Something happened on social media recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. I posted about why music teachers undercharge, and the comment thread that followed said everything about where so many of us are right now. This episode is the extended version of that conversation.
If you haven't raised your rates in years, or if the cost of living crisis has become the reason you're holding back, this one is for you.
In this episode:
Why the belief that music lessons should be accessible to everyone is a lovely instinct being funded entirely by the teacher
The real cost of frozen rates: not just in your bank account, but in how you feel at the piano bench on a Friday afternoon
Why we're almost universally guessing at our students' finances, and getting it wrong
The difference between your standard rate and a private conversation with a family who is genuinely struggling
Why the teachers with waiting lists are rarely the cheapest ones
What raising your rates in line with inflation actually says about you as a professional
Links mentioned:
Monthly Billing Transition Toolkit (£12)
Focus Sessions, one-to-one mentoring
If this episode made you feel a little less alone in this, or a little braver about having that conversation with your parents this September, that's exactly why I recorded it.
If you're ready to look at what a rate rise would mean in practice, the Monthly Billing Transition Toolkit has a calculation tool and email templates to help you do it. And if you'd rather talk your specific situation through properly, that's what mentoring is for. Both links are above.
If you find this episode useful, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review on Apple Podcasts: it goes a long way in helping other music teachers find my podcast!
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Part 1: Why we freeze our rates
The conversation that stopped me in my tracks
Okay, so last week, while reading through the piano teacher Facebook groups, I came across a conversation about keeping your rates low and not increasing them year on year because of the cost of living crisis: using the cost of living as a reason for not increasing your prices year on year. It really stopped me in my tracks, because this is such an important issue, and clearly one of the reasons piano teachers are not charging what they're worth, or as much as they should be.
It prompted me to put up a post on my own social pages about why the cost of living crisis isn't yours to fix. Some of the responses really had an impact. One teacher said they hadn't increased their rates in seven years and they were perfectly happy. This is an issue I think we need to talk about, which is why this podcast episode is dedicated to it. If you saw that post, this episode is the extended version of that conversation. And if you didn't see it, I'm really glad you're here, because this is such an important one for all music teachers to be aware of.
I'm Victoria. I started teaching piano part-time 18 years ago, alongside a career in pharmaceutical market research, and I made pretty much every mistake you can make when it comes to running a teaching business. But today I run a thriving studio from my home on the south coast of England, with students I love and a waiting list I'm proud of. I started this podcast because I want that for you too.
If you've ever said yes to a reschedule you really didn't want to do, felt your heart sink when your phone buzzed with another last minute cancellation, or found yourself putting off increasing your fees for another year because the timing never feels quite right, this is the podcast for you. I've been there and come out the other side with a teaching business that lights me up every single day, and I'm here to help you do the same.
The cost of freezing your rates
Today's episode is all about our collective aversion to charging enough for music lessons. I don't think I've ever met a music teacher who was totally confident in their teaching rates. And I'll talk about how the cost of living crisis has become the latest justification for something that was already happening long before the crisis began.
The cost of not solving this problem is that teachers are freezing their rates while everything else increases in price, and it only has negative effects. Despite how the teacher feels, some kind of absorbed resentment will creep into lessons, maybe subconsciously knowing, in some cases, that what they are being paid for lessons this year is less than what they were being paid last year because of inflation.
It creates an unsustainable practice where you're making less and things cost more, so you're going to have to take on more students or teach longer days, and that only leads to burnout. That's not going to help your students, and it's not going to help you, and it's something to be avoided at all costs.
The thing that's uncomfortable about this, which is why I think these conversations generate so much engagement on social media, is that there's an uncomfortable truth sitting underneath all of it. Teachers are making this unilateral financial sacrifice, but nobody asked them to make it. It's something we just take on for a number of different reasons, which we're going to go into. But no one has said to music teachers, "Please absorb the cost of our groceries going up. Can you just keep your teaching rates the same, so that it doesn't feel so painful when my council tax bill comes in?" No one thinks that, and no one is saying it. So we need to have it out in the open. Even though this is an uncomfortable topic for many people, I think it's such an important one.
