How to price group tutoring sessions per student

A group is not a discount. It is a different product with different preparation, and it needs its own arithmetic.

The short answer

Start from your one-to-one hourly fee, not from what a local centre advertises.
Charge each student a fraction of that fee - commonly a half to two-thirds - so the group total rises with headcount.
Set a minimum viable group and a maximum you can actually teach. Three to five is a workable band for most subjects.
Add preparation and marking time to the hour before you divide anything. A group of five rarely takes the same prep as one student.
Publish the per-student price and the minimum size together, so nobody is surprised when a group of two is re-priced.

The arithmetic, in order

Write your one-to-one fee for a teaching hour.
Add the extra preparation and marking a group creates, in hours, and multiply by that same fee. This is your true cost for the session.
Decide the per-student fraction you want to charge - say sixty per cent of the one-to-one fee.
Divide the true session cost by the per-student price. That is your minimum group size, rounded up.
Check the maximum: how many students can you give individual feedback to in the time you have? Cap it there, not at the number that maximises the total.

What goes wrong most often

Tutors price a group by halving their rate and forget the marking. Five sets of homework is five times the reading, and it happens outside the paid hour.

The second failure is the shrinking group. A price that works for four students quietly becomes a loss when two leave, unless you stated a minimum size at the start and re-price or pause when you drop below it.

Keeping it straight afterwards

Log attendance per student, not per session. Group billing is per head, and absences are where disputes start.
Record which students are on which rate if you grandfather an old price.
Keep the group's minimum size in the same file as the register, so you notice the week it stops being viable.

The free tool for this

What an hour has to cost to pay you - What an hour has to cost to pay you. It runs in the page, asks for your own numbers, and sends nothing anywhere.

If you would rather not build it yourself

Tutor OS holds the register, the per-student rates and the session log in one file, so a group's income and its unpaid total are counted rather than estimated. Tutor Student, Session & Payment Tracker - Excel + Google Sheets (Tutor OS) is $19. See it on the shop, and there is a plain page about it here: what it holds.

Questions people actually ask

Is a group always more profitable than one-to-one?

Not below your minimum size, and not once marking is counted. Run the arithmetic with your own preparation hours before you commit to a term of it.

Should siblings or referrals get a lower per-student rate?

If you want to offer that, make it a stated rule with a start date rather than a private arrangement, so it does not become the price everyone expects.

How to price group tutoring per student