If you’re a business English teacher like me, then I’m sure the question of how much to charge for Business English lessons has occurred to you at some point. While you might offer both general English and business English lessons, how you price your Business English lessons depends on several factors including your short and long term opportunity cost and the competitive environment in your area.
What are opportunity costs
In economic theory, we define opportunity cost as a measure of cost on your next best alternative. Let’s say I go to the local language book store and I’ve got 80 zloties to spend (about $20). I could either buy a business English book or a boardgame to spice up my lessons. Since I only have the fixed amount of money, I have to decide between the two. Hence, the opportunity cost of the business English book is the boardgame and vice versa.
Equally, we can apply the same theory to your time. Your opportunity cost of time is the next best alternative you could be doing with that time. This type of economic thinking should play a big part in determining how much to charge for Business English lessons.
Your Primetime Teaching Hours
Have you heard of the phrase primetime as in a primetime tv series?
Before on demand TV became mainstream, people would tune in to watch their favorite tv shows in the evening. The time slots for the very best shows were typically between 8 – 10 pm. TV networks considered these times as their primetime slots as they could attract the biggest audiences for their shows. Consequently, they could also earn the most by charging the highest rates for commercial spots.
So, primetime means the best money-making period of time for any business. For freelance English teachers primetime is in the evening since our students are out of school or work. This is the time where they can come in for group or individual lessons. Therefore, the opportunity cost for an English teacher is quite high in the evening.
Learn more about the differences between Business English vs General English Teachers here.
To avoid conflicts with opportunity cost, you should keep your Business English hours to mornings. Sometimes business will ask for lessons just before their employees finish their shifts. But if you factor in your commute after the lessons finish, you might run into conflicts.
Business English Primetime Hours are in the Mornings
However, Business English primetime hours occur in the morning and early afternoon. For this reason, the opportunity cost calculation is different. Additionally, we should differentiate between the manner of lessons either occurring online or in-company.
If you travel to teach in-company, you want to teach a string of lessons in the same place. The more you can teach in one place at a time the better. On the contrary, you want to avoid going across town to deliver one lesson.
Yet in the post Covid-19 reality, you will find more students willing to take online lessons. If you commit to doing your lessons online, you reduce the time lost to travel in addition to the extra cost you incur.
How much to charge for business English lessons: the cost of an hour
The opportunity cost of an online lesson is about the same as the evening hour for an English teacher. As a teacher, you want to stack online lessons one after another just as you would do with evening lessons.
Personally-speaking, I’ve decided to commit to being in my office full-time and no longer drive for lessons. Presently, I teach between 8-11 in the mornings while I teach from 3 – 7 pm in my office. The lessons are a mixture of both in-person and online students.
With this arrangement, I can maximize my earnings and have time for content creation. Furthermore, I benefit from this with a more predictable schedule and less frustration from having to commute in the mornings.
As a freelance English teacher, you want a uniform schedule. Just think about how much more efficient your lesson planning and content creation will be when you have breaks in teaching that you don’t have to spend in traffic or on a bus.
The opportunity cost of commuting to onsite lessons
The business English teacher who’s willing to commute will have to make a different calculation, though. After all, commuting to and from a lesson both incurs time and expense.
In the past, I would often conduct a lesson at 8 in Tychy, another at 10 in Katowice, then a final lesson at around noon in another part of Katowice. All that driving around adds up to 5 hours to teach 3 lessons. Even worse, these lessons were organized by a language school so my rate was the same English teacher rate the language school would pay regardless of the lesson being general or business-oriented, nor did that rate take in the fact that I’d have to travel to and from the lesson.
Now that I am a freelance English and Business English teacher, I charge my own rates and do not allow the language schools to profit off my efforts. I charge what I’m worth and maximize my time for both teaching and productivity with my content creation. [plug]
When you are thinking about whether to accept or negotiate the rate you’re offered from a language school, you want your time and expense to be a sticking point.