What's really important to highlight here is the longer term impact of freezing your teaching rates for any period of time. It's not only going to impact your income and your ability to afford daily life, but also how much you value your time, how you carry yourself in your lessons and the way you teach. When you charge less, you might inherently start to value your skills less, because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not something we can just put to the back of our minds, right? It's an important thing that we need to talk about.
Guilt
Guilt is a pretty common emotion for music teachers: feeling guilty for charging for something we all love doing. We are so fortunate to be music teachers. It feels a bit like cheating, because every day we get to do what we love, and for many teachers, that comes with a sense of guilt about charging for it, because we enjoy it so much.
I think there's quite a strong culture that hard work must feel difficult to be really worth the money you're paid for it, and for the most part, that doesn't exist for us as music teachers. We have good days and bad days, but on the whole, we do this job because we love it, truly love it, and it brings joy to us and to our students. So the concept of charging for it goes against the grain a little bit.
"Lessons should be accessible to everyone"
There is also this deeply held belief that piano lessons should be accessible to everyone. It's such a lovely instinct, and if the world was a perfect place, they would be accessible to everyone. But this instinct is being funded entirely by the teacher. There's no society coming together to fund all these lessons. It's not the government, and it's not any kind of arts funding.
This belief is quite prevalent in the music teaching community. A lot of teachers hold it as part of their identity: "Music should be accessible for everyone, and that's why I don't charge the average rate," or "That's why I don't charge as much as everyone around me." There's a feeling that charging more would betray who they are as a person who wants to share music with everyone. These emotions are draining, and they're something we don't need to be feeling.
There's a really important mindset shift around all of this that I feel very fortunate to be on the other side of, and that's why I'm talking about it so much. I want to help as many music teachers as possible understand that you don't need to feel this guilt. You don't have a responsibility to make music accessible to everyone.
I should caveat that by saying these are all my own opinions, and you, as the owner of your own teaching studio, are entitled to run it exactly how you choose. But my purpose here is to make you as informed as I can, so you understand all your options and don't just go for the default: what you understood to be the going rate, or the way to run a music studio, because of what you've been exposed to in the past.
Part 2: How I set my rates, and what inflation does to them
How I chose my rates over the years
Thinking about charging for lessons: when I first started teaching, I had just started my (I'm going to say in inverted commas) "main career" in pharmaceutical market research. For reasons I probably will never get to the bottom of, I decided to start teaching part-time in the evenings, after I got back from work and commuting in and out of London. Well, at the time I was in Putney, but it still took me an hour to get across London to Baker Street, so it felt like a commute.
As a brand new teacher, I used the excuse of being a total beginner to charge only £10 for a 30-minute lesson. This was back in 2007, and I thought, "Yep, that's fine. £10 for 30 minutes, it's a nice round number, it's not that much." I didn't feel much guilt at all. I only took on five students because I was working full-time. I just wanted to start teaching, and I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
Later, I learned about the ISM teacher fees survey (the Independent Society of Musicians; back then it was the Incorporated Society of Musicians), and I decided to pick the average rate and go slightly underneath it. The average was £18 for 30 minutes when I was looking at it, so I picked £15 for a 30-minute lesson, because I believed that reflected my relative experience compared with all the highly experienced specialist teachers, music colleges and everything else. I thought, "Okay, that's fine. I've been teaching for a few years, so I'm happy to increase my rate to £15."
You might look at that and think, "Wow, that's gone from £10 to £15, which is quite a big jump." However, understanding what the average was in the ISM teacher fees survey made me a lot more comfortable going just below it. I've done other posts and talked about this: are you an average teacher? No, you're probably not, because you're paying attention to your teaching and trying to be the best teacher you can be. But that's a discussion for another day.
Following that, when I switched to full-time teaching in 2019, I decided, "Yep, okay, I'm worth about the average now," so I increased it to £18 for a 30-minute lesson and went on from there. Then I went through the process of switching to monthly billing, which I can go into in more detail in another episode. That caused me to look at my rates on an annual basis. Up until that point, it was a fixed rate. Switching to a monthly billing system put me on an academic year timetable aligned with those months, so that every year I would increase my rates by a little bit to keep up with inflation. So that's where all this came from.
