To be brutally honest, you won’t earn very much as an EFL teacher. Private language schools mostly offer zero hours contracts or guaranteed but low-pay hours. I bet you’re got past the stage of just wanting to fund a couple of years living abroad. You probably want to earn more money and have a decent standard of living. Here’s how to earn more in ELT.
1 Become your own boss and earn more in ELT
As a freelancer, you’ll instantly be able to charge more than your school pays. And you’ll probably create a timetable that suits you better. Doing that can means upping hourly rates from 10-16€ to 30€ and higher. Typically this doesn’t mean giving up benefits like sick pay, holiday pay, or pension as there weren’t any from your language school anyway. Yes, you now have to find your own students. But, let your classes know you’re leaving, and chances are high you can take a few with you.
However, just going freelance and cutting out language schools doesn’t mean teaching automatically pays enough. Not unless you can clone yourself and pick up double the number of private students. Or somehow have them all in the same location. You need to teach the kind of class that maximises what you can charge, preferably while minimising preparation time. That way you’ll earn more in ELT without burning out.
2 Get away from private 1-2-1s and into lucrative group classes
If you form online group classes, students get a cheaper class, while your hourly rate stays high. While you could do this in-person, you’ll need a venue which will probably need to be rented. In simple terms, as long as you have an internet connection and a laptop, you can run online classes via Zoom, Google Meet etc to students all over the world.
There are plenty of platforms, like Preply, where you can find students. But these will mostly be 1-2-1 classes, and it’s hard to charge a decent rate as the platforms take such a big cut. If you’re spending all your time churning out low paid 1-2-1s, you’ll burn out teaching all the hours and not earning enough.
Online group classes or membership programs offer a viable way to earn more in ELT. Typically students get access to live or recorded classes. You could add some sort of forum (it could just be a Facebook group) to interact with you and other students.
To get a business going and find your own students, it’s not more teaching skills you want to invest in. You already have those in abundance. What you’ll need is business skills, like marketing, sales, strategies for growing an audience primed to buy your teaching offers.
If you want guidance on how to start a viable teaching business based on group classes, check out Ola Kowalska. She’s an ex-language school owner who moved into a successful digital business and now teaches other people to do the same and earn more in ELT. (affiliate link) Or Gydion Kummer, former English teacher, who trains skills such as creating low-cost memberships and scaling your business.
3 Add revenue streams by creating online courses and books
Having multiple income streams is an important step if you want to earn more in ELT. One way to do that is to create “passive income” in your business. For example, courses that students access on a self-study basis, books or guides, maybe templates depending on what it is you teach. It’s passive in the sense that you’re no longer exchanging your time for money. Instead, you create the thing once and then sell it on repeat rather than spending your time teaching. That’s where you move into “making money while you sleep territory”.
But it’s not truly passive as you need to build an audience of customers and market your products actively. People won’t find your stuff just because you put it on Amazon or a site like Teachers Pay Teachers. It’s true that some sales do happen just because people search for exactly what you’re selling. But, unless you’ve targeted a very specific niche with no competition and high search volumes, it will only be a handful of euros a month in sales. However, the advantage to learning the business skills to market and sell your classes? You’ll know what to do to sell passive products too.
4 Add income streams from investing and earning money from money
The only truly passive income where you do absolutely nothing to generate profits is by putting your money in places where it earns interest. Unlike any of the other suggestions in this article, once you’ve learned the basics of how to grow money from money, there’s no work or study involved.
At the most basic level, separating off some of your income and putting it in a high-interest account means earning money effortlessly. But, depending on the interest rates available in banks in your country, you might find it hard to beat inflation. Keep an eye on good offers and move money around if you see a better deal. Wise has the option of keeping money in different currencies in “jars”. These can be set to pay out interest at higher rates than bank accounts. There’s some small risk of losses as well as gains. But holding money in a current account with no interest means you’re guaranteed to lose money to inflation anyway!
If you want to earn returns that are higher on average over the long term than interest-earning bank accounts, you can invest money into low-risk passive index funds. Index funds are simple to buy through a broker or online bank. They mean you’re investing into hundreds of companies at the same time. This is not at all the same thing as choosing individual stocks and trying to sell them if the price goes up. That’s speculating or trading and is high risk.
Low-risk investing is about the long-term, 5 years minimum. Ideally, it’s something you do over your whole lifetime to generate money for nothing. It’s how rich people stay rich but it’s a tool anyone can learn and use. I’ve been investing since 2021. I’ve earned thousands from money that used to just sit in my bank account doing nothing. If you want to know more, check out my No-Stress Money Plan for people in ELT who want to turn their savings into financial security for the future.
5 Negotiate a pay rise to earn more in ELT
When was the last time you got a pay rise from your school? Or, if you’re working for yourself, when did you last put your prices up?
If you want to earn more in ELT, it’s really important to put your prices up every year. That’s because inflation means everything you spend money on gets incrementally more expensive. Usually, inflation adds 1-2% a year. So if you’re not earning a little more each year, you’re effectively seeing a decrease in your income. If you work for an employer, it pays to know how much students are charged for classes. Your school probably increases the prices regularly and you might not be aware of that. If you see the prices go up, that’s a sign your pay needs to follow suit.
