Are Guitar Teachers Underpaid?



According to Indeed.com, the average guitar teacher in the United States makes $28.51 per hour[1].

If we assume a 40 hour work week, that comes to:

40 hours x $28.51 = $1140.40/week

OR

$59,300.80/year

Not bad.

According to GlassDoor.co.uk[2], the average guitar teacher in the United Kingdom makes £33,000/year, which comes to roughly $41,000/year.

Again, that’s above average.

However, are those numbers any good? What do I mean by that?

Teaching 40 hours a week is a lot - when I was teaching 24-28 hours a week, I found it exhausting.

Assuming two students an hour, you’re teaching 80 people a week.

Now, an important factor here is that you are mainly teaching outside of business and school hours, which means all your teaching has to be done after school, in evenings and weekends.

This means teaching from 3pm-9pm Monday to Friday and all day Saturday and Sunday.

  • 3pm-9pm Monday to Friday gives us 30 hours
  • 10am-9pm Saturday and Sunday gives us 22 hours
  • A total of 52 hours available to teach

This assumes no breaks, so the 40 hour work week we thought about at the start of the article is reasonable.

But having done this, it’s no way to live. You don’t get a social life, because your work time is effectively the opposite of the rest of the world.

What Hourly Rates Are Possible?

When it comes to teaching in-person, we’ve made the assumption that the hourly rate is $28.51. The easiest way to make more money is to increase the amount you make per hour.

Most teachers do this by charging more. This is easy to do, assuming that you have a large amount of enquiries (high demand means high prices). There are other ways this can be done.

When I was teaching locally, I was able to make over $350/hour teaching. I would teach a few evenings a week which was quite nice. And I was using a business model that, in retrospect, was not very good.

With a bit of creative thinking and training, hourly rates like this are not that difficult to achieve.

In fact, the method I was using was quite stressful. I later moved to a business model that made around $150/hour with a lot less stress, which was very manageable.

How to do this is just one aspect of what we’ll cover in Guitar Teacher Training.

If you’re interested in turning your love for guitar into a teaching career, helping students improve, and building a side hustle or full-time income, then on’t miss the Guitar Teacher Training Program.

Footnotes

^[1] https://www.indeed.com/career/guitar-instructor/salaries

^[2] https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Sueldos/guitar-teacher-sueldo-SRCH_KO0,14.htm