I'd like to ask you at this point: when did you decide that your rate was the right one for you? Did you calculate it, or did you inherit it from someone else? Did you see the ISM teacher survey and do what I did, and go for the middle? I'd be really interested to know, because everyone has their own history when it comes to choosing their rate. Maybe you looked at what all the other teachers in your area were charging and decided to go for the average, or slightly underneath it, if you felt your experience wasn't up there with theirs. It's a very personal decision, and a very emotional one, where this guilt surfaces at the worst times.
The cost of living has gone up for all of us
Okay, the cost of living. This has gone up for all of us, every single person. Music teachers are not exempt from the cost of living increasing. What you pay for your gas and electricity bills, your home and car insurance, your piano tuning (which has probably gone up), the continuing professional development courses you attend, and your food bill. That's the one we see very easily.
What was it that stood out to me? Olive oil. The cost of a litre of Tesco own-brand olive oil went from £5 to, I think, £10 at one point. It was enormous. All of those costs increase with the cost of living for everybody. So if you're keeping your rates fixed, what you charge is not going up, but all of your costs have risen. That means your spending power has gone down year on year.
Every year that you keep your rates fixed and say, "No, with the cost of living, I can't increase my rates, because I can't put that extra pressure on my student families," your spending power reduces. You're effectively earning less each year. The knock-on effect is that you can afford to buy less and save less, and you need to take on more students or teach later into the evening, beyond our prime time slots. You get more tired, and you have less energy for yourself and for your family. In its most extreme cases, it leads to burnout.
People often don't follow the process all the way through to the extreme, but this is the ultimate result of keeping fixed rates to protect our student families. It's true, and it's not necessary. It's not really helping anyone. If this is something you're doing, you're sacrificing your own income to protect your student families in a way that they don't need to be protected.
No other profession works like this
Something I think is really helpful is comparing ourselves to other professions. I don't think you'd be able to think of any other profession that would operate in this way, certainly not one that would be around for long. Everybody increases their rates in line with inflation every single year: plumbers, solicitors, dentists. No one expects them to absorb inflation. So why do we expect it of ourselves?
It comes back to this feeling of guilt; I'm certain of it. We want to keep our student families happy. Of course we do. Everyone wants to keep their clients happy, and we have such close relationships with our students and their families that it blurs things. But running your studio like a business is not being unkind to your students. In the bigger picture, we're being professional, and in the long run, we're being kind to our students, because we're going to be the best teachers we can be for them. We're not having to teach later into the night to make the same amount of money. We're fresher and more balanced, and we enjoy our teaching every single day, rather than getting to the end of the week and thinking, "I'm really worn out. I love this teaching, but wow, I need a break." That's a very important point to take on board.
Assumptions about families' finances
The other aspect is the assumption we're making about our students' finances. I certainly don't discuss families' financial situations in depth, and I don't think many of us do. We're guessing. Almost universally, we're looking at our student families and deciding on their behalf that they can't afford any more. We're not asking them, and we have no evidence to tell us that they can't afford any more. Usually this assumption is completely inaccurate.
I have a caveat here. Of course, if you know that one of your student families is struggling financially, that's a conversation you have with them privately. You don't use it to halt the fees across your entire studio, because that's damaging for everybody. But if you do have a student family that is struggling, you have that conversation with them and work it out in a way that suits.
We know our student families are living their lives. You see them going on holiday at half term and in the school holidays, and you hear about it from your students: "Oh, I've just got back from a cruise," or "I went to Florida for two weeks," or wherever they've been, and they've had a wonderful time. They're going on holidays, so they are not hard up financially. They're not on the edge. But so many teachers are still holding their rates frozen for these families when it's not needed.
Forgive me, but I think there's definitely an element of wanting to find reasons to avoid increasing fees, because of the fear that comes with it, which I'll talk about in a minute. Using imagined financial pressure as the reason you haven't raised your rates for the past four years, for example, when you don't have any evidence for it, is a very easy thing to do: "Nope, it's okay, I'm protecting them from a fee increase, because no one really wants a fee increase." Of course they don't, but it's the way the world works. Everyone increases their fees, and costs go up every single year with inflation. You're part of that whole thing.
