Guitar Teaching Income Calculator

One-To-One Guitar Lessons Income Calculator

If you’re new to teaching guitar, or you’re thinking about getting started, you’re probably wondering how much money you can make.

Here’s a quick calculator to show you how much a guitar teacher can make:

Important notes:

• When setting price, you want to think about setting your price to the higher average price for guitar lessons in your area.
• I recommend you start with teaching 30 minute lessons.

How Does The One-To-One Guitar Teacher Income Calculator Work?

This is a simple calculation:

Students per week x price per lesson

As you can see, the upper income for teaching is quickly limited depending on your time. In order to break that limit, we need to teach group lessons.

Guitar Teacher Income From Group Lessons

The following calculator helps you calculate your potential income and students when teaching group lessons:

Using the Guitar Teacher Group Lesson Income Calculator

This is a fun calculator that lets you play around with the numbers and see how it affects your income.

I recommend the following settings:

• Time Available for Teaching: Set this to whatever you want.
• Average class size: I recommend a maximum of 4 to 6 students per class. I’ve taught classes of over 10 and they’re a bit chaotic (but can work in certain scenarios, for example a monthly workshop).
• Price per student: Many teachers make the mistake of setting this too low, offering very cheap group lessons. The key to group lessons is to run them so that the student receives that same value as they would in a 1-2-1 lesson… and you can set your group lesson price the same as other teachers set their 1-2-1 lesson price.
• Classes attended per student: If you have multiple classes available, your students can attend multiple classes per week. Some students will attend one class a week, many will attend twice a week and some will come more often. I recommend setting this between 1.5 and 2.5 as a realistic expectation.
• Average class length: For group classes, anything from 45 to 60 minutes is a good length.

How The Guitar Teacher Group Income Calculator Works

This calculator is doing a few different calculations, here is an explanation of how it’s working:

• T = time available (hours/week)
• L = average class length (minutes)
• K = class slots per week = T / L
• S = average class size (students per class)
• P = price per students per class
• A = classes attended per student per week

Then:

• Income per week = K x S x P
• Income per month = (income per week x 52) / 12
• Income per year = income per week x 52
• Income per hour = (S x P x 60) / L

Comparing One-to-One and Group Lessons

As you can see from using the two calculators, teaching group lessons gives you the ability to literally explode the income you can make from teaching guitar.

The following table shows you how the two teaching methods compare, using the following calculations, using quite conservative numbers:

• 15 hours of teaching available per week
• $37 for a 30 minute lesson
• $58 for a 60 minute group lesson
• Maximum class size of 5
• When offering group lessons, students take an average of 1.8 classes

	One-to-one	Group
Max income per year	$57,720	$226,200
Max students per week	30	42
Income per hour	$72	$290

Are Group Lessons as Good as One-to-One Lessons?

Quite often, they’re not.

But they can be.

Not only can group lessons be as good as one-to-one lessons, but they can be better.

The challenge is developing teaching methods where you can teach mixed ability students at the same time.

Now this can be challenging, and you do want to seperate your students into “tiers” if possible. But it can work - I know, I did it for years!

Teaching one-to-one and group lessons are both covered in the book at the end of this article.

I would recommend that most teachers start with teaching one-to-one lessons for a year, fill up their schedule and then transition to teach group lessons.

How Do I Find Enough Guitar Students?

One of the keys to making this working is being able to find enough students.

Most guitar teachers find this incredibly difficult, finding maybe one or two new students a month.

The key to finding lots of new students is to be able to use paid advertising profitably.

Now when it comes to paid advertising:

• not all methods are equal
• your business model has to support it working
• you have to work out the economics of paid advertising
• you need to know how to write an advert properly

Unfortunately, most guitar teachers completely fall down on each of these actionable points, but, they can all be learned…

in fact, these are all taught in the book and coaching program below.

The book goes through four pillars of advertising, and details exaxctly how paid advertising works, how to write ads and how to make it work for you.

