A private tutoring business is one of the cheapest things you can start in the UK, which is exactly why so many of them are started badly. You need a kitchen table, a subject you know properly and somebody willing to pay for an hour of your attention. No stock, no premises, no van on finance. But cheap to start is not the same as easy to keep going, and the parts people skip in the first week, the tax registration, the cancellation rule, the price they settle on, are the parts that hurt around month nine when they are teaching twelve hours and still not sure it is worth the evenings.
So here is the order we would sort it in.
When A Private Tutoring Business Has To Register With HMRC
Teaching a neighbour’s child for £20 an hour once a fortnight is not a business in HMRC’s eyes if it stays that small. There is a trading allowance that covers a modest amount of casual income before you have to declare anything, and the figure can change, so check the current one rather than trust a forum post from three years ago. Once you go past it, you are self employed, and you register as a sole trader. You can do that on gov.uk in about ten minutes.
The deadline catches more people than the form does. You register by 5 October following the end of the tax year in which you started trading. Take your first paid lesson in February, the tax year ends that April, and your deadline is the October after. That feels a long way off in February. It is not, because by then you will have eight months of receipts to find and no idea which shoebox they are in.
Most people running a private tutoring business stay a sole trader for years, and that is usually the right call. A limited company brings annual accounts, filing dates and a fee, and it earns its keep when profits get large or an agency insists on it. One tutor with fifteen hours a week is not that case.
There is also a VAT exemption for private tuition in a subject ordinarily taught in schools when you teach on your own account, which is why very few tutors ever deal with VAT at all. Ask an accountant before assuming it covers what you teach, particularly if you are doing something less conventional like exam technique coaching or university applications.
DBS Checks: What Parents Will Actually Ask For
Nearly every parent asks. Very few know what they are asking for. As a self employed tutor you cannot apply for an enhanced DBS check on your own, because enhanced checks are requested by an organisation for a role that qualifies for one. What you can do is apply for a basic check yourself and show parents the certificate. In a private tutoring business that is the honest answer to give: here is my basic disclosure, here are two parents you can ring.
If you also tutor through an agency or work in a school, you may already hold an enhanced certificate. Whether it can be reused for your own pupils depends on its level, the workforce it covers and the Update Service, so check before you tell a parent you are covered. Getting that wrong is worse than having no certificate at all.
Most parents ask once and never again. The one who does press will decide whether to book on your answer, so a private tutoring business that has the paperwork ready in a folder starts every conversation ahead.
Insurance For A Private Tutoring Business
Two covers matter. Professional indemnity, which deals with the claim that your teaching caused a loss, and public liability, which deals with somebody tripping over your bag in their hallway or a child hurting themselves in your dining room. Quotes for a one person tutoring policy commonly land somewhere between £60 and £150 a year. Get two quotes and read what is excluded for online lessons.
If you teach at home, tell your home insurer, and check your tenancy or mortgage terms if you rent or have a leasehold flat. A private tutoring business run from the dining table is usually fine with everyone. A policy that was never told about it is the sort of thing that gets argued over after a claim, which is the worst possible time to find out.
What To Charge For Your First Hours
Pick a figure, write it down, and stop apologising for it in the first phone call.
Rates vary enormously by area and subject. Across much of the country a GCSE maths or English hour sits somewhere between £25 and £40, A level and eleven plus preparation usually sit higher, and music is often priced per half hour because that is how young beginners actually work. Do not guess your number. Search your town plus the subject, open ten listings, put the prices in a column and look at where you honestly sit.
Two things new tutors underprice. Travel is the first: 25 minutes each way to a pupil’s house turns a £30 lesson into nearly two hours of your evening, so either charge a higher home visit rate or teach online or at yours. Preparation is the second. An eleven plus session with marked homework and a set of past paper questions can take 30 or 40 minutes of unpaid work. A private tutoring business charging £30 with 40 minutes of prep behind every lesson is really earning about £18 an hour.
Write your cancellation rule before you need it. Twenty four hours notice, otherwise the lesson is charged, is normal and parents accept it without blinking because they meet the same rule at the dentist and the physio. Say it once when they book and put it in the same message as your bank details.
