How much should guitar lessons cost?

It is an open-ended question, indeed.

As someone who has primarily made his living from teaching the art of playing the guitar for nearly 28 years, I can tell you - the honest answer as to how much money I have made over the years, has fallen well short of any expectations I had when I started. It is arguably one of the most unstable forms of income anyone can make.

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When I first started teaching.

For about the past twenty years or so, I have banged my head against the proverbial wall thousands of times, trying desperately to figure out what the magic numbers truly are. "How many students do I need to make a decent living?" "How many hours a week should I teach lessons?" "How much should I charge per hour?"

I have had as many as twenty-five to thirty students each week. This was way back in 1997-98 when I was teaching at the local music store. I didn't have to do any marketing whatsoever. By default, the music store brought in a line of eager students anxiously waiting to learn how to play their guitars. The store did all of the advertising for me. I just had to show up and check my list of students for the day. At the end of the week, the manager of the store would cut me a check for three of four hundred dollars, and everyone was happy. Back then, the store took a percentage of my pay for getting me the students. I had absolutely no problem with this. After all, I just had to show up and play guitar for a few hours.

I think I was charging around $20-25/hour per student back then. I would average about $75-100/day, after the store took their cut. I honestly had no idea how much I should actually charge per hour. Some of the other teachers with college degrees who had been teaching all their lives, were charging more, with good reason. I thought making $25/hour was really good money, even though I wasn't putting in a full 40-hour week. A good week might be thirty hours.

None of the other teachers or I were considered official employees of the music store. We were there renting rooms in the back of the store. I was one of around thirty or forty teachers using these rooms during the week. There were only about a half-dozen rooms for us to use, so, we all had to share or find another place to teach our lessons. Somehow, it all worked out. I really liked that I got the "teachers discount" from the store. It was a significant discount. I bought strings, picks, books, guitars and other gear for a lot cheaper than regular customers.

Ah, but all good things must come to an end.

All of the teachers were asked to vacate their rooms after the music store was purchased from a chain company. I don't remember which year this was. I think it was around 1999, 2000. So, I had to find another place to teach my guitar lessons. The dynamics had also changed. I no longer had someone else finding students for me. Now, I had to find them. I had already been doing in-home lessons for a few years. I made more money going to the houses of my students. By 1999, I was charging $50/hour to drive to the homes of my students for their lessons.

I honestly think that this was when things began to change for me as an independent guitar teacher. I didn't have the backing of a music store or a larger entity to help me with enforcing cancellation policies. I had already dropped down to well under twenty students a week. I had to figure out a solid way for prospective new students to find me on the internet. At the time, I was doing only hour-long lessons. It wasn't worth my time to do half-hour lessons. This was all very new to me. I knew nothing about marketing online. All I ever did before was put up had-written flyers on bulletin boards.

The game had changed, and I needed to know how to play it. 

From around 2001 to 2022, I have had the same rate of $55/hour lesson for all students, no matter where they were located. I did have to charge more for people who lived an hour away from me. Twenty some odd years ago, $55/hour was plenty of income to make a living, as long as I got every lesson in, every week. My rent was only around $600-700/month. Gas prices were half of what they are now. My electric bill was a third of what it is now. A hundred dollars used to fill a grocery cart. Not anymore. Everything was much more affordable back then. I didn't need to make two or three thousand dollars a month just to live.

Okay so, this is where the balance between charging too much and not charging enough, comes into play. I have mistakenly undervalued myself plenty of times by only charging $35-45/hour, in an attempt to get more people who could afford lower rates. This proved to be an exercise in futility, every time.

The lesson I had to learn was that if I lower my value, I would in turn, get the people who want me to give them free lessons or discounts on lessons. They wanted to nickel and dime me to death. I fell for it a few times, but ultimately, it was a disaster. These people weren't committed to their lessons anyway. In order for me to weed out these people, I had to make sure my value remained intact. I wanted students who didn't feel the need to barter with me about how much I charged for lessons. I wanted students who could comfortably afford my services and were happy to pay the rate I had established. It was always so much easier for everybody this way.

If you type into a Google search: "how much do guitar lessons cost?", you will see numbers ranging anywhere from $30-$100/hour. It is nearly impossible to have an exact universal rate for everyone. I had no choice but to increase my rates last year. My normal rates now are anywhere from $60-70/hour, and believe it or not, this is still considered under the normal rate.

I never went to college to learn about business practices or how to run a business by the book. I am not what I would call a businessman, even though I do work for myself. I am a guitar teacher. The number one, most stressful thing I deal with now is traffic in this town. The second is, never being able to keep enough students on my roster.

In many ways, learning how to play the guitar is considered an expendable luxury item that no one is obligated to commit to any longer than how quickly they get bored. The key in what I do is selling my history as a teacher and a musician. I know that I can teach anyone how to play the guitar. When you do what I have been doing for nearly three decades, you learned enough about what to say and what to do to sign on new students. 

How much should I be charging for lessons?

How many students should I have on my roster? How far should I travel to do a lesson? How much income should I be making to live comfortably? All of these questions have varying answers that are different for everyone. I want to keep things simple, low stress and fun for everyone. In a perfect world I would have anywhere from 18-24 students on my roster, paying me $65/hour each. This would be enough of a buffer for cancellations, and I wouldn't have to stress about not making enough of an income.

Getting and keeping students on my roster longer than one year is an impossibility. The average length of time that most of my students commit to their lessons is about two or three months. Yeah, not a very stable outlook, is it? There are so many invisible factors that play into all of this. The most obvious of them nowadays is the generation gap. The younger students who are in their teens or twenties, know very little if anything about guitar music. It becomes a very difficult challenge to try to teach a younger student about rock and roll, blues or jazz music when all they want to talk about is Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran. But, not all of them are like this. Some of them actually know about the older music, and are willing to learn how to play it.

Is the art of learning how to play an instrument, a dying art, and will this art eventually die with the generations who grew up with it? I really don't think so. I just think that it has changed so much that music isn't understood the same way now as the way I knew it growing up as a kid. Maybe so much of it has to do with the insane economy we live in now. Most people simply can't afford to spend $65 a week on guitar lessons. It is very much a luxury item that most people simply cannot afford. In a city like Orlando, I have to figure in the odds of the population versus those who can actually afford me. The struggle remains.

This is why I have taken to writing these newsletters.

I want very much to become a writer with thousands of subscribers. If I had a few hundred monthly paid subscribers, my financial worries would be over. I wouldn’t really need to worry about never having enough students. I could keep a smaller roster of students and charge whatever I felt was a fair rate. I think that my biggest hurdle has always been my competition. No matter what I do, there will always be someone better, someone cheaper and someone more willing to grab all of the students her or she can get for any price they charge. At my age, I have to draw a line on all of that. 

I am incredibly grateful for the students I have now. Many of my former students are subscribers to this newsletter. Just because they're no longer my students, doesn't mean that I don't want them to continue practicing their guitars. I just wish the cost of living wasn't so outrageous these days. So many people are struggling worse than they ever have before. I teach music because I love it. I don't want to do anything else. If it's in person or in a weekly newsletter, at least I have found my purpose in life.