How to Teach Fewer Lessons and Earn More as a Language Tutor

What's the most lessons an online language tutor can teach in a month? In the first episode of the Pensight podcast, our CEO Yuki shared the highest number he's heard recently: 240 sessions. That's eight lessons a day, every single day of the month.

Very few tutors want that. Most are teaching enough to feel something else: the calendar is full, and the income has stopped growing. In this episode, Yuki and our marketing lead Miyuko talk about why that happens, and walk through a free tool we built to find another way. Here's the plan, step by step.

In this episode: our CEO Yuki, who has run his own English coaching business for 14 years, and our marketing lead Miyuko, who spends time in online communities where language teachers talk to each other.

Listen to the episode on Spotify →

Key takeaways

• At a workshop of eight tutors teaching Japanese, English, Chinese and more, almost everyone said they would ideally teach fewer lessons but earn more.
• A tutor teaching 100 one-on-one lessons a month at $30, with 70% of students coming from tutoring sites that charge about 25% commission, takes home $2,475 a month. That is about $19 an hour once 20 minutes of prep and wrap-up per lesson are counted.
• Teaching half the lessons for twice the take-home with 1:1 lessons alone would mean raising the price from $30 to about $113, roughly 3.8 times.
• Raising the price to $45 instead still leaves a gap of about $2,981 a month. A $1,000 course bought by 3 of 30 webinar attendees can close it.
• Whatever a tutor builds next to 1:1 lessons, the first step is the same: collect contacts, and turn the questions students keep asking into a free resource.

Almost every tutor gave the same answer: fewer lessons, more income

Yuki recently ran a small workshop with eight tutors teaching Japanese, English, Chinese and more. Most of them taught between 15 and over 100 sessions a month, mostly one-on-one. When he asked how many lessons they would ideally teach, almost every answer pointed the same way: fewer lessons, but more income. Some said they wanted to earn twice as much.

None of them disliked teaching. They love it. The problem is that every extra lesson costs more hours, so income can't keep up with the time going in. Once tutors reach 100 or 150 lessons a month, they start to see a ceiling, and it's not clear what to do next.

Miyuko has been hearing the same thing in online communities where English teachers talk to each other: tutors who are fully booked, overwhelmed and handling everything on their own, some close to burnout. Completely different people, saying the same thing.

A full calendar isn't the same as a sustainable business

Yuki knows this firsthand. About ten years ago, he was teaching around 100 in-person sessions a month, five or six a day on weekdays. Between sessions, he would put his head down on the desk. On paper he was making about $80,000 a year, but he was doing everything himself: lesson prep, admin, marketing and sales. Then it hit him. If he got sick or couldn't work for a while, everything would stop.

Looking back, he wishes he'd known two things:

1. You can hand things off, to people or to technology.
2. Every lesson you teach is material you can turn into something else to offer.

Step 1: See your real numbers

Most tutors know their lesson price. Fewer know what they actually earn per hour once commissions and prep time are counted. That's why we built the Lesson Balance Simulator. Here's the example Miyuko walked through in the episode:

• 100 lessons a month at $30 each
• 70% of students come through tutoring sites like Preply or italki, which take about 25%
• Each 60-minute lesson comes with 10 minutes of prep and 10 minutes of wrap-up

That works out to:

• Monthly revenue: $3,000
• Paid in commission: $525
• Take-home: $2,475
• Real hourly rate, including prep: about $19

Sit with that number for a moment. Are you happy with it?

Step 2: Decide where you want to be in a year

In the example, a year from now the tutor wants to:

• Teach half as many lessons, 50 a month
• Take home twice as much, $4,950 a month
• Have half their students book with them directly instead of through tutoring sites

Step 3: Meet the price wall

With 1:1 lessons alone, hitting that goal would mean raising the lesson price from $30 to $113, about 3.8 times today's price. As Miyuko put it in the episode, your students might fall out of their chairs. For most tutors, that's a wall.

Step 4: Raise your price where it makes sense

A more realistic move is to raise the price from $30 to $45, and back it up with a more premium experience, such as more direct feedback. At $45 and 50 lessons a month, there's still a gap of $2,981 a month.

