How much does a private tutor cost in the UK?
Most private tutors in the UK advertise between £30 and £60 an hour. GCSE tuition tends to sit at the lower end, A-Level and undergraduate work at the higher end, and London commonly carries a premium of £10 to £15 an hour on top. One hour a week through a 38-week school year works out at roughly £1,140 to £2,280 for a single subject.
The honest answer is that it depends on who you ask, and most of the pages that answer this question are written by agencies with a rate card to defend. So here is the range without the sales pitch, along with the number that actually matters, which is what a year of it costs rather than what an hour of it costs.
The typical range
Across the UK, private tutors generally advertise somewhere between £30 and £60 an hour. That band covers most of what you will see listed publicly. Below it you are usually looking at a sixth former or an undergraduate tutoring in their spare time. Above it you are usually looking at a subject specialist, an examiner, or an agency with a London address.
| Level | Typical hourly rate | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Primary / KS2 | £25 to £40 | Often the cheapest, and often booked in blocks around the 11+. |
| GCSE | £30 to £45 | The largest and most competitive part of the market. |
| A-Level | £35 to £60 | Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry sit highest. |
| Undergraduate | £45 to £80+ | Narrow subject expertise, so fewer tutors and less price pressure. |
| Examiner or agency | £60 to £120+ | You are paying for track record, vetting and cover. |
What moves the price
Five things account for most of the variation, and only one of them is the subject.
- Level. The jump from GCSE to A-Level is the single biggest step, because the pool of people who can teach A-Level Further Maths well is much smaller than the pool who can teach GCSE Maths.
- Experience. A qualified teacher with a decade in the classroom charges more than a second-year undergraduate, and usually needs fewer sessions to get to the same place.
- Location. London and the South East run £10 to £15 an hour above the rest of the country for comparable tutors.
- Agency or independent. Agencies add a margin on top of what the tutor takes home. In exchange you get vetting, a replacement if your tutor moves on, and somebody to complain to.
- Online or in person. Online is usually cheaper, partly because nobody is being paid to sit in traffic, and it widens your choice of tutor beyond whoever happens to live nearby.
The number that actually matters
Hourly rates make tutoring sound affordable. Annual totals are what families actually feel. A UK school year runs to roughly 38 teaching weeks, so one hour a week for one subject looks like this.
| Hourly rate | One subject, one hour a week, 38 weeks |
|---|---|
| £30 | £1,140 |
| £40 | £1,520 |
| £50 | £1,900 |
| £60 | £2,280 |
Now do it for three A-Levels, which is what most students take, and the same weekly hour becomes somewhere between £3,400 and £6,800 a year. That is the point at which tutoring stops being a line in the household budget and starts being a decision about the household budget.
What you get for it
It is worth being straight about this, because tutoring gets dismissed as a luxury by people who have never watched it work. A good tutor does something a classroom structurally cannot. They find out what you already know, they pick an explanation that fits you rather than the room, and when your face says it has not landed they try a different one. Thirty students and fifty minutes does not allow for any of that.
They also do the unglamorous half. They notice the topic you keep skipping. They make you attempt the question before they show you the method. They know what the mark scheme rewards, which is often a different thing from knowing the subject.
Where it falls down
The weakness of tutoring is not quality. It is availability. You get one hour, on Tuesday at six, and the rest of the week you are on your own. Homework does not respect that schedule. The moment you stop understanding is almost never the moment your tutor is sitting next to you, and by Tuesday you have either worked around the gap or forgotten you had it.
The second weakness is that the price sorts students by household income rather than by need. A student who would get enormous value from an hour a week is exactly as likely to be in a family that cannot spare £1,500 a year as one that can.
How to get more out of what you pay
- Book a diagnostic first. One session to find out where the gaps are beats six sessions of general revision.
- Send the tutor the specification and the last assessment. A tutor working blind spends the first twenty minutes finding out what a mark scheme would have told them.
- Agree the goal out loud. Getting from a 5 to a 7 and getting from a 7 to a 9 are different jobs and need different tutors.
- Insist your child attempts the question first. Watching someone else solve it feels like learning and is not.
- Review after six sessions. If the grade has not moved and the confidence has not either, change something.
The alternative worth knowing about
This is our blog, so read the next paragraph with that in mind. Lumi is an interactive AI tutor built to do the part of tutoring that helps most: talk through a problem, draw it on a board, and start again in a different way when the first explanation does not land. Plus is £28 a month, or £14.58 a month billed yearly, and includes over 8 hours a month. That is a different order of magnitude from £1,500 a year for one subject, and it is available at eleven at night on the Sunday before a deadline.
It does not replace a brilliant human tutor who knows your child. If you can afford one and you have found one, keep them. For the far larger number of families who cannot spend four figures a subject, the choice has usually been between an expensive hour a week and nothing at all, and that is the gap worth closing.
What to take from this
- £30 to £60 an hour is the range most UK tutors advertise, before any agency fee.
- The bill people actually pay is annual, not hourly: one subject, one hour a week, is four figures.
- Experience and level move the price far more than subject does.
- Agencies typically cost more than booking a tutor directly, and you are paying for vetting and cover.
- The real constraint is usually not money on its own. It is that an hour a week is one hour, and homework happens on the other six nights.
Questions people also ask
Not necessarily. At £30 you are often getting an undergraduate or a newly qualified teacher, and for GCSE content taught by someone who sat it recently and can explain it clearly, that can be excellent value. For A-Level Further Maths it is optimistic.
Usually yes, by roughly £5 to £15 an hour for a comparable tutor, and you can choose from the whole country rather than your postcode. The trade-off is that younger students often focus better with someone in the room.
For a specific weak topic, two or three sessions can be enough. For a grade change across a whole subject, most tutors would talk in terms of a term or more at an hour a week. Anyone promising a two-grade jump in a fortnight is selling something.
They are worth it if you value vetting, DBS checks and a guaranteed replacement when a tutor drops out. If you are confident judging a tutor yourself and you have a personal recommendation, booking directly is cheaper for the same teaching.
Some schools run subsidised or funded catch-up sessions, and a number of charities offer free tuition to eligible families. It is worth asking the school first, because provision varies enormously and is rarely advertised.