Lately, we’ve been getting a lot of reader questions about how much money you can actually make teaching English online.
Looking for your first job after graduation? Trying to make some money in between jobs? Fancy the life of a digital nomad? Are you a working teacher interested in supplementing your income? How about a graduate student?
Online English teaching jobs are rising in popularity as an option for all types of people. And for a good reason. For pretty much everyone we’ve mentioned above, teaching English online is the perfect side gig because:
- You can do it on your own time.
- You can do it from anywhere.
- You can easily build it into your lifestyle.
All you need is to be a fluent English speaker and hold a bachelor’s degree (in any major) and you can get started in no time at all!
So let’s talk numbers. How much money you can make teaching English online depends mainly on how many hours you want to put in, which will vary depending on where you’re located.
Hourly rates for teaching English online
Generally speaking, you can earn anywhere from $14 – 23/hour, depending on the company you teach with.
Because most students are located in Asia and especially concentrated in China, here’s a quick example of peak teaching hours for people located in North America in EST and PST time zones:
To save you having to do the math, we’ve created this handy free online teaching salary calculator to help you figure out how much you can make teaching English online in a month:
Caveat: This blog post doesn’t cover salary ranges for online college instructors (around $1,500 USD for each semester-length course taught if you’re feeling curious).
It also doesn’t delve into how much online K12 teachers can make. Virtual elementary and high school teachers earn $40,000 USD and up – that’s a similar yearly base salary to other licensed K12 teachers at public schools.
