As an italki teacher you can set your own prices for individual lessons and Packages, but how much should you be charging? The lowest price per hour a Professional Teacher can charge is $8 USD, and $4 USD for Community Tutor.
How much you charge will always be up to you, but there are a few things to consider.
- Pricing strategy for new teachers
New teachers don’t have a positive teaching reputation yet, so raising your price after you’ve earned good lesson statistics and reviews is a good strategy. We recommend keeping your price competitive until you build up a loyal community of students.
It’s likely that you will lose some students after raising your price. On the other hand, with your good lesson statistics and reviews, you’ll be able to attract new students willing to pay your higher price.
- What’s your occupancy status?
If your schedule is always fully booked and you’re always welcoming new students, you should consider raising your price. Make sure to check your calendar and note down your occupancy status. You can also check which times slots are popular with your students, and consider opening up more slots during these times. We’ve published the peak times for major student markets for each teaching language in the Teacher Handbook.
- How do you compare to other teachers?
Now the question is: What’s a reasonable increase?
Try comparing your prices with other teachers who have a similar background to you. This includes teaching language, teacher type, lesson category and tag, nationality, education, experience and qualifications. How much do they charge? Are their prices competitive? You can check their occupancy rate and see if their price is ideal.
We recommend checking the average price for different teacher types and lesson categories in the Teacher Handbook. (Multilingual versions available.)
Discounts are also important! For students who purchase Packages, here are the average discount rates:
5 Lesson Package: 5-8%
10 Lesson Package: 5-8%
20 Lesson Package: 6-9%
Teachers usually offer a lower Trial Lesson price to attract new students. Here are the average prices for Trial Lessons in the most popular languages.
German: 6-8 USD
Korean: 5-7 USD
French: 5-7 USD
Japanese: 5-7 USD
English: 4-6 USD
Chinese: 4-6 USD
Spanish: 3.5-5.5 USD
Italian: 3-5 USD
Portuguese: 3-5 USD
Arabic: 3-5 USD
- What do your students think?
When you tell your students about raising your price, what do they think? You can present the reasons for the raise and see what percentage of increase is acceptable for them.
- Examine your own financial situation
You can also look at your own financial situation and calculate an acceptable income.
How to lock prices for old students
If you decide to increase your price, please let your students know at least 1 month in advance. You can suggest to your current students to purchase a Package now so that the price of those Package lessons will be locked to the old price.
You can also manually alter the price of a lesson request. When you receive a lesson request, you can modify it and send it back to the student to accept, or send a Lesson Invitation to the student with a modified price.
Comments
7 comments
Wonderfully useful article, thank you very much for such valuable advice, and keep up the great work you're doing! Much appreciated! Thumbs up! 👍 ^^
A mí también me ha parecido muy útil, porque siempre me ha surgido dudas relacionadas con este tema. Muchas gracias.
Some great data here. I think it would be a good idea to develop a system where the teacher could set a discount price to a specific student. I am also noticing that many students don't take advantage of package discounts for some reason. Perhaps it is something that can be advertised more clearly.
Merci pour cet article
Thank you for this valuable advice and tips.
Terima kasih :)
It would actually great if Italki could finally allow to set prices for students separately in order for teachers to be able to raise prices without affecting older students if desired and having more control over our fees in general. Other platforms allow this for years and it would be great to see it here as well as new students are usually confused when they see different sets of lesson fees.
Thank you for this article! Offering different prices to older students would be amazing, or being able to use some type of special discount code for different students!
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