How much to charge for business English lessons: the cost of a year
The day-to-day opportunity cost of an hour is one thing, the cost of a year, on the other hand, is another matter. Business English is a year-round endeavor whereas the general English calendar runs from September to June. This is why I mentioned that you should price Business English lessons differently from general English lessons.
With a business English contract, the calculation is closer to 11 months out of the year that you will be teaching. In some regards this sounds like a lower opportunity cost factor, but it isn’t. You have to factor in the kind of people you will be dealing with on a regular basis. I can attest that you will have a 60% (at best) attendance rate on your lessons since business English students tend to be managers, executives, or sales force managers who travel a lot and take frequent business trips.
As a result, not only should you carefully evaluate how much to charge for Business English lessons, but you should also protect your time and income against several factors which I’ll outline in the next section.
Protect your time and income against cancellations
When you are dealing with clients (students) in the business world, you have to protect your time and income against several risks. Business English students will frequently miss lessons due to any of the following:
- cancellations
- business trips
- conflicting meetings
- vacation
- illness
- family commitments,
- peak time periods when they’re too swamped to take time out for a lesson
One example of the final bullet point is that I teach one person in the commercial shipping and logistics industry and he routinely disappears from the time before Black Friday to January the following year.
If you charge by the lesson, you will find yourself getting frustrated with your students due to the high number of cancelled lessons. For that reason, you want to think of your business more along the lines of the subscriber model. Your students aren’t paying for individual lessons but to keep that time slot in your schedule. I would recommend charging either a monthly fee or, in the very least, a minimum invoice to protect against cancellations.
Be Careful of prepaid invoices
Some business English students get a certain budget from their company to spend on their English development. In this situation, they will want to arrange with you a price and set number of lessons for the invoice. What I would suggest is to stipulate some deadline on the contract so that you don’t get stuck teaching someone for a contract whose time value of money had long since run out.
To summarize opportunity cost, you want to determine your price based on the cost of an hour. Based on that determination, identify what that time is worth to you for the whole year. Finally, you want to charge this price upfront (yearly, semesterly, or monthly). When you follow this approach, it is important to have a cancellation policy. Explain to your students that they aren’t paying for lessons. They are paying for your time and to keep the time for the whole school year.
Following this protocol will give you some income stability. Your time is valuable, and you cannot easily replace or reschedule someone who has cancelled a lesson.
Don’t Price per Lesson, Price as a Service
Service oriented businesses can be based on one-off visits or recurring visits by the same clients. A one-off model might look like a dentist’s office. This kind of service has no problem filling its schedule from week to week with patients within its area. If a person cancels an appointment, the dentist can easily place another patient in that time slot. Those time slots will fill up and the appointments can be scheduled out for weeks at a time. A dentist doesn’t care much if one person cancels because another can easily slot in.
The business English teacher with the office next door has the same revolving circle of clients. He has the Monday clients, the Tuesday clients, the Wednesday clients, and so on. Each client has fit the appointed day and time into their schedule and has built their other extra-curricular activities besides English around that fixed schedule. These clients may appreciate a bit of flexibility to cancel and reschedule appointments. Yet they need to respect and prioritize the time they set with you.
You, as the business English teacher, need to set a cancellation policy that protects your income against your students’ unpredictability. Without it, you are doing yourself a huge disservice.
Contracts and Informal Agreements
When you work with a company, both you and the company you’re working with will want to have a contract to formalize the teaching arrangement. Within that contract you can set conditions for the following items:
- Agree with your client upon the format of the lessons provided.
- Set the timing (for example: does one hour or lesson equal 50, 55, or 60 minutes delivered?).
- Outline the frequency of the meetings along with stipulations for additional lessons.
- State your cancellation policy and the number of allowed make-ups and reschedules.
- Set the cost per lesson as well as how the bill will be calculated.
- Allow for addendums to the contract so that you can change the price in the future if necessary.
- Stipulate what counts as a late cancellation and whether or not it is fully paid.
