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I live near LA in South Pasadena.

My piano lesson at the local music school is $27 for 1/2 hour.

My guitar lesson at my home is $60 for 1 hour.

Bruce
South Pasadena

It's all about your local cost of living. There's no point comparing what you pay in a region where the average house costs say $350,000 and the average wage is say $45,000 with another region where the average house costs $680,000 and the average wage is $95,000.

I take lessons at the University. There is a program that awards scholarships based on need. Because I'm a typically poor 20-something, I pay only $65 per semester for 12 lessons (which end up 30-40 minutes), slightly less for 10 lessons in the summer. My teacher is a gifted graduate student who performs the hardest Liszt very well, and a very good teacher also. Pretty good deal And no, I'm not actually enrolled as a student there, I just take the lessons. It's worth looking into your local university or college, wherever you are.

When you do the math, teachers could make very good money for not much time working. Let's say you give 4 one-hour lessons per day at the rate of $60 per hour, 5 days a week. That's $1200 per week, over $62,000 per year (not sure how tax works on this stuff) only working 16 hours. That's a pretty comfortable living for a single person, anywhere in the country, with plenty of free time. What a nice gig!

Even piano teachers think it's a nice gig but that's because they don't really understand how business works - they don't calculate their costs accurately, they don't amortize their hourly rate over the hours they work in addition to the contact hours, they don't calculate holiday pay, sick pay, superannuations/insurances (this will vary from one country to the next), and so forth.

These are the mistakes made by many small business owners, and why many small businesses do not succeed, but of course the business model with piano teachers is one of service provider rather than seller of goods, and a service provider such as a piano teacher does have lower overheads and more predictable cash flow than many small businesses, which is why you don't hear of piano teachers 'going out of business'....

A good rule of thumb is that, whatever the gross hourly rate, the teacher is ACTUALLY making at best 45% of that figure (when expressed as an hourly rate). Here in Australia piano teachers rarely *gross* even the average wage, and I wouldn't think even the very most expensive teachers would net the average wage.

Hi Elissa

Yes, I am in Australia too, and have a PhD and heaps of degrees in music. The Music Teachers' Association of Queensland recommends A$60 an hour as the minimum rate, and I can hardly get tha. Some students opt for a fortnightly lesson - I even have one who has one a month!
It's the general financial situation, I guess, though I do no see anyone suffering at the Malls!
Robert Keane

I think as a teacher part of the trick is to live in an area where kids will want lessons AND have parents earning at least the average wage and paying no more than the average mortgage!!!

I pay about 34 euros per 45 minute lesson in Copenhagen, Denmark, which I find is a fair price for private tuition. Lesser can be paid for on a musical school with subsidization by the municipality. But I prefer my teaching 1-on-1.

I've recently begun lessons paying $160 a month for a weekly one hour lessons from a very well qualifled teacher (Phd in piano performance etc) who teaches in the studio of the non-profit "music academy" offshoot of a local university. The "academy" appears to have been founded as a local "feed in" to their music program as most of the instructors seem to be semi retired or former college music faculty. They must have seen the need as there are very few truly qualified instructors around here otherwise. The "academy" charges the same rate for violin, woodwind or voice instruction and offers weekly half hours lessons for $80 a month. This is in relatively low income area of the South.

The average family income is $46,056, the average cost of a house is $139,176.

I'm paying 105 € per month, which includes 1 hour piano + 1 hour theory/solfege every week.
I live in Barcelona (Spain)


PS: Theory and solfege are group lessons. Piano is 1 to 1.

I pay $25 for a half hour lesson, but often get 45 minutes or an hour for that.
An "average" condo here (west coast of Canada) costs about $400,000, a house close to a million.

And I work as a language tutor, which is a similar financial arrangement to teaching piano. Elissa, you're exactly right about working more unpaid hours than paid. Also, I doubt that any piano teacher would try to teach 4 hours straight - if I had 4 language students in a row, I'd be a basket case at the end of it. Keep in mind, it's one-to-one, which unlike classroom teaching, means you're 'on' all the time. Also,, each student is at a different level, so it's a different course to prepare & keep track of. I charge similar rates to a piano teacher, & my hourly rate works out to less than half what each student pays me for time I actually spend with them. Same goes for piano teachers, I'm sure. They work hard for their money, & the rewards, I'm sure, are mostly non-material.

Well, going by your math..let's say the person in my example is "actually" making about $30/hr, working 32 hours per week. Still a pretty nice gig in my book, about 3x what I made at my last "real job" (which was terrible).

You still need to factor in the unpaid hours spent in lesson preparation and studio planning/administration. Add on top of that the irregular hours (you've got to cram most of them in the afternoon/evening) and irregular income (unless you're well-established and have a long wait list, you're at the mercy of people signing up or leaving unexpectedly), and suddenly the picture is not so rosy.

