Your Real Hourly Rate as a Tutor: How Commission and Unpaid Hours Shrink What You Earn

A tutor's real hourly rate is the money you actually receive in a week, after platform commission and costs, divided by all the hours you worked to earn it, including the unpaid ones. It is almost always lower than the price on your profile. In the example week in this guide, a $25 lesson becomes $11.84 an hour once a 25% commission and 8.75 hours of unpaid work are counted, and about $15 an hour with the same hours on your own booking link.

Most tutors have never calculated it, because the headline rate is the only number a platform shows. This guide gives you the formula, a worked week with every step visible, the four changes that move the result and an honest note on what changes when you leave a platform and what does not. The tutor in the example is made up, and so are her hours; the point is the method, so use your own numbers.

The formula: money received divided by hours worked

Real hourly rate equals (lesson income − commission − costs) ÷ (taught hours + every unpaid hour). The top of the fraction is what lands in your account. The bottom is the number of hours you gave up that week to produce it. Two things make the answer smaller than your price: the top is reduced by what the platform keeps, and the bottom is larger than the hours you taught.

Start with the top. Marketplaces such as Preply and iTalki publish commissions that, between them, run from about 15% to 33% on an ordinary lesson, and they differ in how they treat trial lessons. Preply, for instance, keeps the whole of the first lesson with a new student. Card processors also take a fee on direct payments, typically around 2.9% plus 30 cents per payment in the US, and it varies by country. Both pages are linked at the end of this section so you can check the current figures.

Rates checked 25 Oct 2026. Sources: Preply commission model · iTalki commission.

Card processing fees vary by country and change; the figure in this guide is an example, not a quote. Check the pricing page of your own processor. Sources: Stripe pricing.

Now the bottom. Count six kinds of hour: the lessons you taught and were paid for; trial lessons that earned nothing; preparation; messaging and admin; slots a student missed or cancelled late; and anything you spent on tools. The last one belongs on the top, as a cost, but it is easier to see in the same table.

To find your own figure, copy these seven lines into a notes file and fill them in for one ordinary week.

• Lesson income: the lessons you taught and were paid for, each at its price, added up.
• Commission: what the platform kept, in dollars, read from your earnings statement and not from memory.
• Payment fees: what you paid yourself for card or PayPal payments, if students pay you directly.
• Software: a monthly price multiplied by 12 and divided by 52 gives the share that belongs to one week.
• Taught hours: the time on the clock for the lessons you were paid for.
• Unpaid hours: trials, preparation, messages and admin, and slots that went empty.
• The answer: (line 1 minus lines 2, 3 and 4) divided by (line 5 plus line 6).

A worked week, step by step

Take Maya, a made-up IELTS speaking tutor who charges $25 for a one-hour lesson and teaches 15 paid lessons in a week. On a platform that keeps 25% (inside the published range), 15 lessons at $25 is $375, of which she receives $281.25. Her unpaid hours that week: two trial lessons, where the platform keeps the whole first lesson, so she earns nothing for 2 hours; 15 minutes of preparation for each lesson, which is 3.75 hours; two hours of messages, rescheduling and payment follow-up; and one slot that a student missed without notice, which she could not fill. That is 8.75 unpaid hours.

Two details in the table are worth a second look. First, the gap between the platform and the own link is $75.60 for the week ($356.85 minus $281.25). Over 44 teaching weeks, which allows for holidays and sick days, that is about $3,326. Second, even with no commission at all, the real rate is $15.03 and not $25, because 8.75 of her 23.75 hours earn nothing. Leaving a platform fixes the first problem. It does not fix the second.

A second tutor: a higher price and more preparation

Maya's week has many lessons and little preparation. Many tutors are the other way round. Take Tomás, another made-up tutor, who teaches SAT maths at $60 an hour on his own booking link and gives eight paid lessons a week. Each lesson needs half an hour of preparation, because he builds practice sets from the last mistakes a student made. He also gives one free introductory hour to a prospective student, spends an hour and a half on messages and scheduling, and loses no slots to no-shows this week.

