If Every Parent Says Yes, Your Tutoring Rate Is Too Low

For a long time I charged £30 an hour for my tutoring sessions, and every single parent who enquired said yes. I used to think that was a good thing. It felt like proof I was doing something right, that the price was fair and nobody had a reason to hesitate. It took someone else pointing out the obvious flaw in that logic for me to see it properly, and once I saw it I could not unsee it. If every parent who asks says yes, your price is not fair. It is too low.

I want to walk through why that conversion rate is actually a warning sign, what it took for me to raise my rate anyway, and the method I now use to keep raising it without it ever feeling like a guess. My rate has more than doubled since that £30 figure, and I am still converting close to every enquiry that comes in, which tells me there is probably still room to move. This is not a victory lap. I am mid-way through this, not at the end of it, and some of it has been genuinely uncomfortable.

The conversion rate that gave the game away

A hundred percent conversion sounds like a success story, but it is really a pricing signal, and it took hearing Alex Hormozi talk about this for the penny to drop for me. His reasoning, and it is a rule of thumb rather than a law, is that a healthy price sits somewhere around 30 to 40 percent conversion, the point where most people say yes but a decent chunk look at the number and think that is a bit pricey for them. If literally everyone says yes, you have not found your price. You have found a price so comfortable that nobody has to think about it, and that comfort is coming out of your own pocket.

When I actually sat with that, it explained a pattern I had never questioned. Every parent who messaged me about tutoring went on to book. Every single one. I had read that as evidence I was good at my job, when really it was evidence that £30 an hour was an easy yes for almost anyone who was even considering paying for tutoring in the first place. Nobody was weighing it up against anything. There was no real decision happening on their end at all.

Parents are not buying an hour, they are buying a path

The other shift, and this one mattered as much as the number itself, is understanding what a parent is actually paying for. It is not sixty minutes of my time on a Tuesday evening. It is a different outcome for their child at the end of a course of GCSE maths, a pass instead of a fail, a grade that keeps a door open rather than closing it. The way I think about it now, a maths pass can determine the shape of someone's whole working life, the courses they can go on to, the jobs they can apply for, the choices that stay available to them rather than falling away. I am not going to put a figure on what that is worth over a lifetime because I have not got a study in front of me that proves it, but I know it is a great deal more than an hour of anyone's time, and once I started framing my own sessions that way rather than as time on a clock, the price I was charging started to look strange in the other direction. It looked too low for what was actually being bought.

Where the price anxiety comes from

I want to be honest about something more personal here, because I think it explains a lot of tutors' pricing, not just mine. I came up through a working-class background and trained as a classroom teacher, and both of those things left me with a mindset of keeping prices low so I could help as many people as possible. That is not a bad instinct. It comes from a good place. But most of my network, friends, family, colleagues I have known for twenty years, share roughly that same background, and to that group of people £30 an hour already sounds like a lot of money and £40 sounds like too much. I was pricing my whole business off the reactions of people who were never going to be my customers.

Parents with more money behind them assess the same purchase in a completely different way. They are not asking whether £40 an hour feels like a lot compared with what their friends pay a cleaner or a tutor. They are asking what a year of consistent work with a good tutor produces at the end of it, and they are willing to pay accordingly. Same sessions, same me, entirely different frame in their head, and I had spent years pricing to the wrong frame without realising it.

The comparison that stings

Here is the one that really sat with me once I noticed it. When I have booked an appointment with another university-trained professional, a physiotherapist or a private GP, I have generally paid somewhere between £60 and £80 an hour, and I was charging £30 for work that took the same years of training and the same responsibility for someone's outcome. So I had to ask myself honestly whether that gap was because tutors genuinely cannot see the value of what we do, or because we are all anchored to each other, all watching what the tutor down the road charges and setting our own price a few pounds either side of theirs, some of us as low as £15 an hour. I suspect it is a bit of both, but either way it is not a gap that reflects the actual value being delivered.

The five-client price ladder

None of this is useful as a mindset shift on its own, because knowing your price is too low does not tell you what the right price actually is. What I use instead is a simple, iterative method rather than a leap of faith. Raise your rate, and take on five new clients at that new price. Watch how many of those five actually convert. If all five say yes, you have not found your ceiling yet, so raise again for the next five. If none of them convert, you have found it, and you know to come back down slightly from there. Then you repeat the process every five clients, so the price keeps moving with real evidence behind it rather than a hunch.

I have just run a batch of five new clients through this at my current higher rate, and I told my existing clients honestly that the rate is going up this year as well. Around fifteen people in total have now accepted the higher price, which is the clearest signal I have had yet that the old rate was leaving money on the table. The method works because it takes the emotion out of the decision. You are not guessing whether people can afford more. You are watching what actually happens with real enquiries and letting that tell you where to go next.

Holding the price when it gets uncomfortable

I will be honest that none of this has felt easy in practice, even once I understood the theory. A recent enquiry, the first time this has ever happened to me, replied that my rate was pricey. My instinct in that moment was to say I get it, I have been where you are, let me reduce it for you, because that is the version of me that grew up keeping prices low to help people. I did not say it. I held the price, partly because I am genuinely fully booked and partly because I had decided in advance that this was the point I was testing. The family came anyway, without me moving on price at all. Within a handful of sessions the student had their best assessment result yet, and the parent told me afterwards, you're expensive, but you're worth it, and left a glowing review. I am keeping the details of that family private, as they should stay, but the moment has stuck with me as proof that holding a price you believe in is not the same as being unreasonable about it.

What actually justifies charging more, in the end, is not confidence on its own. It is the case you build behind the price: results with previous students, testimonials that say what actually happened, word of mouth from parents who were happy, and something close to a guarantee that a student who turns up and does the work will see progress. In my case that record is a 100 percent pass rate across the students I have taken through their maths GCSE, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out that this belonged in a conversation about price rather than sitting unmentioned on my own CV. That evidence is what turns a number on a page into an honest value conversation, and it is the thing I would tell any tutor to build before they worry about the price itself.

If you tutor and any of this sounds familiar, the pricing side is only half the picture. The other half is the evidence you can put in front of a parent, which is part of why I built Bow Tie Maths, so students and their parents can see exactly which topics are costing marks and watch that change over time. A few tutors have asked about using it alongside their own sessions, so if that is something you have been thinking about, have a look at the teachers page and get in touch, and we can have a conversation about it.