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. For most of us, the first answer comes from a language school, and it's rarely a fair one. The question I wish someone had asked me in my first year is a harder one. How much, and for how long, will you accept what a school is willing to pay you?
In this guide, I'll show you how to work out how much to charge for Business English lessons by pricing a whole year rather than a single lesson. How you price depends on several factors, including your short and long term opportunity cost, the cancellations that come with business clients, and the competitive environment in your area. I've taught English in Poland for 18 years, and before that I earned an Economics degree at UCLA and worked as a financial advisor, so I'll lean on a little economics along the way.
What Are Opportunity Costs
In economic theory, we define opportunity cost as the cost of your next best alternative. Let's say I go to the local language bookstore with 80 zł to spend (about $20). I could either buy a Business English book or a board game to spice up my lessons. Since I only have a fixed amount of money, I have to decide between the two, so the opportunity cost of the Business English book is the board game and vice versa.
Equally, we can apply the same theory to your time. Your opportunity cost of time is the next best thing you could be doing with that time. This type of economic thinking should play a big part in deciding how much to charge for Business English lessons.
Why the School's Rate Isn't Your Rate
Most native-speaker teachers start at a language school, and I did too, at a family-run school in Mikołów that filled my book and treated me like family. Back then, the school charged students 90 to 100 zł per lesson and paid me 55 to 60 zł. Private students were happy to pay me 75 zł, so what happened next happened to every native-speaker teacher I knew.
Nobody plans to go independent, because it happens one freed-up weekday at a time. Word of mouth brings you a private student or two, Tuesday becomes your teaching-at-home day, and one year you realise you only give the school Mondays.
The Bait and Switch on Your Invoice
In Poland, many schools encourage teachers to register a business and invoice for lessons rather than work under a contract. Once you're a business, you're responsible for your own tax and Social Security (ZUS in Poland), you need a business bank account, and you'll probably pay an accountant. Yet the school still wants to pay the same 60 zł on the invoice that it paid when it covered those costs for you. That's a bait and switch, and it's the moment many teachers start to question the rate.
The School Rate Ignores Your Time on the Road
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 added up to 5 hours to teach 3 lessons. Even worse, a language school organized these lessons, so my rate was the same English teacher rate the school paid regardless of whether the lesson was general or business-oriented, and it didn't take the travel into account either.
When you are thinking about whether to accept or negotiate the rate you're offered by a language school, you want your time and expense to be a sticking point.
Gratitude Doesn't Set Your Rate
A good school does a lot for a new teacher. It helps with your visa and work permit, finds you an apartment and fills your book while you settle in. That gratitude is real, and it can turn into guilt the day you tell the school you only have Mondays for them. Teaching is a business for you just as it's a business for them, though, and a school that won't raise your rate to match your costs has told you what it thinks your time is worth.
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 and 10 pm. TV networks considered these times 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 when 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 a business will ask for lessons just before its employees finish their shifts. But if you factor in your commute after those lessons finish, you might run into conflicts with your evening students.
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 lessons that take place online and lessons that take place 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 reality, you will find more students willing to take online lessons. If you commit to teaching online, you reduce the time lost to travel as well as 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 with evening lessons.
Personally speaking, I stopped driving to lessons years ago, and today I teach fully online. I start my mornings off with a couple of online lessons, switch over to data annotation work, then switch back for another pair of online lessons in the evening. These aren't online lessons on some platform as all of my lessons are locals or business professionals here in Poland who have found me online through my website.
With this arrangement, I can maximize my earnings and have time for content creation. I also benefit from a more predictable schedule and less frustration from commuting.
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.
Price the Year, Not the Lesson
The day-to-day opportunity cost of an hour is one thing, but the cost of a year is another matter. Business English is a year-round endeavor, whereas the general English calendar runs from September to June. This is one reason you should price Business English lessons differently from general English lessons.
Here's the problem with pricing by the lesson. Teachers should be able to survive the summer on what they earn from September to June, yet in Poland that rarely happens. When July arrives, students go on holiday, your book dries up, and the rate you charged all year has to stretch across two months with little or no income.
That's why I price for 12 months, not for 10. When you decide how much to charge for Business English lessons, your rate has to cover all of these costs.