On payment, monthly in advance for the month’s lessons keeps a private tutoring business out of the chasing game entirely. Some tutors sell blocks of six. Either works. What does not work is an open tab that reaches £240 before anybody mentions it.
And raise your rate. Put the new price on new pupils first, leave existing families where they are until September, then move everyone. A private tutoring business that has charged the same £28 for four years has quietly given itself a pay cut.
Where The First Six Pupils Come From
Almost nobody’s first pupils come from advertising. They come from people who already know you, and from one parent telling another in a car park.
- Parents at your own children’s school, or the school you used to teach at.
- School offices and heads of year, some of whom keep an informal list of tutors they are willing to mention.
- Local Facebook groups and Nextdoor, where the question “can anyone recommend a GCSE maths tutor” appears roughly every fortnight from September onwards.
- Music shops, libraries and church noticeboards, which still work surprisingly well for instrument teachers.
- The parents of the pupil you already teach, who often have a younger child two years behind.
Agencies and platforms have their place for the first pupil or two, but they take a cut of every lesson and many have a clause stopping you taking a pupil off the platform for a set period. Read that clause properly. A private tutoring business built entirely on somebody else’s marketplace is renting its income.
Expect the year to be lumpy. Enquiries spike in September, again in January, and again when mock results land and a parent realises there are eleven weeks left. Summer goes quiet. A private tutoring business that budgets on August looking like October will have a bad August.
Word of mouth still ends in a search. The parent handed your name in the playground will type it into Google that evening, probably alongside “GCSE maths tutor” and the name of the town, and what comes back decides whether they ring or move on to the next name. If there is nothing, or only a personal Facebook profile full of holiday photos, you are relying on them being brave. A page that sets out what you teach, which exam boards, your rate, your DBS status and when you have space does a lot of quiet selling before you ever speak. That is the thinking behind our website design for tutors: written for the parent who pays rather than the pupil who sits the exam. Better to have it in place in August than halfway through the September rush.
Records, Receipts And The Bits Parents Never See
From lesson one, keep a single sheet: date, pupil, subject, length, fee, paid or not paid. A spreadsheet is fine. A paper diary is fine. What matters is that you update it every Sunday rather than every January.
Keep the receipts too. Textbooks, past paper packs, printer ink, the graphics tablet, the subscription to the question bank, and mileage if you drive to pupils. HMRC publish an approved mileage rate, so look up the current one rather than inventing a figure. As a sole trader you need to keep your records for at least five years after the 31 January submission deadline for that tax year, which is longer than most people expect.
A separate bank account is not a legal requirement for a sole trader. It is still the single best half hour you will spend, because a private tutoring business running through the family current account means untangling lesson fees from the weekly shop at the exact moment you least want to.
Online Lessons, Kit And Data
A lot of tutoring moved online and stayed there, which is good news for your evenings. A graphics tablet at £60 to £100, a free video call tool and a shared whiteboard will do more for lesson quality than any paid platform. Check your upload speed rather than your download speed, since that is the one that decides whether the parent in the next room hears you freeze.
You will also be holding information about children: names, addresses, school reports, SEN paperwork, message threads with parents. A private tutoring business is a data controller like any other business. Delete the reports you no longer need, put a password on the laptop, and never discuss one child in a thread about another.
On safeguarding, keep it simple and consistent. Message the parent rather than the teenager, ask that an adult is in the house during online lessons with younger pupils, and write nothing in a note you would not be happy for the family to read.
So What Does A Private Tutoring Business Need First?
Less than the internet suggests. In the first month of a private tutoring business, we would sort these, roughly in this order:
- Your hourly rate written down, with a separate home visit rate and a cancellation rule.
- HMRC registration as a sole trader once you pass the trading allowance, with the 5 October deadline in the diary.
- A basic DBS certificate you can hand over when asked.
- Two insurance quotes, plus a call to your home insurer if pupils are coming to you.
- One sheet tracking lessons taught and lessons paid.
- Somewhere a parent can check you are real before they ring, which needn’t be expensive: affordable website design starts a lot lower than most tutors assume.
Everything else can wait until you are teaching ten hours a week and know which subjects you actually enjoy. The tutors who are still going in three years are rarely the cleverest ones. They are the ones who answer the phone, start on time and send an invoice that is easy to pay.