a course or a class. If you are worried that your learners won't be able to afford the price you set, get creative with the payment options instead of lowering the charges. Building your online tutoring platform using a clone script makes it easy to implement different payment choices as you can customize the script according to your requirements.

Choose an all-in-one tutoring software like Pinlearn to build your tutoring platform that helps you host both live classes and self-paced courses. You can set tutoring rates per hour based on your business requirements, and the platform helps you from building your site to processing payments and more.

Try the following payment options to make sure you cater to learners of all types and budgets.

Installment payment

A monthly payment of $600 for 3 months would be more attractive to users than a one-time fee of $1800. By following installment payments, you will be able to cater to learners who can plan for the budget every month and offer discounts to learners who pay the full fee.

Tiered pricing

This is yet another smart way instead of lowering your tutoring charges. The basic price may include a single class or the course alone, but for each pricing tier, you can add bonus resources or additional learning content.

Set the price levels

Before deciding on your tutor charge, do market research to study about tutoring companies in your niche and the pricing strategies they follow. If you are just entering the industry, then you must attempt to price your online classes a little above the average industry pricing. Whereas, if you have been established in the industry for some time and you have teaching expertise and qualifications, you can price near to the top of online tutoring businesses in your niche.

Pricing strategies to adopt to grow your online tutoring business

The tutoring rates you set hold a key position in the growth of your tutoring business. If you want to know how much should a tutor charge per hour, here are some of the pricing strategies you can adopt to generate revenue.

Price per lesson

In this pricing plan, learners pay before or after each online tutoring session. This method is great for making your new clients comfortable as they would like to try out your service first before getting into a long-term commitment.

Price per period of time

Paying per period of time requires learners to pay in advance for a week or month based on the number of online classes they can attend during the period. If you are calculating how to charge for tutoring, consider the overall price you would receive every month in this pricing plan.

Learners will find this pricing strategy convenient as they don't have to bother paying for each session individually. This is great for tutoring businesses as well as you get money upfront and doesn't have to worry about students forgetting to pay for each class.

Subscriptions

Another popular pricing strategy online tutors adopt these days is subscriptions, where learners have to pay a recurring fee every month or year to avail learning packages. You can charge your learners high prices along with discounts as it is convenient to price your classes and online courses based on the value offered.

How to know if your tutoring rates are set correctly?

When it comes to setting tutoring rates for your classes, keep in mind that there is no single formula or standard. Know the quality you offer to your learners and be and be ready to experiment with different pricing.

If you are getting good traffic to your tutoring website but no conversions, you must understand it is time to change your approach. But don't immediately assume your tutoring rate is the problem.

Start by testing the following aspects, and changing the price must be the last thing in your list.

• Are you targeting the right audience?
• Do you address the challenges faced by your target learners?
• Is your CTA impressive?
• Can your learners relate with the outcomes your online classes offer?

How to justify a high tutoring rate?

Now that you know why it's important not to under-price your courses let's look at how to justify premium tutoring charges.

Along with the question of how much I charge as a tutor, another question most tutors ask themselves is- "Is it fair enough to ask for a high tutoring rate? You can do certain things that will justify the premium tutoring charges and make your offerings stand out from the competition. So let's explore them one by one.

• Offer quality content and value to your students.
• Serve a specific niche.
• Build an online tutoring marketplace that helps students to find tutors and learn subjects of their choice.

Conclusion

Hopefully, by now, you might have got a better understanding of how much to charge for tutoring. While this blog doesn't give you a magic figure, we have covered some of the pricing tactics you can adopt and other tips that will help you set the ideal tutoring rates for you. The truth is that the only way you can finalize on the best tutoring charges is to actually try out to see how much your learners are willing to pay for your classes. Experiment with different pricing plans to find the tutoring rates that suit you.