Varsity Tutors: How to Start Your Tutoring Career

If you are proficient at anything from grammar to law, you may be able to turn that proficiency into a tutoring position with Varsity Tutors. Varsity is one of several online tutoring platforms that connect freelance tutors with clients.

But this site has a twist. Instead of clients choosing you personally, based on your profile, the site matches tutors through a proprietary algorithm. And it locks students into long-term contracts, so it has more work to pass around.

What is Varsity Tutors?

Varsity Tutors is a national tutoring platform that encourages freelancers to tutor in a wide array of subjects, from math and English to chemistry, drama, and foreign languages.

How it works for tutors

Tutors sign up by filling in an online application that spells out their education and teaching experience. The site will then conduct a video interview. Assuming you meet the site’s requirements, you’ll be invited to create a profile.

The site will then match you with students needing help in your subject areas.

How it works for students/parents

When parents or students go to the site to look for a tutor, Varsity asks a number of questions about when you need a tutor, the subjects, grade level, etc. And then it will suggest that you buy a “learning membership plan.”

A plan that gets you 4-hours of tutoring a month costs $299 a month, if you buy a six-month subscription, and $269 per month, if you buy a 12-month subscription.

The caution here? Subscriptions are automatically renewed and apparently non-refundable. Parents complain that it’s almost impossible to cancel.

Varsity Tutor review (for tutors)

By looking at what Varsity charges parents, you might imagine that tutors are well paid here. After all, the cheapest subscription costs students about $67.25 per tutoring hour. You’d assume that tutors would get at least half of that, or about $33 an hour. But you’d be wrong. In most cases, Varsity pays its tutors around $15 per hour.

The site maintains that tutor pay varies by experience, reviews and subject, but most tutors say they earn $15 to $20. The one exception: Group test-prep tutors can sometimes earn considerably more — but just for these lessons, that involve multiple students. And getting those gigs is rare.

On the bright side, because of the way Varsity shovels parents into multi-hour, multi-month contracts, it’s easier to find students on this platform than it is on tutoring platforms where students book a single hour at a time.

Booking students

Tutors, however, have very little control over the students they get. The site matches tutors to students — and sometimes will present several tutor profiles to a single student to evaluate. But, again, if you get a job, it’s likely to result in multiple tutoring hours, since the student is likely to be locked into a multi-hour contract.

Tutors apparently sign a contract that requires them to give the site 30 days notice if they want to quit.

Pay

The site determines how much you earn per hour (this is negotiated before you take a student) and pays tutors twice weekly via direct deposit, after sessions are completed.

Recommendations:

Tutoring is a generally attractive job that can be done from home on your own schedule. But unless you are a new tutor needing experience, you can earn more with other tutoring sites.

Our top pick in the tutoring space is Wyzant. At Wyzant you set your own rates and simply pay the site a 25% commission for doing your marketing and collection. Another attractive option: TutorOcean, where you also set your own rates and availability.

If you want to sign up with Varsity, you can Click here

What their users say (from Reddit)

I recently requested that they end my independent contractor agreement. According to the contract, I had to provide 30 days’ notice. Three days later, they assigned me to a student I had last tutored nearly two years ago. I last tutored on the platform in early February. Despite several applications to jobs that clearly matched my skills, experience, and approved subjects, I did not receive any new students, with the exception of one who already had a tutor on their platform.

Varsity Tutors are horrible. Run away. They charged me $120 pr hour and paid my Tutor $15 and continued to charge me after our contract was finished. I had to contact them 6 times and never got a refund. Run away,.. they are a scam.

No work

“Employed” 4 months now and has never received an opportunity. I click on interested and fill in notes and that’s the end of that. Never ever have l received any opportunity or income. Bizarre!

The latest pet peeve right now is an change to their invoice system. Now, you have to provide an attachment as proof that the session with the client occurred. You then have to select the submit button twice for confirmation to send your invoice, and finally they tell you they will review it meanwhile you don’t see the invoice listed in your account. So essentially, you work for free at the mercy of them reviewing your invoice to validate it is worth paying for work already done.

Low pay

Why do people work for Varsity Tutors when the pay is so low? It seems that this company vets their tutors pretty thoroughly for technical and interpersonal competence. Given this, I would say you are worth at least $40/hr or more on a site such as Wyzant (which takes 25%) and or as an independent. I would say learn what you can while working for Varsity, then transition to greener ($$) pastures.

Please explain how it’s necessary for a web-based business to charge $90/hr to pay $15/hr to a professional with the necessary credentials to make a “small” profit.

You can get paid upwards of $60 per hour for the test prep courses, but those are group classes. I’ve seen over $100 per hour for quite a few of them. The base $15 per hour rate is just for 1:1 tutoring, but if you can do the group courses for any subject the rate is a lot higher.

(from Indeed)

You can make your own schedule, and the website is very easy to use. Scheduling appointments on the calendar was practical and made things efficient. There is no upward mobility and no pay raises.

A very efficiently run and monitored company with excellent customer service. You view the opportunities yourself and express interest. The company then matches you with individual students.

It’s a great part time gig and I loved all of my students! The platform suddenly let me go without explaining why, and sadly I heard that that is a common experience! You also are expected to do things outside of your paid hours, like lesson prep and phone calls, and you don’t get paid more for meeting with more than one student at a time.

Good part-time job option for college students and also an easy way to gain some experience. Exposure to other schools’ curricula.

(From Glassdoor)

I love the independence of scheduling and selecting my own students.  But I would like to receive some assistance from Varsity Tutors on mileage, especially with gas prices increasing.

The pay rates are about half of what other companies pay, but you do not need previous tutoring experience to apply.

Being paid $15/hr to teach organic chemistry with a masters degree is ridiculous.

Low pay, no training

They charge over twice as much per session as you make, and are not up front about this.

You receive no training, and the pay isn’t comparable to what you can make elsewhere.

The main downside is pay. GRE tutors are paid $33 per hour, but the students are paying anywhere from $50-$90 per hour. So Varsity pockets anywhere from 33-63% of the income. It can be even worse for high school subjects, for which tutors only earn $15 per hour. It makes sense that Varsity needs to make some income to run their business, but taking this much as profit is exploitative to the tutors. Oh, and if you call and ask if there’s any possibility of higher pay, they hang up on you.

Updated 2/14/2025