- your living costs for all twelve months, including July and August
- your tax, Social Security (ZUS in Poland) and accountant
- the lessons your students cancel or skip
- the flight home when your family needs you
A Worked Example of Pricing the Year
Let's put some round numbers on it. These figures only illustrate the method, so swap in your own. Suppose your living and business costs come to 100,000 zł a year, and you can realistically fill 25 lessons a week.
If you price as though you'll teach every week of the year, you divide 100,000 zł by 1,300 lessons and arrive at about 77 zł per lesson. Students don't show up for 52 weeks, though. Between the summer break, Christmas, Easter and the long weekends, you'll teach closer to 40 weeks, which gives you 1,000 lessons and a price of 100 zł. The gap between those two numbers is the cost of pretending you'll teach all year.
Business English Runs Closer to 11 Months
With a Business English contract, the calculation is closer to 11 months of the year that you will be teaching. In some regards this sounds like a lower opportunity cost, 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% attendance rate at best, since Business English students tend to be managers, executives or sales 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 cancellations.
Sell a Prepaid Course Instead of Single Lessons
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 for reasons like these.
- cancellations
- business trips
- conflicting meetings
- vacation
- illness
- family commitments
- peak periods when they're too swamped to take time out for a lesson
One example of the final reason is a student of mine in the commercial shipping and logistics industry who routinely disappears from the week before Black Friday until 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 a subscription model. Your students aren't paying for individual lessons but to keep that time slot in your schedule.
Price a Year of Lessons and Collect It Up Front
My answer to cancellations is to sell a course rather than single lessons. A student who meets me once a week buys a year of roughly 30 to 32 lessons, and I price that course on what I need to earn from that student over 12 months, not 10. They can pay monthly, by semester or all at once, which works much like a subscription.
Because the student has already paid, rescheduling becomes their responsibility rather than yours. This matters more than it might seem. Students who feel they're paying for lessons they never get will eventually quit, so the goal is to make sure they use what they've paid for rather than to charge them for nothing. Prepayment also lets you set money aside for the summer before it arrives.
Be Careful with Prepaid Invoices
Some Business English students get a budget from their company to spend on their English development. In this situation, they will want to agree with you on a price and a set number of lessons for the invoice. I would suggest putting a deadline in the contract so that you don't get stuck teaching someone on a contract whose time value of money has long since run out.
To summarize, you want to determine your price based on the cost of an hour. Based on that figure, identify what that time is worth to you for the whole year. Finally, you want to charge this price up front, whether yearly, by semester or monthly. When you follow this approach, it's important to have a cancellation policy, and you should explain to your students that they're paying for your time and for keeping their slot for the whole year rather than for individual lessons.
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.
Price Your Lessons as a Service
Service businesses can be based on one-off visits or on recurring visits by the same clients. A one-off model might look like a dentist's office, which has no problem filling its schedule from week to week with patients in its area. If a patient cancels an appointment, the dentist can easily place another patient in that time slot, so one cancellation barely matters.
The Business English teacher with the office next door has a different kind of client base. 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 built their other activities around it. These clients may appreciate a bit of flexibility to cancel and reschedule, yet they need to respect and prioritize the time they set with you.
You, as the Business English teacher, need 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 will want a contract to formalize the teaching arrangement. Within that contract, you can set conditions for these items.
- Agree with your client on the format of the lessons provided.
- Set the timing, for example whether one lesson equals 50, 55 or 60 minutes delivered.
- Outline the frequency of the meetings along with terms 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.
- Specify what counts as a late cancellation and whether it is fully paid.
My Terms and Conditions Page Shows How I Set These Rules
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 my Terms and Conditions page as an example.
Groups and Individual Students Need Different Rules
You should have a zero-cancellation policy if your Business English arrangement is to teach a group. At least one group member should be present, and if nobody shows up for the lesson, it still counts.
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 fall solely on you when you're 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 on a cancellation policy or subscription price in the first meeting. If you have existing clients and would like to change the arrangement, tell them in advance that you want to discuss it, and raise your points at 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 provide your teaching services and how you measure up against the competition there have 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 in costs and standards of living. Yet a gap remains, since a prospective client in a Western European country will have a different price range from one in Central and Eastern Europe, Asia or Latin America.