Walk through it. Lesson income is 8 × $60 = $480. Card fees at 2.9% plus 30 cents on each of eight payments come to $16.32 ($13.92 plus $2.40). The $12 Pro plan costs $2.77 a week when spread over 52 weeks. Money received is $480 − $16.32 − $2.77 = $460.91. Hours: 8 taught, plus 4 of preparation, 1 of trial and 1.5 of admin, so 14.5 in all. His real hourly rate is $460.91 ÷ 14.5 = $31.79.

That is a little over half of the $60 on his profile, with no platform commission at all. Had the same week gone through a platform keeping 25%, he would have received $360 and his rate would be $24.83. Set the two tutors side by side and a pattern appears: Maya's real rate is 60% of her price on her own link, Tomás's is 53%. The gap between price and real rate depends less on where you teach than on how much of your week is not teaching.

His preparation is also why his students improve, so the answer is not to cut it but to price it in, which the next sections turn into a number.

What the unpaid hours are made of

Unpaid hours hide in plain sight because none of them feels like work on its own. Each one is small. Together, in the example, they add up to more than a third of a tutor's week, so it is worth naming them.

• Trial lessons. A free or reduced first lesson is a sensible way to win a student, but it is still an hour of your week. If it converts one student in two, each regular student cost you two hours up front.
• Preparation. Fifteen minutes per lesson sounds modest until you multiply it by the lessons in a week. Exam preparation such as IELTS, TOEFL or the SAT tends to need more, and a new student needs far more than a returning one.
• Messages and admin. Answering "can we move to Thursday?", sending the link, writing the recap, asking for payment. These tasks come in small pieces across the whole day, which makes them easy to underestimate.
• Missed and late-cancelled slots. A student who disappears 20 minutes before the lesson leaves an hour you cannot sell. A written cancellation policy turns some of those hours back into income; our guide to no-shows covers it.
• Profile and ranking work on a marketplace: fast replies, keeping your calendar open, discounting to stay visible. It is real effort, even though no lesson is attached to it.

How much preparation time moves the number

Preparation is the largest unpaid block in both examples, and the one tutors control most. The table keeps Maya's week fixed and changes only the preparation time per lesson, so you can see what each extra quarter of an hour costs.

The first quarter of an hour costs about $2.20 an hour on the platform and $2.80 on her own link. The second costs less, about $1.60 and $2, because a rate is a fraction and each added hour weighs a little less. None of this argues for preparing less. It argues for noticing it: reusing a lesson plan for a second student, keeping a bank of worksheets, or using the AI lesson plan and homework tools on Pro as a first draft to correct can each take minutes off the quarter of an hour. Check every draft before a student sees it.

Four changes that move your real rate

Four levers change the result, and they are not equally powerful. The table shows what each does to the platform column of the example week, one change at a time, so you can see which is worth your effort first.

Read the table honestly. Moving to your own link is the largest single change, and a price rise from $25 to $30 is second. On a platform the commission takes a quarter of that rise, so $5 more per lesson becomes $3.75 more for you. Cutting unpaid trials and trimming admin are smaller, but they need no marketing and carry no risk of losing a student. Notice too that the own-link row changes only the money coming in: the hours stay at 23.75, which is why the unpaid time needs its own attention.

To see your own figures for the commission part, use the Commission Calculator below. It takes your weekly hours, your rate and your platform's commission, and shows what you keep per year on a platform and on your own link. It is free to use, and you do not need an account to see the result.

Work backwards: the price you need for the rate you want

The formula runs in reverse, which is how a real rate becomes a price. The price you need equals the real rate you want, multiplied by all your hours and divided by your paid hours, then adjusted for what comes off the top. Maya's hours ratio is 23.75 ÷ 15 = 1.583: for every paid hour she works 1.583 hours in all.

Suppose she wants a real rate of $20 an hour. Before any commission she needs $20 × 1.583 = $31.67 for each paid hour. On a platform that keeps 25% she keeps 75 cents of each dollar, so the price must be $31.67 ÷ 0.75 = $42.22. On her own link there is no commission, and the card fee and her share of the plan add about $1.45 per lesson, so the price comes to about $33.12. Check it: 15 lessons at $33.12 is $496.80; after card fees of $18.91 and the plan share of $2.77 she receives $475.12, and $475.12 ÷ 23.75 is $20.00.

