What to charge for music lessons
· 4 min read
Teachers routinely undercharge, then take on too many students to compensate, then burn out. Here's how to arrive at a rate that works.
Music teaching has a well-worn trap. A teacher sets a rate that feels reasonable, fills their week, works out they're not earning much, and takes on more students — which makes the rate worse, because now they have less time to prepare and more scheduling to juggle.
The way out isn't more students. It's arithmetic done properly at the start.
Count the hours you're not paid for
A one-hour lesson is not one hour of work.
Add: the time before it (setting up, remembering where this student got to), the time after (notes, sending material), the scheduling messages, the preparation, and the gap the lesson creates in your day — because a lesson at 4pm and another at 7pm doesn't leave you a usable three hours.
Realistically an hour lesson costs somewhere between 1.3 and 1.75 hours of your life. If you price at £30/hour thinking you're earning £30/hour, you're earning closer to £18.
This is the single biggest reason teaching feels underpaid. Usually it isn't the rate — it's that the rate was set against the wrong denominator.
Then decide what your week can hold
Teaching is not linearly scalable. Most people find that beyond fifteen to twenty contact hours a week, the quality drops and they start resenting it.
So: pick a realistic weekly ceiling first, decide what you need to earn, and divide. If those numbers don't meet, the answer is a higher rate, not more hours — because more hours has a hard limit and eventually costs you the playing career the teaching was supposed to support.
Cheap rates attract the wrong students
This is counterintuitive and consistently true.
Students who choose on price are the ones who cancel, don't practise, and quit in six weeks. That's not snobbery about money — it's that someone who picked you because you were cheapest has made a decision about how much this matters to them, and it shows up in whether they do the work.
Students who chose you for a reason turn up, practise, stay for years, and recommend you. They're also much less exhausting to teach.
Raising your rate is uncomfortable and usually results in a smaller, better, more reliable roster earning the same or more.
Things that genuinely justify a higher rate
- Being a working player. Someone learning from a person who does this for a living is buying something a generalist can't offer. Say that you gig or do sessions; it's relevant.
- Specialism. Exam preparation, a specific technique, a specific style, adult beginners, kids under eight — anything narrow. Specialists charge more because the alternative isn't a cheaper teacher, it's no teacher.
- Actually preparing. Custom material, recordings of the exercises, notes after each lesson. Most teachers don't. It's very visible when you do.
- Reliability. Being the teacher who never cancels is worth money to parents in particular, and it compounds through recommendations.
Structures that work better than pure hourly
Blocks. Six or ten lessons paid up front. Better for you (predictable, fewer transactions) and better for them (they commit, so they actually progress). Modest discount versus single lessons — enough to make the choice easy, not enough to erode the rate.
Different lengths. Thirty minutes for young beginners, an hour for everyone else, ninety minutes for exam prep. Thirty minutes at more than half the hourly rate is fair — the fixed overhead is the same.
A trial lesson at the normal price. Not free. A free trial attracts people trying free things. A first lesson at full price, with no obligation to continue, attracts people who intend to learn.
The cancellation policy is the whole ballgame
Weekly teaching only works if the slot is reliably yours. Without a policy, a run of cancellations turns a viable teaching income into an unpredictable one — which is the exact problem teaching was meant to solve.
Twenty-four hours' notice, otherwise chargeable, is standard and nobody will find it unreasonable. SESH makes you choose a policy and shows it before booking, so it's agreed in advance rather than negotiated in a moment when someone's ill and you feel like the bad guy.
When to raise it
Two signals, and they're both simple.
You're full and have a waiting list. Unambiguous. Raise it.
You feel a flicker of resentment before a lesson. Less obvious, more reliable. That feeling usually means the price stopped matching the effort a while ago.
Raise for new students first; give existing ones notice and a date. Most stay. The ones who don't are usually the ones you'd have been happier without.
List your teaching with a rate, a level range and a policy — the three things people are actually trying to find out.