Your first task should be some market research to see how much people are charging at both the high and low ends.
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 of teachers in their area and reach out directly through the website's portal.
This section contains affiliate links, so I may earn a small commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you.
The obvious benefit for teachers is that it allows them to obtain leads for new students passively. More importantly, though, you can use a platform like this to gauge the competition in the market, because you can 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-priced teachers on the market. Finally, ask yourself where you fit into the competitive environment. Does your profile compare well with the luxury price range, the budget price range, or somewhere in the middle?
Don't Compete with the Bottom Feeders
Online platforms make the competitive environment look very different. On sites like Preply, you'll find teachers offering lessons for $10 to $15 an hour, and many of them aren't professional teachers at all. Those prices teach students to skip the local teachers whose rates can support a real living.
I've considered joining these platforms myself, and the economics never worked. The platform puts the power in the hands of the students, who can choose from hundreds of profiles, so a new teacher has to price near the bottom just to win a few trial lessons, however experienced they are. The platform keeps the trial lesson fee, and then you hope the student comes back for a regular course. You can use these platforms to understand the market, but you shouldn't let them set your price.
How Do Your Teaching Qualifications Measure Up in the Local Market?
Some factors that set you apart as a Business English teacher are your educational background, your teaching experience and whether you have business experience outside teaching. If you have these qualities to a higher level than your competition, you can charge at the high end of the price range. In my post on Business English vs General English teachers, I cover qualifications in greater detail.
Where Will Your Leads Come From?
Language schools and people-matching agencies often do the marketing and outreach to secure arrangements with businesses in your area and promise to match them with a teacher. These services set the price in advance and offer the opportunities to teachers on their mailing list. The teacher who responds to the offer and meets the client's needs wins the job.
However, this approach rarely benefits the teacher, since you're limited in what you'll be paid but still have to handle the administration of the lessons and whatever red tape comes with it.
If you're just getting started as a Business English teacher, you might take these jobs to fill up your schedule. As you start to acquire your own clients, you can phase these arrangements out and become 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 who will be eager to start working with you. Your student has done the work for you by talking up your service when making the referral.
Unfortunately, your student might also have shared the price you charge them with the new prospect. This means the new student will likely come with a price expectation that matches what you've been charging their friend or acquaintance.
Raise Your Rate Without Emptying Your Book
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 is a good moment to raise your price to a level where you'd like to set your new floor, which 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 for your next new client. Once you have a new student at that price point, you can gradually start stepping up the prices of 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.
The Rate Conversation with Existing Students
Inflation has made this conversation harder than it used to be. When prices in Poland rose, I needed to move students from 75 zł to 100 zł, and to them that looked like a jump of a third. In reality, I had charged 75 zł for two or three years, so the new rate was catching up with inflation rather than getting ahead of it.
The fear behind that conversation is losing your book, because students now have cheaper options, from platforms to AI practice partners. That's exactly why the next-new-student approach works. Once new students accept the higher price, you know the market will bear it, and you can bring existing students up in steps with plenty of notice.
Get Found Without a Language School
As a freelance Business English teacher, one way to generate your own leads is to do your own local and content marketing. Students find teachers the same way they find language schools, through Google Maps and Google Search, so you need to be visible in those places too.
Set Up Your Google Business Profile
Local SEO (search engine optimization) starts with a Google Business Profile, which means you'll appear as a local business on Google Maps. To rank highly, you need a business address, a complete profile with your business hours and contact details, and reviews from your students. That way, when potential students in your area search for "Business English (your town or city)" or "native speaker English teacher (your town or city)", you show up as one of the top results.
There's a catch that took me years to notice. Directory and aggregator sites often copy your name, address and business details, and because their websites carry more authority than yours, they can outrank your own site even when someone searches for your name. Students who are looking for you then land on someone else's page, sometimes right next to your competitors.
Make Your Website the Home for Your Content
Additionally, you might consider doing your own content marketing. Content marketing is the idea that you write content, such as blog posts, that points to a landing page where you try to convert that traffic into students or subscribers.
A few years ago, I started writing a book on this called Content Marketing Essentials for Content Creators. Its core idea was that your website should be the home for all your content, so you embed your videos in your posts and share everything out to your social channels from there. That way, your blog sends views to your videos, and your videos send visitors to your blog.