Asking your boss or private clients to pay more can be daunting. But, just like you’d tell your students, negotiating is a skill. And a lot of it revolves around the language you use. Point out the value they’re getting from your work. Include specific results as much as you can, like maybe the percentage of passes your class achieved, or good feedback from parents, or occasions when new students enrolled because other students recommended you. Try and avoid using reasons such as how long you’ve been working together or how much experience you have. Those are valid, but results speak louder.
6 Get management roles in summer school
Summer school, particularly residential schools in the UK are one way to earn more in ELT. Live-in summer school is an intense environment and the hours can be long. But you usually end up saving money because you’re so busy, and food and accommodation is provided. And they’re often in locations where you can’t spend much apart from at the local pub. But most teachers miss out on earning hundreds more than they could be because they underestimate their skills and experience and apply for teaching roles.
If you’ve been teaching for a couple of years and have experience of the age group of learners at your summer school, at the very least, apply for a Senior Teacher job. The pay will be higher, and you might get to teach less. Your main responsibility will be helping teachers plan lessons. You can easily do this.
If you’ve got the necessary qualifications, (usually equivalent to DELTA or MA) apply for Academic Manager/DOS. Apply even if you have never done a management role. The pay again is much higher. And you may not have to teach at all unless you’re needed to cover sick/absent staff. You’ll have more admin to do, like creating class lists and organising the testing, reports and certificates. You’ll hold or organise input sessions and do lesson observations. But you’ll have training or support to do most of this stuff and you’ll learn on the job.
So many teachers undersell themselves and don’t even apply for management roles. They miss out on the higher pay thinking they wouldn’t get the job. But summer schools struggle to find the people with the British Council required qualifications. So, as long as you’re good with people and have basic computer skills, the job is well within your capabilities. Trust me, if you doubt you can do the job you’re much less likely to be a power-crazed, arrogant idiot who’s impossible to work with. I’ve seen many many DOSs at summer school who somehow got hired and then made the team’s life a misery.
For me, the risk of having to cover classes as DOS was too great. So I did one summer of that and then became Centre Manager. That, or Assistant Centre Manager, is also something you will get training or support with. No one knows what the hell they’re doing the first year anyway. And you do not need DELTa etc to be eligible for it. This job pays up to £1000 a week at the best-paying places. An alternative could be a role like Welfare Manager which would pay the same as a DOS role.
Not only will you earn more in ELT from a summer manager job than teaching, you’re guaranteed work for the whole of the period the school is open. Teachers, on the other hand, are often let go when the busiest weeks are over. The experience is also great for your CV and a jump into a better paid management job year round.
7 Get out of EFL and into tutoring
If you’re PGCE qualified and able to homeschool, you could be earning thousands of pounds a month. Check out Tutors International for the kinds of mindblowing opportunities there are for fully-qualified teachers, especially those who can offer cross-curricular support. I’ve seen jobs for £8,000 a month. Yes, per month and they come with accommodation included.
Without a PGCE or other non-EFL teaching experience, it’s still possible to earn more than a typical ELT job. In 2011, I tutored for a year for a family in Germany through an agency in the UK. For about 20-24 hours of work a week, I was basically an after school homework helper and English-speaking companion to two girls. I had a rent and bills free flat to myself (the first time in my life not having to flatshare) and one month paid annual leave on a salary of 36,000€. That’s about 31.5€ per hour. But with no rent or bills to pay that’s at least another 40% equivalent earnings on top.
I had most of the day free and wrote two (published) books during that year, as well as doing some summer school consulting on the side. Some of my work with them involved a skiing holiday, NYC, New Mexico and the south of France. That said, it was quite a tough job in some ways.
8 Become a content creator
If you’ve got basic video editing skills, and can use social media, you could start a YouTube TikTok or Instagram channel. (LinkedIn could be a good platform too.) It takes time and commitment, and it’s not for you if you hate social media and interacting with strangers online. But it can be lucrative if you stick with it and are willing to learn how to grow your audience. Plus, there’s more to making money this way than directly through the platform itself. It is a way of marketing you and your courses or services as a teacher.
The stats on subscribers suggest a YouTube channel aimed at learners has far greater earning potential than one aimed at teachers. This makes sense as that market is bigger, but, unfortunately, that market is also more crowded. So, just like with running online courses, the more specific your niche, the more likely you can get an engaged audience. Then you’re on the way to monetising your channel or bringing customers to your paid offers. It’s a similar story with Instagram but notice what the purpose of this curated list of top ELT Instagram influencers is. It’s a site where companies looking to run influencer marketing campaigns go to find people they can pay to feature sponsored posts or collaborate with.
However, not everyone who has a large following on social media is making all of their money directly from their profiles or channels. What they’ve actually done is learned highly valuable skills like video editing, writing captions, SEO, and digital marketing. They then get hired by other companies in ELT to create content for them. I’ve met people at conferences whose main income comes from creating content for others, but who started out with their own content. Those types of jobs open a lot of doors and pay a lot better than teaching. Not to mention that you can then create courses teaching digital marketing so others can do what you’ve done.