Tutorperch Research · No. 1
The UK Private Tutoring Rate Report 2026
What 24,183 UK private tutors actually charged, by subject, level, region and reputation.
Written by Fiona Hennessy Last reviewed
£30
Median UK rate
£40
Median London rate
£40
Top 25% of UK rates
First Tutors operated for over twenty years before announcing its closure on 8 May 2026. Throughout that time the Wayback Machine and Common Crawl had been indexing the site at intervals. We pulled what those snapshots had — incomplete, but substantial — deduplicated it into one row per tutor, and analysed the dataset of 24,183 UK private tutors and 83,475 parent and student reviews, broken down by subject, level, region, and reputation.
The first thing that was clear from the data was the large range in pricing. The typical tutor in Norwich charged £25 an hour. The top quartile of tutors in Knightsbridge charged £80. That kind of gap — three times the price for what looks, from a parent's reading, like a similar lesson — is what every parent looking for a tutor is implicitly trying to navigate, usually without any data to work from.
The figures here won't tell you which tutor to hire. They will tell you what other parents in your position paid, what a fair range looks like, and what tends to drive the difference. The methodology and the limitations of the dataset are at the end of the page.
Section one
What you should expect to pay
Roughly 29% of UK secondary students have had private tutoring at some point, per the Sutton Trust's 2026 polling. This report covers the other side of that transaction — what those tutors charged.
The median UK private tutor charges £30 an hour. About a quarter charge £25 or less. About a quarter charge £40 or more. That national figure hides a wide regional spread.
Liverpool, Leeds, Norwich and the North-East cluster at the bottom: a typical tutor there charges around £25. Surrey, Oxfordshire and the South-East sit at £35-38. London is the outlier — £40 median, with a quarter of London tutors charging over £50.
UK regions by hourly rate
Median · middle 50% · bottom 10% to top 10%
Top 20 UK regions by tutor count. Regions with fewer than 30 priced tutors excluded.
What this means for budgeting: parents in cheaper regions can usually find a competent GCSE-level tutor for £20-25. In London, expect to budget £40-50 for the equivalent. Top-end specialists — Oxbridge entrance, top-tier A-Level, sought-after instruments — sit well above these numbers regardless of region.
Section two
Find your typical rate
Pick a subject, level and region. We'll show you what tutors in that cell of the market actually charged.
Most parents looking for a GCSE Maths tutor in the UK pay between £25 and £40 an hour.
£25
Bottom 25%
£30
Median
£40
Top 25%
£60
Top 10%
Based on 2494 tutors in the First Tutors archive.
Section three
How tutoring rates have changed since 2018
Because the snapshots in the archive carry dates, we can also look at how rates moved over time. The chart below shows the median UK tutor's headline rate for each year that has enough snapshots to be meaningful, alongside UK CPI inflation as a reference.
Median UK tutor hourly rate, by snapshot year
Median hourly rate per snapshot year. CPI line shows what the 2018 headline rate would be today if it had only tracked general inflation. Based on 9,100 UK tutor snapshots that could be timestamped via Common Crawl. Pre-2018 snapshots have too thin a sample to chart.
The median UK tutor charged £28 in 2018 and £40 in 2026 — a 43% nominal increase over eight years. UK CPI rose around 34% over the same period, so tutoring kept pace with general inflation and a little more besides. Most of the move came after 2022.
Section four
Why London prices look the way they do
The underlying demand explains some of it. Per the Sutton Trust, 45% of London pupils have had a private tutor, against 27% in the rest of England and 24% in Wales — well over a third more demand per pupil.
London's £40 median is itself an average of two very different markets. Outer-London boroughs and student-dense neighbourhoods cluster around £40-50 an hour. Inner-London wealth zones — Westminster, Knightsbridge, Mayfair, Wimbledon — sit much higher.
London median hourly rate, by borough
Hover (or tap) any borough
Median rate
Borough detail
Hover or tap any borough on the map to see its median rate, top-quartile rate, and sample size.
Choropleth shows the median listed hourly rate among tutors in each London borough. Borough boundaries: ONS Local Authority Districts (2013). Boroughs with fewer than five tutors in the dataset are shown as "no data" rather than charted.