Here's a Sample Teaching Terms and Conditions
I have put my terms and conditions up on my website and refer my students to that page. That way, they can translate it into Polish and fully understand my policies and expectations. You can view that Terms and Conditions page here.
Perhaps you’re thinking about teaching English abroad and are reading this to gather ideas and insights. Why don’t you comment below with any questions you might have, or email me directly.
Teaching Groups vs Individual Students
You should have a zero-cancellation policy if your business English lesson arrangement is to teach a group. At least one of the group members should be present and if nobody shows up for the lesson, it will still be counted.
You also want to include an allowance for any materials you provide to the group. As a freelance teacher, you don’t want the cost burden to be solely on you when you are dealing with a group. Printing for individuals is one thing, but printing for a four-person group can really add up over time.
You may have an informal arrangement if you are working with individual students, but you should at least agree to a cancellation policy or “subscription” price in the first meeting. If you have existing clients and you would like to change the arrangement, notify them in advance of your intention to discuss the matter and raise the points you want to make at the time of that meeting.
You will avoid the frustration of seeing your income fluctuate and drop as cancellations pile up if you follow these recommendations.
The Competitive Environment for Business English Teachers
Where you are providing your teaching services around the world as well as how you measure against the competition in that locale has a huge impact on how much to charge for Business English lessons. Technology has made the world a much smaller place, largely closing the gap on cost and standards of living around the world. Yet a gap remains as a prospective client in a western European country will have a different price range to a prospective client in Central/Eastern Europe, Asia, or even Latin America.
Your first activity should be to do a bit of market research to see just how much people are charging on both the high and low scale.
Use Match Finder Services for Market Research
In Poland, for example, there is a website called nativespeaker.com.pl which is a match-finder website. Teachers register on this site as native or non-native speakers, create their profile, define their preferred teaching format, and set their prices. Students looking for a native speaker browse the profiles for teachers in their area and reach out directly through the website’s portal.
The obvious benefit for teachers is that it allows for them to passively obtain leads for new prospective students. More importantly, though, you can use a platform like this to gauge the competition in the market. You see how much other teachers are charging.
Make a note of the teachers charging the highest prices and figure out their reasoning for that luxury price, then do the same for the lowest price teachers on the market. Finally, ask yourself where do you fit into the competitive environment? Does your profile compare well to the luxury price range, the budget price range, or somewhere in the middle?
Here are some additional considerations against which you compare yourself to other teachers in your local competitive environment.
How do your Teaching Qualifications Measure Up in the local Market?
Some factors that separate you as a business English teacher are your educational background, your teaching experience, and whether or not you have business experience apart from teaching. If you possess these qualities to a higher level than your competition, you can charge on the high end of the price range. In my post on Business English vs. General English teachers, I cover the concept of qualifications in greater detail, so you can click this link to read that post next.
Where will your leads come from?
Language schools and people matching agencies often do the marketing and outreach to secure an arrangement with businesses in your area and promise to match them with a teacher to fulfill the service. These services arrange the price in advance and offer opportunities to the teachers in their mailing list. The teacher who responds to the offer and meets the needs of the client will win the job.
However, this approach rarely benefits the teacher as you, the teacher, are placed with a limit on what you will be paid but still have to adhere to the administration of the lessons and whatever red tape that comes with it.
If you’re just getting started as a business English teacher, you might take these jobs so as to fill up your schedule. As you start to acquire your own clients, you can phase these arrangements out and go completely self-sufficient.
How to Price Student Referrals
The best form of marketing is word of mouth or getting referrals from your existing clients. For starters, you get a qualified lead that will be eager to get started working with you. Your student has done all the work for you by talking up your service when making the referral.
Unfortunately, though, your student might also have shared the price you were charging them to the new prospect. This means they will likely come with a price expectation that should at least be in accordance with what you’ve been charging their friend or acquaintance.
Do your own content marketing
As a freelance business English teacher, one way you can generate your own leads is to do your own localized and content marketing.