I really want to make the point that I'm not suggesting financial hardship isn't real. It is, but you have that private conversation with that student or family, and you work out how to help them. It's not a reason to freeze your rates for your entire studio, because it's just not needed. It's damaging for your business and for you, and therefore it's damaging for your students. If they're left without you as a teacher because you've done too much and burnt out, they'll suffer as well, because they want you as their teacher. They value you; that's why they come to you for lessons.
Part 3: The fear of losing students, and what your price says about you
The fear underneath the guilt
Okay, so let's talk about the fear. There's a real fear that sits underneath the guilt. The guilt is the surface emotion, but underneath it is the fear of losing students when you increase your rates. We've all felt it, and lots of us feel it every single day. It's a deep, complicated psychological situation to do with our own sense of self-worth and imposter syndrome. I have not met a music teacher who hasn't experienced imposter syndrome at some point in their life. It's an understandable fear.
But in practice, in my experience, and from lots of people I've spoken to who increase their rates on an annual basis, this fear is rarely accurate. Most teachers who raise their rates don't lose students. I haven't lost any students after increasing my rate each year. Not one.
Don't get me wrong, I really had that dread each time I decided to increase my rates. Making it an annual thing was a little bit scary, even though that was the smallest increase I've done. Going from £15 to £18 for a half-hour lesson, I managed it because I justified it in my mind and my own sense of self-worth: I was not a below average teacher. I was an average teacher, according to the ISM fees survey.
That survey, by the way, isn't the be all and end all. It's self-reported teacher fees, which comes with its own biases, with teachers possibly undervaluing or underestimating what they charge, because no one wants to be the most expensive teacher.
So let's think about that for a second. No one wants to be the most expensive teacher, and the fear is that families will line you all up and choose the cheapest. This is not real life. It's not how it works, certainly not when choosing a music teacher. Sure, if you're choosing oranges from different shops and they're more or less the same, you're going to pick the cheapest. But a music teacher has to be the right fit for each student. We know that not every teacher is right for every student, just as not every student is right for every teacher. The connection has to be there. The relationship has to be there and has to build; it has to be comfortable, and communication has to work both ways. Most music families wouldn't walk away lightly from that kind of established relationship. As we all know, learning to play a musical instrument is not a short-term journey. So why would we put ourselves in the position of saying we're just going to be chosen on price? It's not how it works.
My first annual increase
When it came to increasing my rates after I had switched to monthly billing, and was setting an annual increase in my teaching fees for the first time, I did have a lot of dread. I thought about how much to increase my rate, read as many posts as I could and did the research online. I thought, "Well, it's not like a stab in the dark; it needs to be relevant." However, inflation was so high at the time that increasing it by the current rate of inflation would have been an astronomical increase, and one I certainly wasn't comfortable with. So, after doing a lot of research, I think I settled on an increase of something like three, four or maybe five percent.
Then it came to writing the email to announce the increase, which was going to take effect at the start of the next autumn term. I think I sent it around May, part way through the summer term here in the UK. I deliberated over the contents of that email for ages and ages, because I had this enormous fear that they'd see the increase and think, "Oh well, that's not worth it." It's the fear we all have, that our students will see us as run-of-the-mill teachers who are all the same, so they'll go for the cheapest.
I put as many benefits as I could think of for the monthly billing into that email, and I also explained what the increase was and how much it equated to per lesson. But I put it forward in a way that was minimally shocking, I suppose. It was a very difficult email to write, and I had all the fear we all experience. I sent it thinking, "Well, if a few people quit, that'll be really sad, but I can cope with it."
Not a single person did. No one responded to say anything about it other than, "Okay, thanks, that's great. I'll sign next year's agreement at the next lesson." There was no pushback at all. No one had any problem with the increase. After that first experience of an annual increase, a lot of my fears were settled.
Your ideal students aren't defined by income
One point I'd like to make here is about living in different socioeconomic locations. This point was made by someone in response to my post, and it's making a different point. It doesn't matter how well off our students are or the area you live in. The point I'm making is that teachers are freezing their rates out of guilt, at the expense of their own livelihood.
You've got all sorts of different families, but it's about how much they value what you offer, and how much they value having piano lessons with you. It's up to them to decide how they spend their money. It's not a reason not to increase your rates, because you get different types of students everywhere. Your ideal students are not defined by their income; they're defined by how much they value piano lessons. So this fear of losing students when you increase your rates doesn't have anything to do with their socioeconomic status. It's how much they value the lessons, and your ideal students will be everywhere.
