How much should you pay a language tutor for you or your child?
I wrote this blog in 2018 but found this is one of the most-read articles recently. So I had a little search and here is the update for 2021. And another update for 2022 (October).
A better question should be how much should I pay for a good private school?
Let’s have a look at the average market rate of a tutor in the USA, Australia and China (Beijing).
In the USA, the hourly rate of a tutor ranges from US$30 – US$40 per hour for a high school student tutor and up to US$85 for a certified teacher with top experience. Even online tutor charges about US$20 per hour. At today’s rate, the tutor’s charge ranges from A$25 to A$110 per hour. You can find the details here.
Update 2021:
- $10-$40 per hour for high school students. (Note: More high school students take tutoring jobs and charge less hourly rates to compete).
- Up to $100 (or more) per hour for certified, experienced teachers. (Good tutors hourly rate increased from US$85 to US$100, A 15% increase from 2018)
A new update below shows the lowest charge is now US$45 per hour and the highest is US$180 per hour for AP exams on the MyGuRu website.
Updated July 26, 2022
- Location difference: Big cities charges higher than remote areas.
- Tutor centres charge more than private tutors. Average USD 49-USD80 per hour.
We know American people like buying cheap products, but it seems they are paying more for education than their Australian peers.
So how about in the UK? We just found this article written by AGCAS in September 2020:
The average rate for a private tutor session is between £30 and £42 per hour.
Your rate could increase to upwards of £50 per hour as you gain experience and build your reputation.
If you receive tutoring requests through an agency, they will add on VAT and commission, which makes average hourly rates £45 plus.
https://www.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles/private-tutor
So you pay about A$56 – 79 per hour in the UK. For an experienced tutor like our teachers who have over 25 years of experience, you will pay A$94 per hour.
In Australia, the tutor’s rate ranges from about A$20 – A$35 per hour for student-tutor according to PayScale. We know some Universities charge A$99 per private language tutoring and there are many even cheaper student tutors around as well.
A new search below shows while the lowest charge is reduced to $15 per hour, an experienced tutor will charge over $70 per hour.
Update in 2022:
There are not many detailed figures, but with the inflation worldwide, you can predict all the fees will go up. This article gives a good inside to finding a good tutor.
In Beijing, based on our investigation, a good tutor charges about RMB 500 to RMB 1000 (A$100 to A$200) per hour, and an average tutor charges RMB 300 per hour (A$60).
So how much are you willing to pay for a tutor?
This should be based on your value of yourself and the value the tutor can bring to you.
The purpose to find a tutor is to help you or your child reach a goal – learning Mandarin or Japanese – if you are looking at our website.
Your value is your time and the potential value brought by the new language skills, whether it is a better job, pay rise, improved score or just for understanding another culture.
If you find a cheap tutor, you may spend more time understanding the new language and learnt something incorrectly. Children, may lose interest in the language and do not want to learn any languages in the future. This is a big loss comparing the cheap rate you paid. The cheap tutor wasted your time and money. We know a businessman who learnt Mandarin from a Chinese student for six months. When he went to Beijing, his business partner told him what he learnt is improper for a business situation. We also had a boy who came to us from another Chinese school. He learnt there for 7 years, but can only fit into our 3-year class because he couldn’t write Chinese characters and only spoke what he memorised.
A good tutor can help you study the language in your style and enable you to reach your goal in the most cost-effective way. One of our students is a school teacher. She was given a new role in teaching year 7 Japanese this year, but she never learnt Japanese before. She emailed us for help and we tailored an intensive Japanese teaching course for her during the summer holiday. She not only learnt the basics of Japanese language skills and also learnt how to teach Japanese. She is now teaching Japanese very confidently. For more details, please read her testimony.
How to find a good tutor, please read our tips here.
Remember the total cost of learning a language is:
Hourly Rate x quality (hours you need)
Instead of asking “how much should I pay for a language tutor?”, you should ask “how much should I spend to reach a language goal?”
So let us know your goal of learning a language and your budget and we will make a plan for you. Two goals we recommend are HSK (Chinese Language Proficiency Test) and JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test). HSK and JLPT are two globally recognised certificates that will make your C.V shine.
If you like your children to get a certificate, YCT (Young Chinese Test) is one of the best.
We now also offer online classes, so you can learn from wherever you are.
And we will not increase our fees in 2022!
You can now book a free consultation online.