Local SEO (search engine optimization) involves setting up a profile on Google My Business. This means you will appear as a local business on Google Maps. To do this and rank highly, you need a place of business, complete your profile with details of the business hours and contact, and get some students to review your business on Google Maps. That way, when potential students in your area search for “business English (your town/city) or native speaker English teacher (your town/city), you show up as one of the top results.
Additionally, you might consider doing your own content marketing. Content marketing is the idea that you write content (blog content) which points to a landing page where you attempt to convert that traffic into customers or subscribers. In my upcoming book, Content Marketing for Content Creators, I teach you the whole scheme of content marketing aimed at content creators and freelancers.
You could sign up to be notified of the book launch when I publish it. Please find the form just below and sign up.
Run your Business English Teaching Service Like a Business
The benefit of having your own place of business, a website, and a marketing plan means you can set your own prices and generate your own leads based on these realities as opposed to renting yourself out to language schools and people-finder websites. How does that sound for a way to get qualified leads at the price you want?
How full is your schedule already?
Another thing to consider is your schedule availability. If your schedule is rather full already, you don’t really “need” to take on any additional students. This would be a good moment to raise your price to a level where you would like to set your new “floor.” Your price floor is the lowest price you would charge.
In this case, you’re not necessarily raising prices on all your existing clients. More to the point, you are raising the price on your next “new” client. Once you have a new student at that price point, you can gradually start stepping up your prices on your existing students. I wouldn’t recommend doing this all at once, because if too many of them don’t accept the new reality, you could be left with some huge gaps in your schedule.
What to charge for Business English in Poland
While I, unfortunately, cannot give you a definitive guide on what to charge for business English lessons in other parts of the world, I can only provide you with my own personal experiences as well as the insights to make your own informed decision.
As I live in Poland and teach Polish students, there are some realities that I have to deal with. My business English rates apply for morning lessons in the block between 8-11 am. The afternoon lessons are mostly in my private office and are general English students.
As I’m not located in Warsaw or Krakow, I can only discuss the realities for my location. For my location (the Katowice, Tychy, Mikolow area), the low scale of pricing for teachers would be 50 zl per lesson whereas the median price has settled recently at 75 zl for this area. As for Business English, I have seen most prices range from 90 – 120 zl per lesson from individual teachers.
What I charge for Business English
Personally, I charge the high end of this at 100 zl average price for business English lessons. My arrangement is typically to plan the month and invoice based on the available number of lessons for the agreed upon day and time with the student. For example, a month where I might meet a student 3 or 5 times is counted and charged as the invoice amount upfront. Business English lessons are on a “use it or lose it” basis in that I charge the invoice as a service, not for lessons delivered.
My Business English students reserve my time as much as they are paying for the lesson. I have arrived at this point after many years (12) in this local market. This all made possible by my having a full schedule, an established reputation as a teacher in the area, and my own place of business. I also do my own marketing efforts, which has enabled me to set my own prices equivalent to what the language schools are charging.
My recommendation
My advice for you as a freelancer is to work on building up your reputation first. Try and fill up your schedule and gradually push the upper limits of the price scale for your local market. Rome was not built in a day and neither will your business be.
Final Word
Being a freelance Business English teacher can be a rewarding career. Many of us freelancers may have started out thinking we’d be doing it for a year or so. However, once you find a landing spot and have a wonderful experience, you want more.
You start out with language schools, but eventually you branch out to take control over your career. If you’re ready for that challenge, I commend you and wish you the best. Hopefully, this pricing guide helps you to take the leap and be your own business. Or if you already have your own business, perhaps it gives you the insight needed to improve.
Over to You
If you’re a business English teacher, please comment on the post and let me know where you’re teaching. What does the situation look like where you teach, and what are the price ranges? Let’s keep the conversation going.
Perhaps you’re thinking about teaching English abroad and are reading this to gather ideas and insights. Why don’t you comment below with any questions you might have, or email me directly.