Your price is a signal
The last point I want to make is that your value is not determined by how little you charge. In fact, a low price can indicate the opposite. There is a widespread and damaging belief that affordability equals accessibility, which equals kindness. But price is a signal. When you charge less than your experience is worth, you're telling families that your time and expertise are less valuable than they are.
Take the example of searching online for a tradesperson. Say you need an electrician to come and fix something for you. I don't know about you, but I really don't go for the cheapest when I'm choosing someone to sort something out. For something important, like your electrics, you don't want them to do a bad job. How much they charge does affect your perception of how they value their skills. If you find someone ridiculously cheap, there's not a lot of trust that they'll do a good job. So when choosing an electrician, I'd go for neither the cheapest nor the most expensive, but somewhere in the middle.
It's not exactly the same as the relationship we have with our students as music teachers, but I would argue that if you are charging so little that people are surprised by how cheap your rates are, that's probably having a detrimental effect on the public's perception of your value as a teacher. People aren't necessarily going to say, "Oh, isn't she kind," or "Isn't he kind, charging such a small amount because they want to make lessons accessible to everyone." That's not what the vast majority of people are thinking. They're thinking, "Wow, they're not charging very much. I wonder why. Maybe they don't have many qualifications. Maybe they don't think they're very good." Which is obviously the complete opposite of the intended effect of having low rates.
So I'd urge you to consider how your fees are received by prospective students. If more than one has said, "Wow, that's cheap," or "Wow, you're the cheapest in the area," it might be worth rethinking, because you don't want a perception that's damaging for you. No one wants that.
Charging what your experience is worth
Charging what your experience is worth is quite a difficult thing to do, especially in the beginning. As I mentioned earlier, as an absolute beginner teacher, I had learnt everything I'd learnt up to that point, and I was comfortable with repertoire and everything else, but the teaching itself was brand new to me. So I was perfectly comfortable charging a really, really low amount.
Just a side note: if you're charging £10 for a half-hour lesson, please, please rethink your rate, because it's extraordinarily low. If lots of us did that as experienced teachers, we'd bring the entire expected going rate down, which is damaging for all of us as music teachers.
Back to the point: teachers with waiting lists are not usually the cheapest ones, and that tells you something. They're in demand for a reason. It's not because they're charging more than others; it's because they and their teaching are perceived as valuable, and more than likely it plays out that way. They have waiting lists because their students stay with them, because they are good teachers and good communicators, and because they adapt to their students and keep them going. There are all sorts of reasons why you'll have a full studio and a waiting list. It's not because you're the cheapest. Very, very rarely is that ever the case.
For example, I charge nearly £47 an hour, and I currently have just over 50 people on my waiting list. Yes, I'm active on social media, so people come across my page, and I'm searchable on Google, but I have a continuous influx of student enquiries, which I now direct through my Google Form to collect their availability and details. I'm certainly not the cheapest in my area. It's not something I wanted to be. I recognised early on that undercutting the rest of the teachers doesn't place you in an advantageous position for getting students. It puts you in a situation where your credibility is under question.
What made it click for me
I've mentioned the fear I had in the beginning, when I first started charging for lessons and then increasing my rates. The fear of losing students was really real. But I've had a mindset shift since then. What really made it click for me, and made me recognise the need to increase my rates every single year, was the example I gave you earlier: our food bill for our weekly Tesco shop.
We do it online, so you order the same things every week, and seeing how much that consistent food bill had gone up, buying the same things, really brought it home to me. We're all paying more for everything we need to live: the things that keep our houses heated, keep the water flowing and keep the food coming in. All of that cost has gone up. It really sank in then that if I don't increase my rates every year, I'm doing my family a disservice. I'm basically giving money away by not increasing my rates every year, just to keep up with inflation, because everything else is costing everyone more. That's what made it click for me.
Part 4: Making a choice, and where to start
Families choose how they spend their money
My motivation for putting up that post on Facebook and Instagram the other week was to highlight this area that so many of us struggle with: the fear of losing students because of increasing fees, and keeping your fees frozen because of the cost of living. It's an excuse for the underlying fear of losing students because they can't, quote unquote, "afford" piano lessons.