The London premium also isn't uniform across subjects. A London Maths tutor charges 15% more than the national median for the same level. A London Economics tutor charges 50% more. A London Biology tutor charges 43% more. The pattern tracks the subjects where wealthier parents are competing for the same finite pool of specialist tutors: pre-medical sciences, Russell-Group-feeder Maths and Economics, and 11+ and 13+ entrance preparation.
London A-Level premium by subject
National · London
A-Level rates only. Subjects with fewer than 20 London tutors or 50 nationally excluded.
Section five
The A-Level step up — with one exception
Most subjects show a clear premium for higher levels. The median GCSE Maths tutor charges £30 an hour. The median A-Level Maths tutor charges £35 — roughly 17% more. The same 17% premium appears in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, English, History, Psychology, Business, and Computing.
Two subjects break the pattern in opposite directions.
A-Level vs GCSE rate by subject
GCSE · A-Level
Entrance Exams shows the steepest premium curve in the dataset. The median Primary-level Entrance Exams tutor charges £33. By A-Level, the median is £50. The top quartile charges £70+. The top 10% charge £100 or more. The top 1% reach £250 an hour. This is the part of the market where private-school and Oxbridge-feeder tutoring sits, and it prices accordingly.
Modern Languages — French, Spanish, German — show no A-Level premium at all. A GCSE French tutor charges £30. An A-Level French tutor also charges £30. The same is true at the borough level and across regions. The data doesn't tell us why.
Section six
Does paying more get you a better tutor?
The strongest predictor of a tutor's rate isn't their region, their subject, or the level they teach. It's how many reviews they have.
Hourly rate by number of reviews on the tutor's profile
A tutor with no reviews charges £30 at the median. A tutor with 50 or more reviews charges £50 — 67% more. The signal is consistent across every region and subject we looked at. Tutoring reputation compounds: the longer someone has been visibly endorsed, the more they can charge, and the more they keep charging.
Star rating alone tells you much less. A 5.0-rated tutor charges £35 at the median; a 4.5-rated tutor charges £32. The variance within each rating bucket dwarfs the variance between them. A 5.0 average built on three reviews carries less information than a 4.7 average built on sixty.
Section seven
What credentials tutors put in their own bios
When tutors describe themselves on their own profiles, a few credentials come up much more often than others. We counted mentions across the 24,183 profiles with any biographical text.
Credential mentions in tutor profile bios
A few things stand out from the list.
Oxbridge appears in over 5,000 profiles. The famous-five private schools — Eton, Harrow, Westminster, St Paul's, Winchester — appear in roughly 500. The "Oxbridge tutor" archetype is around ten times more common in self-marketing than the "Westminster-educated" one. Parents looking for an elite-signalled tutor are far more often being sold by a university than a school.
QTS — Qualified Teacher Status — appears in fewer than 1 in 40 profiles. PGCE, the standard teacher-training qualification, is roughly 1 in 10. The majority of UK private tutors are not, in the formal sense, qualified teachers. They are subject experts with a degree (Master's mentions appear roughly 6,000 times, BSc and BA 3,700, PhD 3,300) who teach. Many of the most-reviewed tutors in the dataset have no QTS.
"Examiner" appears in nearly 1,900 profiles — three times as often as QTS. A parent looking for exam-technique drilling may value examiner experience over teacher training, and the market appears to agree.
Section eight
What parents say tutoring actually changed
Most reviews just say nice things about the tutor — only about a third describe a specific change in the child. When they do, the picture is unambiguous: confidence is mentioned 27 times more often than grade improvement.
Share of reviews mentioning each outcome
n=76,732 reviews
Each bar is the share of 76,732 reviews that mention any phrase in the corresponding category. Categories are hand-curated regex buckets — over-counting some phrases and missing others is unavoidable, but the relative pattern is consistent across re-runs with looser or tighter patterns. 34.5% of reviews matched at least one specific outcome; the remainder were general praise of the tutor without describing a particular change.
The implicit "why" of private tutoring, in parents' own language, is rarely "to get the grades". It's: my child believes in themselves again; my child stopped dreading the subject; my child finally understands. Specific grade outcomes get named in fewer than one review in a hundred — and exam-related anxiety reduction (2%) gets mentioned almost four times as often as grade improvement itself.
For a parent reading this trying to decide whether to hire a tutor: the language other parents use suggests it's worth asking what you want the lessons to do, not just what grade you want. Most reviews describing a real change describe an emotional one. Grades, when they come, appear to be downstream.
