Why Online Tutoring Prices Vary So Much

What is actually inside an hourly rate

An hourly rate is a price for a service, not wages for sixty minutes. Only the first item below is the part you watch happen, and for a tutor working properly it is rarely more than half of the time attached to your child.

This is why two tutors quoting the same number can be selling different things. Ask what happens between the lessons; the answer separates them faster than any question about qualifications.

• The lesson itself
• Preparation: finding or writing questions pitched at this student rather than at the topic
• Marking and written feedback between lessons
• Scheduling, rescheduling, payment handling, refunds and the software it all runs on
• The tutor's own living costs, taxes and the unpaid gaps in their timetable

Most of the spread is geography, not quality

An online lesson can be delivered from anywhere, so the price tracks where the tutor lives rather than where the family does. A rate that looks impossibly low from London can be a good professional wage in Lahore, and a rate that looks high from Lahore would be modest in Zurich. That is an exchange rate. It is neither a discount nor a warning.

It becomes a warning when the low price is achieved locally rather than geographically. A tutor in a high-cost city charging a low rate is compensating somewhere, usually by putting thirty students in one room, by skipping preparation, or by teaching six subjects they were never trained in. The useful question is not why is this cheap but where is the saving coming from.

Group size is the biggest lever, and the one you choose

One tutor, one hour, one student, and one tutor, one hour, six students, cost the same to deliver and are a very different price to buy. Nothing else on a pricing page moves the number as much. If a quote looks unusually low, the first thing to establish is how many other children are in the room.

It does not follow that a group is worse. Up to about six a tutor can still see every student's working and question each of them properly, and hearing another child give a wrong answer and be walked back from it is one of the fastest ways to learn. Past eight or so, questioning becomes a lottery and the quiet student is never called on. That is where a group stops being cheap teaching and becomes a lecture.

What a very low price usually means

Cheap is not automatically bad, but it is always bought from somewhere and the list of places is short. Knowing which one applies lets you decide whether you mind.

For a Year 5 child who needs number bonds drilled, several of these are irrelevant. For a Year 11 student four months from a GCSE, at least three of them are disqualifying.

• A larger class than the word group implies
• A tutor teaching outside their own subject, or two grades above their comfort
• No marking and no contact at all between lessons
• No recording, so a missed class is simply lost
• A first-term undergraduate, which is fine at some levels and not at others
• An introductory rate that rises after the first month

How to judge a price instead of comparing it

Comparing two numbers tells you nothing until you know what each one buys. Six questions do the job, and any honest provider will answer all of them in a sentence each.

Our own answer, for the record: live small-group classes on Zoom, every session recorded, one free demo class before anything is paid, from PKR 6,000 or USD 25 a month. We price by the month rather than by the hour deliberately, because an hourly rate quietly rewards a tutor for taking longer and a monthly fee does not.

• How many students are in the class?
• Who is the tutor, and what have they taught at this level before?
• What happens between lessons, and does the tutor see the student's written work?
• Is a missed class recoverable, and how?
• What notice is needed to stop, and is anything paid in advance refundable?
• Is the fee per hour, per month or per term, and what makes it change?