One caution: the $42 is what she would need to charge to net $20, and whether students will pay it is a market question, not a maths one. Look at what comparable tutors charge before you raise your price by a third, and raise it for new students first.

How to track your own unpaid hours for two weeks

You do not need an app. A notes file or a paper notebook is enough. For two ordinary weeks, write down every block of tutoring-related time that is not a paid lesson: the minute you start preparing, the minute you finish, and a three-word label. At the end of the second week, add the labels up and divide each total by two.

• Write "trial", "prep", "admin" or "missed" next to every block, so you can add them by label later.
• Count messages as you send them, not at the end of the day, because by then you will have forgotten half.
• Note the slots that went empty on short notice, with the student and the notice they gave.
• At the end, fill in the table above with your numbers and compare the platform and own-link columns.

Tutafy helps with the top of the fraction, not the bottom. The Earnings page adds up what you earned and what is still owed for 30 days, 90 days, 12 months or all time, and the Calendar shows the lessons you taught. It does not record preparation or admin time, so that count stays in your notebook.

Mistakes that make the number look better than it is

A calculation helps only if it is honest. Six slips are common, and each one makes the rate look higher than it really is.

• Dividing by taught hours only. It turns $11.84 back into $18.75, which is $281.25 divided by 15 taught hours.
• Using the price instead of the payout. A platform shows the lesson price; your statement shows what you were paid. Use the statement.
• Treating a good week as a typical one. Add up four ordinary weeks and divide by four, and count the weeks of holiday, illness and exams when nobody booked.
• Forgetting trial lessons that never became students. A trial that converts is an investment; one that does not is a cost, and either way it belongs in the unpaid hours.
• Leaving out tools you pay for only to run lessons: a scheduling plan, a video plan, a card-payment fee.
• Reading the result as take-home pay. The figure is before income tax and, depending on your country, social contributions, which differ everywhere and are not covered here.

What changes when you leave a platform, and what does not

Leaving a platform changes who keeps the commission and who owns the relationship. It does not change how long it takes to prepare a lesson, and it adds one job: finding students yourself. A marketplace is also worth its cut in some situations, such as when you are brand new and have no students, when you want a steady flow of trial requests, or when you dislike running anything that resembles a business. Be straight with yourself about which describes you.

Many tutors do both for a while: a marketplace for discovery and their own link for students they already teach. If you choose that route, read your platform's terms on contacting students outside it, and move across only students with whom you have a genuine relationship. Our guide to leaving Preply walks through the practical steps.

When a lower real rate is fine, and when group lessons change the maths

A low real rate is not always a problem. A new tutor with no reviews is buying students with unpaid hours, and a marketplace's first-lesson rules are part of the price of being found. A subject you love may be worth a lower rate for a few students, and a lesson you teach again next week needs far less preparation the second time. What matters is that the number is a choice you made with the figures in front of you, and that you know how long you will accept it.

Group lessons change the arithmetic because the preparation is shared. Suppose a group lesson needs the same 15 minutes of preparation as one of Maya's lessons and four students each pay $12 for the hour. That is $48 of income for 1.25 hours of work, or $38.40 an hour before commission and fees, against $20 an hour for a $25 one-to-one lesson with the same preparation ($25 ÷ 1.25). The catch is that a group needs four students free at the same time, which is harder to find than one, and some platforms treat group lessons differently, so check the rules of yours.

Where Tutafy fits, and where it does not

Tutafy is all-in-one software for independent tutors and small centers of up to five tutors. It takes 0% commission on what students pay you, on every plan. The Free plan covers up to 10 students with a booking page, a built-in video classroom, email reminders and a PayPal link. Pro is $12 a month for unlimited students, card payments with Stripe, packages, coupons, subscriptions and the AI tools, and Academy is $29 a month for up to five tutors with team payroll.

It will not find you students, and it will not shorten your preparation. What it removes is the commission and a share of the admin: a booking page that students use without messaging you, email reminders before lessons, and a record of who has paid. If your admin hours in the table are high, that last part is where the second column of the example improves further; the example above deliberately did not assume it.