Step 5: Fill the gap with something next to 1:1

This is where the path opens up. You could add:

• Group classes
• Low-priced digital products, like a $10 or $20 PDF
• A premium course, such as a series of recorded lessons
• A membership, where students gather as a community

In the episode, Miyuko chose a $1,000 premium course:

• 150 leads a month
• 60 sign up for a webinar about the course
• 30 attend
• 3 buy, 10% of attendees

That's $3,000, enough to close the gap. The simulator shows a ballpark of how many people you'd need at each stage, and that number changes completely depending on what you choose to sell.

Step 6: Check what's already in place

Finally, take stock:

• Have you sketched offers beyond your 1:1 lessons?
• Is any of it ready to sell now?
• Do you have an email list you can reach today?
• Do you have a system that contacts people automatically, so you're not doing everything by hand?

The simulator then tells you what kind of language teacher you are today, and what your balance of lessons, direct students and hourly rate could look like in a year.

Work backwards from what you want to sell

Yuki's two takeaways from the tool: first, see the numbers, including the reality of where you are now. Second, start from what you want to sell and work backwards from the goal. Picture the tutor you want to be, then bring it back to where you are today.

If one-on-one lessons are all you have, half the lessons and twice the income means roughly four times the price. Once you add something besides 1:1, like a digital course or group sessions, the path starts to open up.

Your first step: turn what students keep asking into a free resource

Whatever you build, the first step is the same: start collecting contacts, and make a free resource out of what your students keep asking you. Every lesson is material.

One tutor at the workshop did exactly that. His students kept asking about the difference between wa (は) and ga (が) in Japanese, and the same question kept showing up in his Instagram comments. He turned it into a free guide, using scripts he'd already written for his reels. It barely took him any time.

This isn't about leaving one-on-one lessons, or the tutoring sites that bring you new students. It's about what you build next to them. Keep the tutoring site for new students, and build a page of your own alongside it. That's what Pensight is for.

Try the simulator with your own numbers

The Lesson Balance Simulator is free and works in your browser. Put in your real lessons, prices and commissions, and see the path from where you are to where you want to be.

Try the Lesson Balance Simulator →

Want to see how other language teachers run their 1:1 lessons alongside tutoring sites? See how Pensight works for language teachers →

Prefer to listen? Hear the full conversation on Spotify →

Next episode: how many hours you actually spend on booking, payments and messages each month.

FAQ

How many lessons can an online language tutor teach in a month?
The highest number our CEO Yuki has heard recently is 240 sessions in a month, which is eight lessons a day, every day. Most tutors at his workshop taught between 15 and over 100 sessions a month, and almost all of them said they would rather teach fewer lessons and earn more.

How much does a language tutor really earn per hour?
It depends on price, commission and prep time. In the episode example, a tutor teaching 100 lessons a month at $30, with 70% of students coming from tutoring sites that take 25%, takes home $2,475 a month, or about $19 an hour once 20 minutes of prep and wrap-up per lesson are counted.

How much would I need to raise my price to teach half the lessons and earn twice as much?
With 1:1 lessons alone, roughly four times your current price. In the episode example, going from 100 to 50 lessons a month while taking home $4,950 means raising the price from $30 to $113, about 3.8 times. Adding an offer next to 1:1, such as a course or group class, lets a smaller price increase close the gap.

Do I need to stop teaching on tutoring sites like Preply or italki?
No. The approach in this episode keeps 1:1 lessons and the tutoring sites that bring in new students, and adds something next to them, such as group classes, a digital product, a course or a membership.

What is the first step to earning more without adding lessons?
Start collecting contacts and turn the questions your students keep asking into a free resource. One Japanese tutor at Yuki's workshop turned the scripts from his Instagram reels on the difference between wa and ga into a free guide, and it barely took him any time.

Full episode transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

00:00 Introduction

Miyuko: Hi everybody, this is Miyuko from Pensight. I'm the marketing lead here, and today we have our CEO, Yuki, with us. Yuki has had his own English coaching business for 14 years, and he's here to talk about how to run your language teaching business, and the business side of things. This is the Pensight podcast, and on this show we talk about everything around teaching, and the business side that nobody talks about.

00:26 How many lessons can a tutor teach in a month?

Yuki: So Miyuko, let me start with a question. How many lessons do you think an online language teacher or tutor can teach in a month, at the very most?

Miyuko: Hmm, I'd say fifty? A hundred? What is it?

Yuki: The highest I've actually heard this month was 240 sessions.