Further reading
- How to choose a tutor — our practical guide, picking up on the report's finding that review count is a stronger signal than star rating.
- Sutton Trust — Private Tutoring 2026 — the canonical demand-side reference, polled by Ipsos. Theirs covers who's buying tutoring; ours covers what they're paying.
Methodology
Where this data comes from
This report analyses public profile data from First Tutors, a UK private tutoring directory that operated for over twenty years before announcing its closure on 8 May 2026. Throughout its life, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and Common Crawl crawled the site at intervals, preserving snapshots of public tutor profiles — pricing, location, subjects, declared qualifications, and parent reviews.
We pulled what those snapshots had, deduplicated to one row per tutor (keeping the most recent listed price per subject and level), and excluded cells with too few observations to be meaningful. This report uses only aggregated figures (medians, percentiles, counts) — no individual tutor profiles are reproduced here.
The resulting dataset contains 24,183 unique tutor profiles and 83,475 student or parent reviews, spanning every UK region and 49 distinct subjects.
How this dataset is useful
Getting a useful read on the shape of the UK private tutoring market — what got charged, where, for what subjects, by tutors with what declared credentials. The sample is large enough that the regional and subject medians are reasonably stable; the relative differences (London vs the rest, A-Level vs GCSE, Entrance Exams vs everything else) are clearly visible in the data.
The limitations of this dataset, and how to read the numbers
- The archive is incomplete. The Wayback Machine and Common Crawl took snapshots at intervals, not continuously. Many tutor profiles were never captured at all; many that were captured were captured only once or twice. The dataset here is what survived in those public snapshots — substantial, but not exhaustive.
- Single-platform bias. First Tutors was one of several UK private tutoring directories. We don't have an authoritative figure for its market share relative to MyTutor, Superprof, agencies, or word-of-mouth. The kind of tutor who chose First Tutors may price differently from those elsewhere — online-native low-rate tutors are probably under-represented; long-tenured tutors who built up their visible reputation on First Tutors are probably over-represented.
- Self-reported pricing. Tutors set their own listed rate. Many will have negotiated discounts in practice (package rates, sibling discounts, long-term commitments) that the listed price doesn't show. Headline numbers should be read as "what tutors said they charged", not "what parents actually paid".
- Snapshot dates vary. Profile snapshots range from 2005 to early 2026. We've used the most recent snapshot per tutor, but coverage isn't uniform across time: roughly half of all profiles were last snapshotted in 2018 or 2019, and only about 13.7% carry a snapshot from 2024 or later. The year-on-year chart in Section 3 cleans this up by binning each snapshot to its actual capture year; the cross-section figures elsewhere in the report don't. We haven't adjusted for inflation — figures are nominal.
- Review verification is opaque to us. We don't have detailed visibility into First Tutors' review-verification policy. Review counts in the dataset are taken as they appeared on the profile.
- No demand-side data. We can see what tutors listed; we can't see how many lessons each one actually sold. A tutor with a £150/h rate and three reviews may not have many takers.
- No outcome data. This report is about what tutoring costs. It is not about whether tutoring works, which tutors get better grades, or whether higher rates predict better outcomes.
- Registration dates are sparse. Only about 4% of profiles carried a parseable registration date. Any year-by-year trend should be read as illustrative rather than precise.
- Geographic coverage is uneven. London is heavily over-represented in the dataset relative to its share of the UK population. Some of that may reflect where First Tutors had the most users; some may reflect where the public archives captured the most snapshots. Either way, regional figures should be read with that weighting in mind. Cells with fewer than five tutors have been excluded from the explorer.
For the demand-side view — how many UK pupils receive private tutoring, who they are, where they live — the canonical reference is the Sutton Trust's Private Tutoring 2026 report, polled by Ipsos. This report is intended to sit alongside it, not against it: theirs covers demand, ours covers supply.
Re-use
The aggregated, anonymised dataset that underpins this report is available as JSON at /research/tuition-2026/explorer.json and the supporting cuts in the same directory. If you re-use any of this in reporting or research, please cite it as:
Tutorperch (2026). The UK Private Tutoring Rate Report 2026. Available at: https://tutorperch.com/research/uk-tuition-rate-report-2026
Press contact
For comment or interview, contact press@tutorperch.com. The report's author, Fiona Hennessy, is a working UK private tutor.