How Much Does a Private Tutor Cost in the UK? (2026 Prices)

If you are pricing up a tutor this week — and two days after GCSE results, a lot of parents are — here is the straight answer. A private tutor in the UK typically costs £15–40 an hour online and, at secondary level, £35–65 an hour in person, based on commonly advertised rates. Experienced London tutors often charge more than that, in-person rates usually carry travel on top, and agency-arranged in-person tuition frequently starts at £50 an hour. In other words, the average cost of a tutor in the UK depends less on the teaching than on how you buy it: broadly similar tuition can cost £20 or £60 an hour depending on where the tutor lives, who introduced you, and how many lessons you were persuaded to pay for upfront.

This guide sets out tutor prices in the UK for 2026 by level and format, explains what actually moves the price, and — more usefully — shows how to pay less without getting worse tuition. Every figure here is a commonly advertised rate, not a promise: tutors set their own prices, and the ranges are wide for reasons we will come to.

How much does a tutor cost? 2026 prices by level

Tutoring cost per hour rises with the level being taught and the scarcity of people who can teach it. These are the ranges you will commonly see advertised in 2026:

Three footnotes matter. First, in-person rates typically exclude travel — some tutors charge for it, others fold it into a higher hourly rate. Second, experienced London tutors often sit above these ranges altogether. Third, tuition arranged through a traditional agency commonly starts around £50 an hour in person, because the agency takes a margin on every lesson, indefinitely.

What actually drives tutor prices in the UK

Four things explain almost all of the variation:

• Who is teaching. A current undergraduate studying the subject at a good university typically charges towards the bottom of each range. An experienced graduate tutor sits in the middle. A qualified, serving or former schoolteacher — particularly one with examining experience — sits at the top. Each step up is real, but the jump in price is usually bigger than the jump in results, especially below A-level.
• Level and subject scarcity. A-level costs more than KS3 because fewer people can teach it well. Within a level, scarce subjects carry a premium: further maths, physics and modern languages tutors are harder to find than English or biology tutors, and their rates reflect it.
• Where you live. In-person tuition is a local market. In London and the South East, demand is high, tutors' own costs are high, and travel time gets priced in — so the same tutor CV costs meaningfully more than it would in Leeds or Cardiff. Online tuition has no postcode premium, which is a large part of why it is cheaper.
• Who is in the middle. An agency that takes a cut of every lesson has to charge you more than a tutor working through a platform that matches you directly. You are not paying for better teaching; you are paying for the introduction, every week, forever.

What you get at each price point

£15–25 an hour

Almost always online, and usually an undergraduate or recent graduate with strong grades in the subject. For KS3 and GCSE — where the material is not the hard part, and patience, energy and recent exam experience count for a great deal — this band is genuinely good value. A student who sat the same GCSE spec five years ago often explains it better than someone who last taught it from the front of a classroom.

£25–40 an hour

Experienced graduate tutors and subject specialists, online, and the cheaper end of in-person tuition outside London. This is the band for A-level, for a GCSE student chasing top grades, and for anyone who needs a tutor who has taken many students through the same exam board before. Most families who shop carefully end up here.

£40–70+ an hour

Qualified teachers, examiners, 11+ and admissions specialists, and in-person tuition in London. Sometimes worth it: an examiner's eye genuinely helps a borderline A* candidate, and entrance-exam preparation is a specialist trade. But be clear about what the premium buys. At £60 an hour, roughly half the price can be geography and margin rather than teaching.

Red flags: where parents overpay

The tutoring market is unregulated, and the expensive mistakes are structural, not hourly. Watch for these:

• Big upfront blocks. "Buy 20 lessons and save 10%" sounds like a discount. It is actually a bet — placed before you know whether your child and the tutor get on. If the fit is wrong after lesson three, the discount has cost you 17 lessons.
• Contracts and notice periods. Tuition should be easy to stop. A monthly minimum or a long notice period exists for the provider's cash flow, not your child's education.
• No meeting before you commit. An agency that assigns a tutor and takes payment before you have spoken to them is asking you to buy the most personal service there is, sight unseen. Rapport is half of what makes tutoring work; you cannot assess it from a PDF profile.
• Vague credentials. "Expert tutors" means nothing. Ask specifically: what did this person study, where, what grade, and who checked? A serious platform verifies qualifications and will tell you exactly what has been verified — including, tutor by tutor, who holds a DBS check.

How to pay less without getting worse tuition

There is a version of "cheaper" that just means worse. This is not that. Four moves cut the price without touching the quality:

1. Go online. This is the big one, and it is worth understanding why it works. Online tuition removes the travel premium and the postcode premium, and it puts your local tutor in competition with every good tutor in the country — real supply, real competition, lower prices. On effectiveness, the evidence is reassuring: comparative studies have generally found that well-run online one-to-one tuition performs on a par with in-person teaching, and the Education Endowment Foundation has found one-to-one tuition delivers roughly five months' additional progress (small-group tuition roughly four). We have written up the full comparison of online vs in-person costs if you want the detail.
2. Pay as you go. No blocks, no contracts. It keeps the tutor accountable every single week, and it costs you nothing if circumstances change. With our matched online tutoring, there are no contracts at all and cancellation is free up to 24 hours before a lesson.
3. Use free trial meetings. The most expensive tutor is one your child does not click with, at any hourly rate, because those lessons achieve little. Meet tutors before paying — on our service you can meet as many as you like free — and let your child have a say. Ten minutes of conversation tells you more than any profile.
4. Book a consistent weekly slot. A regular slot with the same tutor compounds: no re-explaining, no cold starts, steady momentum through the spec. Ad-hoc "panic booking" before each test costs more per unit of progress than a modest weekly rhythm.

One quiet advantage of the online format worth pricing in: on a purpose-built platform — proper online classroom, shared whiteboard, maths tools — every lesson can be recorded, so your child can rewatch the explanation the week before the exam. That is a revision resource you would otherwise pay for again.

What a term actually costs: worked examples

Hourly rates hide the real number, which is the term bill. The autumn term runs roughly 14 weeks from the first week of September. One lesson a week:

• Online at £18–25 an hour: £252–£350 for the term — around £72–£100 a month.
• In person at £45–55 an hour: £630–£770 for the term — around £180–£220 a month, before any travel costs.

Two lessons a week — a common choice for a Year 11 retaking maths or an A-level student in trouble — simply doubles those figures: roughly £500–£700 for the term online against £1,260–£1,540 in person. Over a full academic year the gap between the two formats is comfortably four figures, for tuition the evidence suggests performs about the same.

If your child is resitting GCSE maths or English this autumn, note that the timeline is short: the exams fall in November, which means a September start gives you roughly ten teaching weeks. The November 2026 resit dates and entry deadlines are worth checking this week, not next month.

Booking for September

A last practical point about timing. GCSE results came out on Thursday, A-level results the week before, and the autumn term starts in under a fortnight. This is the fortnight when the best tutors' weekly slots fill for the year — late September shoppers choose from what is left. You do not need to commit money to move now: fill in a short form, take the same-day call, meet a tutor or two free, and only pay when you book a lesson. If you are not sure what to look for in those meetings, our guide to choosing a GCSE maths tutor sets out the questions worth asking, whatever the subject.