Miyuko: So there are thirty days in a month, and that's eight sessions a day. Every single day. That is a lot.

Yuki: Every single day. That's really a lot of teaching, right?

01:01 What tutors actually want: fewer lessons, more income

Miyuko: Yes. But I wonder how many lessons teachers actually want to be teaching. Do they want to do eight sessions a day? What's the ideal number in a month?

Yuki: I asked exactly that at a workshop I ran recently, actually, and almost everyone gave me the same answer.

Miyuko: So what did they say?

Yuki: Nearly everyone said: I want to teach fewer lessons, but earn more. It was a small group, eight tutors teaching Japanese, English, Chinese and more. Most of them were teaching somewhere between 15 and over 100 sessions a month, mostly one-on-one. So I asked them how many lessons they would ideally want to be teaching in a month, and almost every answer pointed the same way: fewer lessons, but more income. Some said twice as much. And it's not that they don't like teaching. They love it, actually.

Yuki: But the more lessons they teach, the more hours it takes, so the income doesn't keep up with the time they put in. You start seeing a ceiling, and you're not sure what to do next. Once you're teaching that many lessons, like a hundred or a hundred and fifty a month, it seems everyone starts thinking the same thing.

02:10 Yuki's story: a full calendar

Miyuko: Wow. Was that a surprise for you, as a former coach?

Yuki: Actually, no. That was me about ten years ago. I was coaching in person, not online, and it was around a hundred sessions a month, maybe five to six a day, every weekday. My calendar was completely full. Between sessions, I literally put my head down on the desk. My brain was fried. And I kept thinking, I cannot keep doing this.

Yuki: I was making about eighty thousand dollars a year at that time, on paper. That's not bad, right? But I wasn't happy at all. I was doing everything myself: the lesson preparation, admin, marketing, sales. And I couldn't let my students down, so I just kept pushing. But then it hit me. If I got sick or couldn't work for a while, everything would stop. Looking back, I wish I'd known two things. One is that I could hand things off, to people or to technology. The second is that every lesson I taught was material I could turn into something else to offer. My calendar was full, but if I stopped, everything stopped.

03:15 The same story in online teacher communities

Miyuko: That's really interesting, because I keep hearing the same thing online. I've been visiting forums and online communities where English teachers talk to each other, and I found that a lot of them are drowning. They want to make more money, but they're so booked out, overwhelmed and overworked, and honestly, some people are on the verge of burnout. They handle so much on their own. These are completely different people from your workshop, and they're saying the exact same thing.

Yuki: Right. So it's not just one group of people. It's something a lot of tutors run into, I guess.

03:52 Why the path is hard to see

Miyuko: So fewer lessons and more income sounds ideal, but it can't be easy. Everybody's drowning. So how can we find a solution to this?

Yuki: I think a lot of teachers or tutors have a revenue goal, or a price they'd like to charge, but very few can see the path to get there. When we break it down into numbers, the steps start to show. So we actually made something you can just play with.

04:16 Step 1: Audit your numbers today

Miyuko: So we built this tool where you can input the numbers of your actual lessons and what you're making currently, and audit where you are in your teaching journey. Step one is auditing your numbers today. Let's say you're teaching a hundred lessons per month at an average of $30 per lesson, and 70% of your students come from language teaching platforms like Preply or italki. They take about 20 to 30% of what you make, so I'm going to put 25%. Let's say my lessons are 60 minutes, I prep for 10 minutes before the lesson, and I do a 10-minute summary after the lesson. So that's 80 minutes in total.

In the tool, that example works out to:

• Monthly revenue: $3,000
• Paid to platforms in commission: $525
• Take-home pay: $2,475 a month
• Hourly rate, including prep: about $19

Miyuko: So the total amounts to $3,000 in monthly revenue, but you're actually paying $525 to the platforms you're using, like Preply or italki. Your take-home, what you're actually making, is $2,475 per month. And your hourly rate, including your prep work, is $19. You can sit with that number and think about it. Do you want to make more money? Are you happy with the number you have?

05:45 Step 2: Decide where you want to be in a year

Miyuko: Step two is thinking about the future. One year from now, where do you want to be? You were teaching a hundred lessons per month, but let's say you want to cut that in half, so you're teaching 50 lessons a month, and in a year's time you want your take-home to be close to five thousand dollars a month. Right now, 70% of your students come from Preply, italki or other language teaching platforms. Let's say you want that to be half of all your students. Half of your students come from the platforms, and half of them have become your private students, who book lessons and learn from you directly. The tool calculates how you can get to that number.