When I read the comment, "I must live in a different socioeconomic location to you," it made me stop, and it made me feel really sad. If this is how music teachers understand their permission to charge for lessons, then if they live in a less affluent area, they feel they can't charge a reasonable fee, and certainly can't increase their fees every year, because they fear their students may not be able to afford it.
It made me feel really sad, because there's so much you can assume about a family, but you don't know for sure. You can encourage your students to reach out to you if they are struggling financially with lesson fees, but it's not an assumption you can make about all of your students, because you don't know the ins and outs of their finances.
Every family makes choices about what they spend their money on. You could spend a lot of money on food if that's where you want to spend it, or on games consoles and games, or you could go on holiday more often at the expense of something else. Apart from the basic necessities (council tax, energy bills, water bills and all the rest of it), every family makes choices about how they spend their income. The modest income family who prioritises piano lessons is making exactly the same commitment as the more affluent family.
Your ideal students aren't defined by how much income their family has. It's about how much they value what you offer, and how much they value piano lessons, because then they'll choose to spend some of that income on piano lessons rather than spending more of it on something else.
I think it's a widely held belief among piano teachers, and sorry, all music teachers, who live in less affluent areas of the country, that they're obliged not to increase their fees every year and to keep their rates as low as possible. But all it does is stop you from growing. It damages your business, and it means you're earning less every year.
It's everything I've already said. It puts more pressure on your time. Your income per hour spent working (which isn't just active teaching time, I might add) gets less and less. It can cause you to teach later in the evenings, spend less time with your family, feel more strung out and reach burnout. You might not be able to maintain your teaching, or have to cut down on students because you've got so stressed out, and you get the physical repercussions. None of this is something any of us want in our lives. Yes, these are the more extreme examples, but it's all heading in the same direction.
Treat yourself with the same respect
So: value your time, understand that you can't predict your student families' finances, and understand how basic inflation works. Everyone's costs increase, so you increase your fees and everyone keeps up together. Everything costs a little bit more every year.
I really want to bring this home. Raising your rates in line with inflation every year is not putting pressure on families. It's running a professional business, and treating yourself with the same respect that you give everybody else.
If the thought of increasing your fees fills you with fear, it's okay. That's normal. It's not going to damage you, unless you don't act on it. So start small if you need to. An increase that feels manageable to you is infinitely better than nothing for seven years followed by a jump so large that it feels terrifying to announce.
You're not responsible for managing the financial pressures of households who are possibly booking holidays, going to the cinema, spending money on games or whatever else. You're not responsible for running their finances; that's their responsibility. The only thing you're responsible for is running a sustainable teaching practice, one that keeps your main purpose alive: sharing your joy of music, if that's your main purpose, or introducing music into the lives of your students and allowing them to access it. That's your purpose, and that's all you need to focus on. Your income matters too, and it's not something to feel guilty about.
The Monthly Billing Transition Toolkit
If you're ready to look at what a rate rise would mean in practice, what it would do to your monthly income if you'd consider moving to monthly billing, how to calculate it, and how to communicate it to parents without all the awkwardness, I have a Monthly Billing Transition Toolkit with a calculation tool built in. It has all the email templates that go with it, and responses to frequently asked questions, so you know how to respond to the things parents and students might ask. The link, if you want to check it out, is victoriaclarkpiano.com/monthly-billing, and you can read all about it there.
This has made an enormously positive impact on the way I run my studio, and has enabled me to comfortably increase my rates by a small amount every year. That's a feature of the calculation tool: you can say "I want to increase my rate by X percent", put the percentage in the box, and it does all the calculations for you. It's been a really helpful way to run my studio, so I don't have all the peaks and troughs of term times and holidays. So it's definitely worth checking out if you've ever thought about billing monthly rather than termly.
Thank you so much for spending this time with me. If this episode made you feel a little bit less alone in all of this, or a little bit braver about sending that fee increase email, then it was worth every minute, and I'm so grateful you're here. If you know a teacher who's been putting off raising their rates, send them this episode. It will do them a big favour. And I'll be right here waiting for you when you tune in to the next episode.