I never published the book, because the AI era changed the technical side of content marketing so much that its advice no longer held up. Back then I recommended plenty of plugins, whereas today I run a lean website with as few of them as possible. What grew out of that work was a different method altogether, which I now run as ContentOps. Instead of a book to read, it's a system for doing the work, and it checks the code underneath each page rather than the prose, turning every page into a structured record that search engines and AI tools can read. If you teach locally, its guide on how local practitioners own their SEO instead of renting it explains the approach in plain terms.
The benefit of having your own website and a marketing plan is that you can set your own prices and generate your own leads, 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?
![Diagram illustrating two pillars for English teachers to market themselves independently: Pillar 1, Google Business Profile, emphasizes local SEO through appearing on Google Maps, completing profiles, gaining student reviews, and optimizing for local search terms like 'Business English [your city]'. Pillar 2, Your Website Hub, focuses on content marketing with blog posts, videos, and lessons driving traffic to a central site and converting visitors into students. An arrow indicates these two pillars 'Work Together'. A warning advises against directory sites, and the overall message promotes setting own prices, generating leads, and avoiding renting oneself out.](https://i0.wp.com/native1.pl/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/09-how-much-to-charge-for-business-english-lessons-slide-09.webp?w=1200&ssl=1 "slide-09")
Diversify Your Income to Survive the Summer
Pricing the year solves much of the summer problem, but the most reliable fix I've found came from outside the classroom. As a language teacher, your skills are in demand for more than lessons, and alongside my teaching I do data annotation work for AI companies. In summer, when I have fewer students, I shift most of my hours to that work, and this past summer it earned me more than teaching did.
The same thinking applies to your teaching book. Instead of relying on one school, you can work with several schools, take on private students and say yes to occasional opportunities like university courses. Once you invoice as a business, a school becomes one client among many, and you're free to turn down the classes that don't suit you. Coming from financial advising, I think of it the way an investor thinks about a portfolio, where no single source should control your income.
If I Could Do It All Over Again
Being a freelance Business English teacher can be a rewarding career. Many of us started out thinking we'd do it for a year or so. However, once you find a landing spot and have a wonderful experience, you want more.
Had I priced for 12 months from my first year, I would have spent far fewer summers flying off to work at camps just to cover July and August. I would also have treated my teaching like a business from the day I sent my first invoice, instead of waiting for the school's rate to push me there.
You start out with language schools, but eventually you branch out to take control of your career. If you're ready for that challenge, I hope this pricing guide helps you take the leap and run your own business. If you already have one, I hope it gives you the insight you need to improve it.
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?
What to Charge for Business English in Poland
I can't give you a definitive guide on what to charge for Business English lessons in other parts of the world, but I can share my own experience and the insights you need to make an informed decision.
As I live in Poland and teach Polish students, there are some realities I have to deal with. The same applies to you wherever you live in the world. If you want to attract Business English students, you need a profile that identifies you as such. And pricing those lessons have to be based in the reality of where you are in the world, market rates, and so much more. It's not just about setting the price, but having terms your target students find agreeable. Use this guide to frame that process but input your own variables into the mix.
I'm not located in Warsaw or Kraków, so I can only discuss the realities for my area of Katowice, Tychy and Mikołów. In 2023, the low end of pricing here was 50 zł per lesson, the median had settled at 75 zł, and most individual teachers charged 90 to 120 zł for Business English. Today's low end for Business English is more like 100 zl and can go as high as 200 zl per hour for Business English lessons.
What I Charge for Business English
Personally, I charge 125 zł on average for Business English lessons. My usual arrangement is to plan the month and invoice based on the number of lessons available on the agreed day and time. For example, a month in which I might meet a student three or five times is counted and invoiced up front. Business English lessons are on a "use it or lose it" basis, because I invoice for a service rather than for lessons delivered.
My Business English students reserve my time as much as they pay for the lesson. I arrived at this point after 18 years of teaching in Poland. A full schedule, an established reputation in the area and my own marketing have made it possible for me to set prices equivalent to what the language schools charge.
My Recommendation
My advice for you as a freelancer is to build your reputation first. Try to fill your schedule and gradually push toward the upper limits of the price range in your local market. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will your business be.