06:35 Step 3: The price wall

Miyuko: Step three tells you how much you need to raise your lesson price to get to the number you set in step two. If you want your monthly take-home to be $4,950, and you want to teach half the lessons you teach now, so 50 instead of 100, then you need to raise your lesson price from $30 to $113. That's 3.8 times your lesson price today. Your students might just fall out of their chairs. If you're paying $30 now, are you going to pay $113 for the same lesson tomorrow? That might be difficult.

07:22 Step 4: A realistic price raise

Miyuko: So instead of astronomically raising your current lesson price, what could you do to make the same amount of money you want, without subjecting your existing students to that? Say you raise your price from $30 to $45. To do that, you could provide more premium experiences, more direct feedback, things like that. At $45, you still have $2,981 per month to go to reach the goal you set.

07:46 Step 5: Fill the gap with something next to 1:1

Miyuko: So how do you fill that gap? This is where step five comes in. In step five, you think about what you can sell to meet the remaining $2,981. There are different ways to do this. There are group classes you could run. There are low-priced digital products, like a PDF you sell for $10 or $20. You could do a premium course, or a membership where your students gather and form a community. I'm going to choose a premium course, which is a series of recorded lessons you can sell for a higher price. Let's say your premium course is $1,000.

Miyuko: Then let's say you have about 150 leads per month. You host a webinar to talk about the premium course, and 60 people sign up. Thirty people, half of those who sign up, actually attend the webinar, where you talk about the course, what it covers and what people can learn. Then three people, which is 10%, buy the course for a thousand dollars. And there you go, you have your business funnel. It gives you a structure and a ballpark of how many leads you need, how many people need to hear about the course, and how many need to buy it to fill the gap.

09:38 Step 6: Check what's already in place

Miyuko: Step six is a checklist of what you already have in place. Have you sketched your offers? Other than what you sell right now, which may be your one-on-one lessons, what else can you sell? Is it already a product you can sell immediately? Do you have an email list you can reach out to right away? And do you have a funnel and a system that contacts and emails people automatically, so you're not doing everything manually? Then the result tells you what kind of language teacher you are, and gives you a lay of the land of what you could become in a year. It summarizes your ideal balance of lessons, how many students come to you directly, and what your hourly rate could look like if you worked on expanding your offers and raising your prices.

10:37 Takeaway: work backwards from what you want to sell

Miyuko: So back to you, Yuki. What's our takeaway from this tool?

Yuki: I guess it's two things. One is being able to see the numbers, the reality. The second thing I feel is important is that you start from what you want to sell, and work backwards from the goal.

Miyuko: So you first get a view of the tutor you want to be, and then bring it back to where you are today.

Yuki: So if one-on-one lessons are all you have, half the lessons and twice the income means four times the price. And I think that's a wall, right? But when you look at what happens when you add something besides one-on-one, like a digital course or group sessions, the path starts to open up. And depending on what you add, the number of people you need changes completely. So you start from what you want to sell and work backwards.

11:26 Start with what your students keep asking

Yuki: Remember what I said I wish I'd known: every lesson is material. That's where it starts. Whatever you build, the first step is the same. Start collecting contacts, and make a free resource out of what your students keep asking you, or what you communicate in your lessons. One tutor at the workshop did exactly that. His students kept asking about the difference between wa (は) and ga (が) in Japanese, and he saw the same questions in his Instagram comments too. So he turned it into a free guide, using scripts he'd already written for his reels. It barely took him any time. So whatever you build, the door is the same: collect contacts, and start with what your students keep asking you.

Miyuko: So really get to the bottom of what your students want to know and what they repeatedly ask you. And collect contacts: get people to sign up and share their email. It's not about leaving one-on-one lessons. It's about what you build next to them, and expanding your offer.

12:23 Try the tool, and what's next

Miyuko: So try the tool with your own numbers. We're sharing the link below. Let us know how it helped you and what you think about it. It's completely free to try, and it works in your browser. Next week, we want to talk about how many hours you actually spend on booking, payments and messages. Thank you, and see you next week.