Commission is the number every tutoring marketplace competes on and the number they all present least clearly. Here it is worked through with figures taken from the platforms' own published material.
The two shapes
Flat. One percentage on every lesson. Wyzant states that tutors retain 75% of their posted rate and that Wyzant retains a 25% platform fee. Easy to forecast: your take-home is your rate times a fixed fraction.
Decaying. The rate starts high and falls as you accumulate hours on that platform. Preply's schedule, from their help centre, runs 33% for the first 20 completed hours, 28% to 50 hours, 25% to 200, 22% to 400, and 18% beyond that.
A decaying rate is usually described as a loyalty discount. It is also a switching cost you build for the platform out of your own labour: 400 hours accumulated in one place is worth nothing anywhere else, so the longer you stay the more expensive leaving becomes. Both descriptions are true at once.
What it costs a real week
A tutor charging 30 USD an hour, teaching 15 paid hours a week, 45 weeks a year. That is 675 hours and 20,250 USD gross.
Swipe table sideways to see all columns →
| Commission | Kept per hour | Kept per year | Given to the platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| 33% | $20.10 | $13,568 | $6,683 |
| 25% | $22.50 | $15,188 | $5,063 |
| 22% | $23.40 | $15,795 | $4,455 |
| 18% | $24.60 | $16,605 | $3,645 |
| 15% | $25.50 | $17,213 | $3,038 |
The spread between the top and bottom row is about 3,600 USD a year on the same work. That is the part everybody focuses on, and it is real.
The part nobody puts in the comparison
Unpaid trials. Preply charges 100% commission on every trial lesson with a new student, so the tutor is paid nothing for it. If you take four trials a month at 30 USD, that is 1,440 USD a year of taught, unpaid work. On the table above, that is larger than the entire gap between the 22% and 18% tiers.
Worse, it lands hardest on new tutors, who take proportionally more trials and are simultaneously paying the highest commission rate.
Utilisation. The share of your offered hours that actually get booked. Going from 50% booked to 70% booked is a 40% pay rise on the same rate, and it dwarfs any commission difference available anywhere. This is why "which platform has students searching" beats "which platform has the best rate" every time.
The hours you spend getting to a lower tier. Reaching 18% on Preply takes 400 completed hours. At 15 hours a week that is about seven months of teaching at higher rates before the good rate begins.
Student-side fees. These do not come out of your pocket but they do come out of your student's. Wyzant charges students a 9% service fee on top of the lesson. A student's total cost affects whether they book and how long they stay, so it is your problem too even when it is not your line item.
Withdrawal and currency costs. Small per transfer and large over a year if you withdraw often or get paid in a currency the platform does not hold.
How to actually compare
1. Work out your commission tier today, not the best one advertised.
2. Add the trials you gave away last month, priced at your rate.
3. Divide by the hours you actually made available, not the hours you taught. That is your true rate per hour of life.
4. Only then compare platforms, and compare on that number.
Most tutors who do this discover the commission tier is the third most important variable, behind utilisation and unpaid trials.
Sources
Preply's commission schedule and its 100% trial rate are published in their help centre. Wyzant's 25% platform fee, 75% tutor share and 9% student service fee are published in their support pages. Both are quoted, linked and dated on our comparison pages: [TutorBoost vs Preply](/compare/preply) and [TutorBoost vs Wyzant](/compare/wyzant).
Figures for platforms we could not read first-hand are deliberately absent rather than estimated.