In the coaching program you can get feedback on your ads before you run them and we can work together to create a game-plan for you, so that you can run your ads effectively for free…

FAQ

What sort of space do I need to teach a small group class?

I see teachers overthink this. The truth is: When you’re getting started, it doesn’t matter.

Use a shed in your garden. Use your garage. Move the furniture in your front room. Ask your local churchm gym or school if you can use some space.

Your students aren’t expecting an Abbey Roads recording studio. They want to learn guitar.

Once you have your groups running, building an awesome studio space is easy.

How do I find students?

There are four key ways guitar teachers can find students. I have people contacting me every day for guitar lessons.

In the book below, we detail what these methods are and how to use them. We even cover what to say when someone contacts you!

The entire process is covered in quite some detail.

A key part of group lessons is that students can take (and pay for) multiple classes… this means that you need LESS students to hit a certain revenue goal. This entirely depends on the amount of classes that students take.

Use the group classes calculator above and experiment with the results from students taking 1, 1.5 and 2 classes each. You can see an example of the students required to hit an income of $5,000 per month, if they’re paying $37 for a 30 minute lesson, or $50 for a one hour group class (the maths was rounded up to the nearest ‘whole’ student):

Lesson type	Students Needed
One to one	32
1 class per student	24
1.5 classes per student	16
2 classes per student	12
2.5 classes per student	10
3 classes per student	8

Having all students take three classes is probably ambitious - but saying that, if you live in a wealthy area, you will find it much easier to sell multiple students on attending multiple classes per week.

What’s the easiest way to get started?

Put the word out with your friends, social media, any groups, sports, teams, places of worship you’re involved with.

Get one or two students and then roll that income into paid advertising (as detailed in the book) and then answer your phone as students reach out to you!

The coaching program includes a “Fast Start Guide” where we setout exactly what you can do to find your first two to five students without spending any money.

There are also live calls with other beginner teachers where we discuss how they can get started.

Should I work for a teaching agency? They can find me students and save me the hassle of learning all this stuff.

Sure you can do that.

And you’ll be paid a lot less, and consequently have to work a lot more hours to make the same income compared to doing it yourself.

Do you want to know the dirty truth about most agencies? They’re run by people who failed as guitar teachers, and they rely on sheer numbers of teachers for “finding” you students.

If you learn the techniques we set out in the book, you won’t need to give an agency a percentage of your income.

And you’re advertising will work 100x better than theirs ever will.

Why would anyone want to take lessons with me? I’m not famous

The market for local students and online students are completely different.

A local person taking lessons doesn’t need or want a famous guitar player to take lessons from.

They want someone sitting in the room with them who can guide them week by week through learning some songs.

Your “value” is partially in the fact you exist nearby.

People want that. And they’ll pay for it.

Do I need a massive social media following?

No way.

You don’t need a huge social media following…

You don’t need to be posting on instagram five times a day…

In fact, you barely have to do anything on social media.

Can I teach online?

You can, but, consider the following:

• When you teach online you are competing against every other guitar teacher in the world.
• When you teach online, you are competing against lesson libraries where someone can get 14,000 videos for $14/month
• When you teach online, you are competing against a pack of Paul Gilbert guitar lessons that costs $19.99

When you teach locally, you don’t have any competition, and students are expecting to pay you a decent amount of dollars for guitar lessons.

I’ve tried both. The difference in how easy it is to make a few thousand bucks a month is not comparable - teaching locally is so much easier.

Do I need to be a virtuoso to teach people?

Not really.

By all means continue working on your skills to reach that level, if that’s what you want…

But the local market is 99% beginners…

We’re talking:

• The seven year old girl who wants to play a simplified version of Taylor Swift songs so that she can play her guitar and sing along
• The teenager that wants to learn Metallica riffs
• The retiree who, after a lifetime of being busy with work and family, wants to pick the guitar and play some Bob Dylan songs…

If you can play songs in time with a band, you are advanced enough to teach guitar, help your students make progress, have a ton of fun and get paid for it.