Building a Private Tutoring Business Alongside Teaching: The UK Practicalities

Plenty of teachers tutor on the side. Fewer stop to check the practical bits: whether their contract actually allows it, what HMRC expects, whether they need a DBS check as a sole trader, and how to avoid marking someone else’s kitchen table into their tenth working day of the week. None of this is complicated once you’ve been through it, but almost none of it is covered during training or induction. This is the version a colleague would tell you over a coffee, with the sources to back it up.

Check your contract before you check your diary

There’s no general law in the UK stopping an employee from taking a second job. In the absence of a specific clause, you’re free to work elsewhere in your own time. But “in the absence of a specific clause” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because plenty of contracts do contain one. Employers can restrict outside work where the contract expressly says so, where the second job creates a genuine conflict of interest, where the combined hours breach the 48-hour Working Time Regulations limit, or where it affects your ability to do your main job properly.

For teachers on the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document, directed time covers a maximum of 1,265 hours across 195 days a year, and anything beyond that – including evening and weekend tutoring – sits outside what your employer can direct you to do. That’s helpful context, but it isn’t the same as your employer having no say at all. Academy trusts in particular often write their own additional-employment or outside-interests clauses into contracts, and some require staff to declare secondary paid work or get written consent first. There’s no substitute for actually reading yours, or asking your union rep to read it with you if the wording is vague.

The bit most teachers don’t think to check

If you’re tutoring a child you also teach, examine, or whose coursework or non-exam assessment (NEA) you’ll mark, that’s a separate problem from your employment contract. Awarding bodies run formal conflict-of-interest processes for exactly this situation – AQA’s is a public example – and heads of centre are required to report suspected malpractice involving teachers to the relevant board. Tutoring your own current students for money, especially anywhere near assessed or coursework-based content, is the kind of thing that should go through your exams officer or head of centre before you agree to it, not after.

Telling HMRC: the self-assessment basics

Most teachers tutoring privately are, in HMRC’s eyes, sole traders running a small trading activity alongside employment. You don’t need to set up a company for this. What you do need to know is the trading allowance threshold.

Per gov.uk’s own guidance, you must register for Self Assessment as a sole trader once you earn more than £1,000 in a tax year (6 April to 5 April). Below that, the £1,000 trading allowance generally means you don’t need to register or pay tax on it at all. Cross the threshold and you have two choices on your return: deduct your actual expenses (travel, resources, printing, a proportion of home-office costs, DBS certificate fees, insurance premiums) or claim the flat £1,000 allowance instead – not both. Multiple secondary income sources are added together for the purposes of that £1,000 figure, so a bit of tutoring plus, say, examining or marking work would count against the same limit.

Two things worth flagging. First, HMRC confirmed in March 2025 that the reporting threshold for trading income will rise to £3,000 from the 2027/28 tax year – the £1,000 tax-free allowance itself isn’t changing, but below £3,000 you’ll eventually be spared a full return in favour of simpler reporting. That’s not live yet, so don’t plan around it for the current tax year. Second, the commonly cited registration deadline is 5 October following the end of the tax year in which you started trading – miss it and you risk a penalty even if you owe no tax. Given how often HMRC deadlines and thresholds move, treat these as a starting point and confirm the current figures on gov.uk before you register or file.

What counts as “trading” rather than a one-off favour is a judgement call HMRC makes based on regularity, whether you’re charging a commercial rate, and whether you’re doing it with the intention of making a profit. If you’re taking regular bookings and getting paid for them, you’re trading, even if it’s only a couple of hours a week. Depending on your profits, you may also owe Class 2 or Class 4 National Insurance on top of income tax – the current thresholds change most years, so check them directly on gov.uk when you register rather than relying on a figure from a blog post (including this one).

DBS checks and safeguarding, in practice

It is not a legal requirement for a self-employed private tutor to hold a DBS check. That surprises people. But it comes with two big caveats: agencies and tutoring platforms almost universally require one before they’ll place you, and parents increasingly expect one before letting a stranger into their home with their child. Findtutors’ own research puts the proportion of parents who will only book a DBS-checked tutor at 92%.

The practical route changed recently. Gov.uk guidance live from 21 January 2026 confirms that an eligible self-employed person – including private tutors – can now apply for an Enhanced DBS check, or an Enhanced check with barred list information, through a registered DBS umbrella body, rather than needing an employer or organisation to sponsor the application. Whether you’re eligible for the barred-list version generally depends on how regularly and unsupervised your contact with children is – an umbrella body can confirm exactly where you sit before you apply, so it’s worth asking rather than guessing.