I doubt there are many piano teachers getting rich. It seems clear to me that the people who have piano teaching as a career do it because they are committed to music education and find it personally rewarding, not because it is an easy way to earn a lot of money.

Even Chopin continually complained about his overhead and well heeled students who absconded without paying.

That would be $11,520 a year, 3x's less a year is $3840 - correct?
And no vacations for he or she.
I hope my teacher makes more than that.
RDW

That's why I changed it from 16 hours a week (4 hours of teaching per day) to 32. The extra hours are for the administrative/prep time.

I understand the concept perfectly - I've been starting up as a freelance web developer the last several months. I'm well aware of the pitfalls of self-employment, and the fact that it takes time to establish a base no matter what line of work you're doing. Until that happens you'll need to work a wage-based job, and it could be years before you don't need that job anymore.

Yes, yes, yes...I'm familiar with all these considerations and the ones you mentioned, and was factoring them into my opinion. But for people who persist, these things can work out beautifully. My friend does web development - for several years it was merely "supplemental income." But at some point he made some great connections, business went up...and now he can go anywhere he wants anytime, as long as he brings his laptop, finds some free wi-fi and does a few hours' work per day. And he makes good money doing it. He went to Thailand for three weeks recently.

On that topic - piano teachers can take vacations. Why couldn't they? My teacher in high school did. My teacher now just went back to her native Taiwan over the new year. I had plenty of advance notice. Did I mind? Not at all, I appreciated a few weeks off from lessons.

So sometimes these things work out. Not always - I'm just saying, I bet there are some piano teachers out there who are thinking they've got it pretty good (the fact that they enjoy it and find it intrinsically rewarding regardless of pay are a given).

No different at all. I wander off to the cafe anytime I please with my laptop. If a student finds me there I order them a coffee... it's unfortunate there are no pianos at the cafe

Seriously though, most of my work can't be done with laptop only, I find I need my instruments, music collection, phone (I would not enjoy making work calls at a cafe). and paper files on students. I use paper as I like to take a few quick notes during lessons and find writing less distracting.

Web design sounds like the way to go if you want to make money and have flexibility doing it. I wouldn't recommend teaching at all if these are your goals.

Edited to add: Yes the holidays are great, and the work is very interesting and rewarding, I love teaching and love all my students. But I simply could not imagine teaching enough to make as much as I would as a "clerk". I would burn out and have to quit anyway. For me it takes an enormous amount of emotional and mental energy.

The best way to make extra money from teaching would be to have a really good website! or sell a lot of books on teaching, or write music (that sells) for the early years of learning music.

Slowpogo: the hourly rate is for each hour you TEACH not for each hour you spend working. The overheads account for a certain (larger than you would think) percentage, if you work in a country with a consumption tax that accounts for a percentage, and then you need to account for all the things an employer would cover that you need to since you are self-employed. This gets us to the AT BEST 45% figure for each hour that you teach. You get paid $0 for the other hours. So a 20 hour teaching week at the $30 per hour figure you quoted comes out at $600 a week. Not a great wage for a job which requires such an exceptional level of study and specialisation.

If there are some piano teachers out there thinking they've got it pretty good they are probably not doing the accounts right.

You totally, utterly, missed the point...I was not making a direct 1:1 comparison between these two professions. I was simply illustrating that self-employment sometimes rises to some pretty cool heights, in spite of the obstacles (which are fairly similar for every small business).

Yes....if you teach 20 hours and make $60 for each of those hours, but you actually work twice that much, then you could say, the amount you earn is distributed over twice as many hours, halving your hourly wage to $30. I'm not sure what you're saying. If you earn $1200 a week, whether you worked 5 or 400 hours, you earned $1200 in that week. How is it that you're actually earning only $600? What extra costs are you assuming MUST be paid out of earnings? Are you including the cost of piano payments or something?

You've got a home, with a piano in it. Students come, you teach them, they give you $60. You do what you need to do administratively and to prepare for teaching. And at the end of the week you've got your $1200, which you can use for insurance, car payment, mortgage or rent, food...your life. Minus some tax of course. What am I missing?

Even if I don't fully understand what you're saying, over $30,000 per year is nothing to sneeze at. Most people teaching music in public schools don't make that much, at least not in the first several years.

I'm also not convinced there is as much extra time as you say. I taught trombone lessons during college - just for extra money. I certainly put some thought into my students and my plans for them, sometimes ordered music for them, kept a spreadsheet of what I earned for tax purposes, occasionally needed to practice something from their music so I could demonstrate it confidently. It didn't add very much time to what I was already doing. Maybe an hour or two per week.

Even if prep time was 50% of actual teaching time - that's 30 hours per week, for $30,000 per year. Still quite good. And not having a boss or workplace politics hanging over your head is always priceless. I'd take it!

I know you're trying hard to convince me that teaching piano is not a very good job...it's just not working, to be honest.