How much does an A-Level Maths tutor cost?

A-Level Maths tutoring in the UK runs from roughly £15 an hour to £200 and beyond, and most families end up paying somewhere between £30 and £60. I charge £180 — which puts me near the top of the market and means I'm not a neutral guide. So rather than pretend to be one, I'll map the whole market as honestly as I can: what each tier actually looks like, what moves the price, and how to work out which tier your child needs. Because sometimes — and I say this with my own rate on public display — the right answer is the cheaper one.

What tutors actually charge

Prices cluster into four rough bands.

£15–25 an hour buys an undergraduate or a recent school leaver, mostly found on the big tutoring platforms. The genuine advantage: they sat these exams recently and remember what the papers feel like from the inside. The risks have nothing to do with intelligence — there's no track record you can check, availability tends to collapse around their own exams, and most have left tutoring within a couple of years. A good one at this price is excellent value.

£25–45 is the biggest band: school teachers tutoring after work, career-changers, the more experienced platform tutors. The teaching is often perfectly sound. The structural limit is bandwidth — tutoring fits around a day job, so bespoke planning and support between lessons are rare. You're buying the hour, and usually only the hour.

£45–90 is where full-time tutors and former teachers with examiner experience sit. This is the first band where you should expect proper diagnosis, a plan that points at the exam date, and some accountability between sessions. For a student who needs more than a confidence boost, this band is the sensible default.

£90–200+ is a small tier: full-time specialists with a record you can actually verify. What you're paying for is pattern recognition from thousands of hours in one subject, a system around the lesson rather than just a lesson, and — bluntly — scarcity. There are only so many hours in the week of someone with provable results, and every September more families want them than can have them.

What actually drives the price

Four things, roughly in order: evidence of results (a tutor who can show you outcomes charges more than one who asks you to take it on trust), full-time versus side-gig (a career tutor's rate carries their entire livelihood and expertise; a side-gig rate carries an evening), demand (specialist diaries fill in September and January, and prices follow), and what's bundled beyond the hour — which the next section covers.

Note what isn't on the list: a polished website, a smart blazer in the profile photo, or an agency's branding. Agencies take a commission on every lesson, often 20–40%, so a £60 agency lesson may be delivered by a tutor earning £40 — you're paying band-three prices for band-two teaching. It's always worth knowing whether your money goes to the person teaching.

The hour is not the product

At the bottom of the market, the hour is exactly what you buy, and that's fair at the price. Higher up, the visible hour should be the smallest part of it. In my own practice the lesson sits inside a system: a diagnosis of exactly where the gaps are, a revision plan built backwards from the exam date, homework set and marked after every session, questions answered over WhatsApp mid-week so a stuck Tuesday doesn't wait until Friday, and past-paper work specific to the student's exam board.

If you only ask tutors one question, make it this: what happens between lessons? The answer sorts the market faster than any rate card. A tutor charging £70 with no answer to that question is expensive. One charging £40 with a good answer is cheap.

When cheap is expensive

Nobody buys one hour of tutoring, so stop comparing hourly rates and compare totals. Weekly lessons from September to the summer exams is roughly 30–35 weeks: at £30 an hour that's about £1,000 a year; at £60, about £2,000; at my rate, considerably more — I won't pretend otherwise.

But two failure modes make the cheap option dear. The first is paying £30 a week for a year of pleasant, undirected lessons that never diagnose the real problem — most commonly algebraic fluency, which I've written about in the context of the GCSE-to-A-Level jump. That's £1,000 for drift. The second is the cost of the grade itself: a missed offer means a retake year or a different course, and against that, the difference between any two tutoring tiers is small. The honest comparison is cost per grade moved, not cost per hour — and a specialist who fixes the actual problem in one term can come out cheaper than a generalist who circles it for two years.

When you don't need the expensive end

Plenty of situations don't justify specialist rates, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. A Year 12 whose understanding is basically sound and who mainly needs routine and accountability will do well with a good undergraduate. A single missed topic — a fortnight of Statistics after illness, say — needs a short block with anyone competent, not a specialist on a retainer. And a GCSE student who mostly needs patience and confidence is often better served by a friendly £25-an-hour tutor than by an exam technician like me.

There's also a middle path I offer directly: small group tuition at £40 per student per hour — the same teaching, shared between three or four students. For self-motivated students it captures most of the value at a fraction of the price.

I turn enquiries away on exactly these grounds several times a year. A specialist is for when the gap is real, the deadline is fixed, and the grade matters to what comes next.

The bottom line

Expect £15–25 for an undergraduate, £25–45 for a part-timer, £45–90 for an experienced full-timer, and £90+ for a specialist with evidence. Whatever the tier, ask for proof of results and ask what happens between lessons — those two questions expose more than an hour of interviews. Match the tier to the problem, not to the anxiety: an expensive tutor for a small problem wastes money, and a cheap tutor for a big one wastes something scarcer, which is time before the exam.