Nobody teaches you this. You finish a training that covered anatomy, philosophy and the sutras, and said nothing at all about what an hour of your attention is worth.
So most teachers guess. They guess low, because guessing low feels humble and guessing high feels like something a worse person would do. Then they live with the guess for years, and by the time they resent it they have twelve clients on it.
Fix it once, properly, and you never have to think about it again.
A private is not an hour
Start here, because everything else follows from it.
You are not selling sixty minutes. You are selling the twenty minutes beforehand where you think about this person's back and decide what to do about it, the sixty minutes themselves, the ten minutes afterward where you write down what changed, the travel at both ends, and the messages during the week when they ask whether the thing you gave them is supposed to feel like that.
Call it two and a half hours of your life for a sixty minute session, and closer to two if they come to you.
Now do the part almost nobody does. You cannot teach ten of those a day. Realistically you can hold four or five good ones in a day before the quality of your attention drops, and if you also teach group classes, that number is two or three. A private is not just expensive in hours, it is capped in a way group teaching is not. The price has to reflect a thing you can only do a limited number of times.
And it is gross, not net. Out of that number comes tax, insurance, whatever you pay to use a room, the training you keep doing, and the weeks in August when nobody books anything. If you price as though the number is your wage, you have priced roughly a third too low.
The shape of the numbers
Rates vary enormously between cities, and the only real data is your own. Ask two teachers you trust what they charge. They will tell you, and it will be more useful than any article.
The structure, though, is fairly consistent everywhere.
A private usually sits somewhere between two and four times what you take home from teaching a group class in the same city. Below two, you are effectively paying for the privilege of the commute. Above four, you are in a different market, which exists, but you need a specialization and a way of being found by people looking for it.
Travel to them costs more than them coming to you. Twenty to thirty percent more is normal and is not greed: it is an hour of transit you cannot use for anything else, plus carrying props, plus the fact that their living room will have a coffee table in the wrong place. If you travel, have one rate for your space and one for theirs, and say both without apology.
Online should sit slightly below in-person, and only slightly. There is no travel, which is real, so a modest reduction is honest. But the attention is identical, the preparation is identical, and the notes afterward are identical. Teachers who price online at half are usually reacting to a feeling that it is worth less, not to an actual cost. It is worth noting that online privates are the ones that survive when your student moves countries, which happens constantly in this work, and a client who keeps their standing hour from another timezone is worth more to you than a local one who cancels in the rain.
A block of five or ten carries a discount of roughly ten to fifteen percent against the single session rate. Not more. A big discount signals that the single rate was decorative.
A small group of three or four, all of whom know each other, is the most underused option in the entire list. Each person pays a fraction, you earn more than a single private, and it often teaches better for people who find an hour of being watched alone excruciating.
Why the block matters more than the discount
The point of a block is not the ten percent. It is the shape.
Single sessions produce a client who books when something hurts, disappears when it stops hurting, and reappears in eleven weeks having lost everything you built. You spend your admin life rescheduling and your teaching life starting over.
A block produces a run. Five sessions in six weeks is long enough to change something, which means the person can feel that it worked, which is the only argument for the next block that ever works.
So sell the run, not the discount:
"One-offs are fine, but honestly the shoulder needs about five sessions to shift. I would rather do it properly than have you pay me twice for the same first session."
Take payment for the block up front, or at the first session. Not because you distrust anyone, but because a paid block is a commitment they keep, and an unpaid intention is a thing that dissolves in December.
While you are there, decide your cancellation line and say it once at the start, in one flat sentence: sessions cancelled with less than a day's notice come out of the block. Every teacher who does not have this line ends up either losing money or having an unpleasant conversation, and the line prevents both.
The two decisions people mix up
Here is the mistake almost everybody makes. You look at a student, guess quietly what that student can afford, and set the price there.
Now you have a different price for every person, no idea what to say to the next one, and a small resentment that grows a little every week.
Separate them. Decide your rate once, from what the work costs you. Then, separately and deliberately, decide who you want to be generous with.
Concretely: keep two reduced places and hold them for whoever needs them. Or run one afternoon a month where you teach at whatever someone can pay. Or simply decide that this one student, for this one reason, gets a rate nobody else gets, and never mention it again.
That is generosity you chose. The version where you shave twenty percent off because you lost your nerve mid-sentence is a discount you were talked into. The money is identical and the way it feels a year later is not remotely the same.
Say the number and stop talking
The tell is the trailing sentence.
"It is eighty, but obviously if that is too much we can figure something out, I really do not want money to be a barrier for anyone, so..."
You have now told them the price is negotiable, that you are uncomfortable, and that whatever they say next will be received as a negotiation. All three are unhelpful, including to them.
"Privates are eighty. A block of five is three fifty."
Your numbers will be different. The delivery should not be. Say it in the same voice you use to say the class starts at seven, then stop. The silence lasts about two seconds and feels to you like a minute.
If you cannot say your number out loud without flinching, that is not a sign the number is wrong. Practice it in the kitchen until it is boring.
When they say it is too much
Do not lower the price. Change what they are buying.
Offer a forty-five minute session instead of an hour. Offer online instead of you traveling to them. Offer once a month with homework in between, which for many people works better than weekly anyway. Offer the small group of three, and let them bring the two friends themselves.
All of those keep your rate intact and still get the person practicing. And notice what they have in common: each one is a real, honest, smaller version of the thing, not the same thing at a worse price.
Sometimes the answer is simply that it is not for them right now, and that is fine. A person who cannot afford privates this year is still your regular on Tuesday, and may be your best word of mouth in the city.
Raising it on someone who has had the old rate for two years
This is the conversation teachers avoid hardest, so here is the whole thing.
Give notice, give a date, give no justification. A justification invites a negotiation.
"Just so you know, from January my rate goes to ninety. Everything else stays the same. I wanted to tell you now rather than surprise you."
Almost nobody leaves. The ones who do were going to leave anyway. And existing clients who are mid-block finish that block at the old rate, which costs you very little and is remembered for a long time.
The arithmetic worth doing once
Take your rate. Multiply it by four clients seeing you weekly. Compare that to what a full week of group classes pays you.
For most teachers, four standing privates is comparable income for about four or five hours of work.
That is not an argument for abandoning group teaching, which is where those four came from. It is an argument for pricing the four properly, because at the wrong number you need eight, and eight is a job.