Most independent tutors are underpriced, and most of them know it. The rate was set when they had four students and no reputation, and it has moved once, by a round number, in three years.
The reason it stays put is not nerve. It is that the ask feels unearned at the moment it is made — and the moment it is made is almost always the wrong one.
The timing rule
The worst time to raise your rates is when you need the money. That is when the ask carries an edge of pleading, when you are most likely to apologise for it, and when you will take the first counter-offer.
The best time is directly after a parent has seen something work. A mock result that moved. A teacher’s comment at parents’ evening. The week a child who hated the subject volunteered to do an extra past paper. The increase is the same number either way, but one arrives while the parent is privately thinking this is working and the other arrives cold.
This is not manipulation. It is the only moment when both parties have the same information about what the service is worth.
Four lines is enough
A rate letter gets worse the longer it gets. Length reads as justification, and justification invites negotiation. Four lines does the job:
- Notice. “From 1 December my rate will be £55 an hour.”
- The gap. Six weeks is normal. It is enough time to find someone else, which is exactly what makes it a courtesy rather than an ultimatum.
- One line of reason, stated and not defended. “This is my first increase since 2024.” Costs, demand, experience — pick one, say it once.
- Continuity. “Nothing else changes; we’ll carry on with the same Tuesday slot.”
That is the whole message. No paragraph about how difficult the decision was. No invitation to discuss it. No apology — an apology tells the parent you believe the price is unfair, and they will reasonably act on that belief.
The four mistakes
Apologising. Covered above, and the most common by a distance.
Raising by too little. A 4% increase costs you the same awkward conversation as a 15% one and buys back almost nothing. If the conversation is happening, make it worth having.
Raising everyone to the same number. A student you have taught for three years and one who started in September do not have to pay the same. Grandfather the long-standing families at a lower rate if you want to — just do it on purpose, rather than by never raising anything.
Announcing it mid-term. Increases land at a boundary: a new term, a new year, the start of an exam course. Mid-term, it reads as something that happened to you rather than something you decided.
Do the arithmetic before you worry about losing anyone
This is where most of the fear lives, and it is the easiest part to settle.
Twelve students at £45 an hour, one hour a week, is £540. Raise to £55 and two families leave: ten students at £55 is £550. You are earning slightly more for two hours less work, and those two hours are now available to someone paying the new rate.
The break-even is usually two or three students, and it is worth computing your own number before the conversation rather than after. A tutor who knows they can afford to lose three families negotiates very differently from one who has not done the sum.
Losing nobody at all is not the triumph it feels like. It usually means the new rate is still under the market.
What makes it easy
The increase is easy to send when the parent has spent the previous three months reading updates that say what their child could not do in September and can do now. It is hard to send when your last six messages were “great session today!” and the parent has no idea what they have been buying.
The rate conversation is not really about the rate. It is about whether the value was ever made visible — and that is decided months earlier, in what you sent after each lesson.