Official safeguarding guidance for parents on out-of-school tuition (published on gov.uk) is written from the family’s side, but it tells you exactly what a sensible parent will ask you for. It advises parents to request evidence of a DBS check if a tutor works alone, to ask whether other adults will be present during home-based sessions, and – specifically for one-to-one arrangements like private tutoring – that they “may wish to supervise sessions.” Build your own practice around that expectation rather than being caught out by it:

• Offer, don’t wait to be asked: tell parents up front that you’re happy for them to be in the house, or in the next room, during sessions.
• Keep sessions in a shared space – kitchen table, dining room, with the door open – rather than a bedroom or fully closed-off room, whether you’re tutoring at their home or yours.
• If a family would rather meet somewhere neutral, a library study room or similar public space works well, particularly for a first session before you know each other.
• Don’t offer to collect or drop the child off unless a parent has explicitly asked and it’s agreed in writing beforehand.
• Get written consent from a parent or carer before you start, covering who’ll be present, where sessions happen, and how you’ll contact each other.
• Have a plain-language answer ready for what you’d do if a child disclosed something concerning to you: you’d listen, not promise confidentiality, write down what was said as soon as possible, and contact local children’s social care or the NSPCC helpline (0808 800 5000) rather than investigating it yourself.

None of this needs to be a formal safeguarding policy document, but writing your version of it down once, before your first booking, means you’re not making decisions on the spot in someone’s hallway.

Insurance: what your school’s cover doesn’t do for you

Your union membership and your school’s insurance cover your work as an employee, in your employed role. They do not extend to a separate self-employed tutoring activity you’re running in the evenings – Edapt’s guidance for private tutors is explicit on this point. Two policies are relevant once you’re tutoring independently:

Professional indemnity insurance covers claims that your teaching, advice, or materials caused a financial or academic loss – for example, a parent alleging you taught the wrong exam board content or that a child missed a grade because of your input. Public liability insurance covers claims for injury or property damage during a session, whether that happens at your home, theirs, or a third venue. Several UK insurers (Hiscox, Simply Business, Markel among them) sell combined tutor policies; Simply Business quotes public liability cover from as little as £5.39 a month, and non-union professional indemnity cover has been advertised from around £185 a year. Costs vary by subject, whether you tutor online or in person, and how much you earn, so treat those as ballpark figures rather than a quote.

If you ever take on another tutor to help with overflow bookings, you’ll also need employers’ liability insurance with a minimum £5 million of cover – that one is a legal requirement, not optional, the moment you employ someone else.

Setting rates and boundaries that protect your evenings

UK tutoring rates cluster around £30–£50 an hour on average, with primary tutoring nearer £29 and A-level nearer £50+, and a noticeable premium in London and other major cities. Those figures come from tutoring-platform pricing surveys rather than a fixed scale, so use them as a sense check, not a rulebook – your subject, exam board specialism, and track record all move the number.

The boundary-setting matters more than the pricing, because this is the part that actually protects your evenings once term starts:

• Decide your cancellation policy before you need it – most tutors charge for late cancellations (24–48 hours’ notice is common) rather than deciding case by case, which avoids an awkward negotiation every time.
• Keep tutoring communication on a separate number or email if you can manage it, so a parent’s 9pm message about Thursday doesn’t land in the same inbox as tomorrow’s lesson resources.
• Put your rate, session length, cancellation terms and payment schedule in writing before the first session – a short email is enough, it doesn’t need to be a contract.
• Invoice or request payment on a fixed schedule (weekly or monthly) rather than chasing it after each session.
• Revisit your rate at least once a year. Tutors who set a price in their NQT year and never move it are usually the ones quietly resenting the work three years later.

Avoiding burnout on top of a full teaching timetable

The maths that catches people out isn’t the tutoring hours themselves – it’s that they sit on top of planning, marking and reporting you’re already doing unpaid in the evenings. Two hours of tutoring after a full teaching day isn’t two hours of extra work; it’s two hours plus the admin of arranging it, the resource prep specific to that student, and the mental load of a fourth “lesson” after you’d normally have switched off.

A few things that keep this sustainable rather than corrosive: cap the number of regular students you take on and hold that number even when demand is there, protect at least one weekday evening as fully off-limits, and be honest with yourself and your families about exam season, report-writing windows and half-terms – most parents will accept “I’m not taking new bookings until after mocks” far better than a burnt-out cancellation in week two of term. If a chunk of your prep time each week goes on finding or adapting topic-specific resources for a 1:1 session rather than planning the actual teaching, that’s exactly the kind of repeat admin worth offloading somewhere – free resource libraries like the one on Learnaroo Hub are built for that kind of reuse across classroom and one-to-one settings, rather than rebuilding a worksheet from scratch every time.

The honest test of whether it’s working is whether you can still tell the difference, by March, between your teaching job and your side income. If tutoring starts feeling like a second full-time job rather than a chosen extra, that’s the point to scale back the number of students, not push through the term.