There’s a spreadsheet open on the other screen that I’ve been avoiding since about eleven, so we’ll do this instead.
Teachers ask us whether they’re charging enough. For me that’s the wrong question to start with, and it’s wrong because you can’t actually answer it yet. You’d be weighing a number you picked against a cost you’ve never worked out.
The question underneath is duller and far more useful. What does an hour of your teaching actually cost you?
Sixty pounds for a class sounds all right. It usually keeps sounding all right until you sit down and count what the class actually took.
The hour in the room. The forty minutes planning it. The drive there and back, which on a Tuesday is longer than it should be. Twenty minutes early to open up and set out. The messages afterwards about next week. The sitting down when you get home because you’re wrung out and no use to anyone for a bit.
That’s most of an afternoon, for sixty pounds.
Nearly every teacher I’ve met is carrying a number in her head that only counts the hour. It’s not carelessness. The rest of the time is invisible, and in truth it is invisible by design. It’s spread out, it doesn’t feel like work, and nobody ever asked you to write it down.
The good news is it’s an afternoon’s arithmetic, once, and then you know. And what usually changes afterwards isn’t your prices. It’s which classes you keep.
When to use this
- Before setting a price for a new class, venue or term
- When you’re busy and the money still isn’t adding up
- If you’re deciding whether to keep a class that’s never quite filled
- Once a year, as a check, ideally before the autumn term
The four things to count
Billed time. The hour you’re actually paid for. Start here because it’s the only bit most of us count.
Shadow time. Everything the class needs that nobody pays for. Planning, travel both ways, setting up and packing down, messages and bookings, and the recovery if there is any. Be honest with the drive — door to door, not the optimistic version.
Direct costs. What that specific class costs to run. Room hire, mats or props you replace, parking, mileage.
Annual costs, divided down. Insurance, membership, training and CPD, your phone, the website if you have one, the accountant if you use one. Add them up for the year, then divide by the number of classes you teach in a year. Everyone’s surprised by this line. It’s usually a few pounds a class, and it’s real.
Then the sum. Fee, minus direct costs, minus the annual share, divided by billed plus shadow hours.
That’s your real hourly figure.
What people find
Most teachers land somewhere well below what the fee suggested, and the first reaction is usually a bit deflating.
Sit with it past that, because the useful part is what it shows you about the differences between your classes. The village hall class with the forty-minute drive and six regulars is on a completely different figure from the studio class ten minutes away with fourteen. Same fee. Not remotely the same work.
That comparison is what the exercise is really for. Most of us have been carrying one average number in our heads and making decisions with it, when in fact some of the week is fine and one or two slots are quietly eating everything.
What to do with a bad number
Three options, and none of them is automatically right.
Raise the fee. Cut the shadow time. Teach two classes at one venue instead of two venues, or block the planning so you’re not starting from scratch each week. Or let the class go.
Letting one go is the option people don’t consider and it’s often the right one. A slot that costs you a whole afternoon and returns very little isn’t neutral. It’s taking the evening you’d have used for the thing that does work.
You don’t have to decide today. Just cost it first, and then decide.
Action steps
- Pick one real class this week and cost it end to end: billed, shadow, direct, and the annual share.
- Then cost your quietest one, the one you’ve had a feeling about.
- Compare the two figures. Sit with the gap before you do anything.
- Choose one move: raise it, cut the shadow time, or let it go. One class, not all of them.
Related resources
- A price you can say out loud
- The week that holds
You may do all of this and leave the number exactly where it is. Plenty of people do, and that’s a perfectly reasonable outcome. The point was never that your number is wrong. It’s that you’d been deciding without it.
Nobody enjoys this bit. But teachers who’ve done it once tend to keep the page, and they make the next decision about a new venue in about ten minutes instead of three weeks.