Your teaching week
Your price check
The target price is arithmetic from your assumptions, not a market recommendation. Confirm your local taxes, contracts, and teaching costs yourself.
What else would change the number
| Change | Net after costs | Effective hourly | Price that hits target |
|---|
Why the number changes
A 60-minute lesson can consume preparation, driving, setup, and an empty slot after a cancellation. This calculator makes those invisible hours visible so you can decide whether to raise the rate, tighten your cancellation policy, or teach fewer locations.
Search questions answered: how much should I charge for music lessons, how to price private piano lessons, and what is my real hourly rate as a music teacher? See the full pricing guide with a worked example, how this compares to a studio-management platform like My Music Staff, or what copying the going local rate misses about your own week.
Common questions
Why is the break-even price so much lower than what I actually charge?
Because break-even only has to cover your fixed monthly costs, spread across every paid lesson — it says nothing about your own pay. At the defaults, $200/month in costs is $2,400/year against 864 paid lessons, a break-even price of just $2.78. The gap between that and your $60 rate is what pays you, not what pays your studio bills.
Why is my effective hourly lower than my lesson price?
Because a lesson slot is never really 60 minutes of paid work. At the defaults, 10 minutes of prep and 0 minutes of travel make each scheduled slot 70 minutes, so $60 earned across 70 minutes of real time works out to an effective hourly of about $44.14 — not $60. Add travel and the gap grows further, since travel time is unpaid time attached to a paid lesson.
What does the cancellation rate actually cost me?
At the default 10% cancellation rate, 960 scheduled lessons a year become 864 paid ones — 96 empty slots you still had to hold time open for but never got paid to fill. Tightening that rate is one of the two levers the comparison table checks, because it recovers lessons you already scheduled rather than requiring you to find new students.
Does adding travel change my income?
No. Travel time changes your effective hourly rate, not your cash: the comparison table's note holds because annual revenue only depends on paid lessons and price, and travel minutes never enter that calculation. What travel does is stretch the hours you spend earning that same revenue, which is why the effective-hourly column moves and the net-after-costs column does not.
Which change is worth more: fewer cancellations or two more weekly lessons?
It depends on your numbers, which is why the table compares both against your actual week rather than assuming one is always better. Five fewer points of cancellations recovers lessons you already scheduled; two more weekly lessons adds new scheduled time (and its own prep and travel) on top. Read the “Net after costs” column for whichever change moves more annual cash at your price and volume.
Is my rate and teaching schedule uploaded anywhere?
No. Every figure is calculated in your browser and saved only to this browser's local storage so the form remembers your numbers next visit — nothing is sent to a server, and no accounts or analytics vendors are involved. “Copy share link” encodes the same teaching-week fields into the page's own URL fragment (never sent to a server) so you can hand a live, editable scenario to another teacher, a bookkeeper, or a studio partner.