Tutors
Also called Academic tutor, Private tutor, Math tutor, Reading tutor, Test prep tutor
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 175,070 US tutors, with median pay of $43,350 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 250,000 from 1998, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for tutors: Online tutoring platforms, 2010 to 2020. Online platforms expanded the tutor labor pool beyond the reach of franchise centers by eliminating geographic barriers to entry.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects little or no change in employment from 2025 to 2035 (-0.2%).
AI exposure studies
- 37.1% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). Tutors: jobs and pay since 1998 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-3041
Future History. "Tutors: jobs and pay since 1998." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-3041.
@misc{futurehistory_25_3041, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Tutors: jobs and pay since 1998}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-3041}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
The access date is today's date on your device.
≈ $42,239 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
Yale president Ezra Stiles arranges a plantation tutoring position in Georgia for graduating senior Eli Whitney. Whitney travels south to take the post; on arrival, the promised salary is halved. He refuses the job, stays with plantation owner Caty Greene, and invents the cotton gin the following year. Whitney's episode illustrates how common and economically precarious private plantation tutoring was in the early Republic: young educated men took such positions as a first stop while deciding what to do next, often on terms that could be changed unilaterally by the employer.
Stanley Kaplan, the son of Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, begins tutoring students for standardized tests in his basement. He believes the SAT is "some kind of elitist establishment plot to keep minorities out of the Ivy Leagues" and sets out to prove that systematic preparation can improve anyone's score. His business grows slowly for decades -- the Educational Testing Service, which owns the SAT, refuses to acknowledge that coaching can raise scores -- and eventually reaches 70 centers nationwide by 1975. The Washington Post Company acquires Kaplan Educational Centers in 1984 for an undisclosed sum, making it the largest test prep operation in the nation. Kaplan's founding creates the blueprint for what commercial tutoring will become.
Kumon Institute of Education opens its first US tutoring center in New York City, initially serving the children of Japanese expatriates. Toru Kumon had developed his method in Osaka in 1958, inspired by teaching his own son Takeshi. The US expansion proceeds slowly at first; by 1983 Kumon begins formal US franchising, and by 1993 the company has 850 North American learning centers. Kumon becomes one of the largest tutoring operations in the world, with a model built around daily self-paced worksheets and incremental mastery rather than one-on-one instruction. This represents a distinct organizational form from the personal tutoring relationship that had defined the occupation since colonial times.
Former schoolteacher W. Berry Fowler founds Sylvan Learning in Portland, Oregon, building a personalized tutoring center model based on diagnostic assessment and individualized instruction plans. By 1986 Sylvan has over 500 franchises and goes public on NASDAQ. By 2003 the company operates 960 centers across 10 countries. Sylvan's model creates the archetype of the franchised learning center: a structured, testable, repeatable tutoring product. It transforms a personal relationship business into a scalable institutional one -- and in doing so, creates thousands of part-time and full-time tutor positions that employ credentialed instructors under institutional supervision.
President George W. Bush signs the No Child Left Behind Act on January 8, 2002. Title I of the Act requires schools that have failed to meet state standards for three or more consecutive years to offer supplemental education services -- publicly funded tutoring -- to low-income students, with approximately $500 to $1,000 per child available from Title I funds for approved providers. For-profit tutoring companies can qualify as providers. The National Tutoring Association reports that in the year after NCLB, the number of paid tutors nationwide grows from approximately 250,000 to more than one million -- though this explosion partly reflects the broad definition (all paid tutoring, not formal employment) and reflects pre-existing demand that NCLB accelerated.
Brookings Institution publishes a summary of four randomized controlled trials on generative AI tutoring. The results are striking: in one RCT, students using an AI tutor achieved learning gains more than double those of the control group relative to baseline knowledge (median post-test score 4.5 vs. 3.5). Effect sizes across the four studies range from 0.73 to 1.3 standard deviations. These are among the strongest experimental results ever recorded for any educational intervention. The findings create an immediate challenge for human tutors who have built their practice around content delivery and concept explanation -- the tasks the AI platforms replicate most effectively. The same research confirms that AI tutoring performs best for already-motivated students; for anxious, disengaged, or struggling students, the human relationship remains the primary intervention.
Chegg, the largest publicly traded tutoring and homework-help company in the US, reports in its FY2025 annual filing a 40% year-on-year subscriber decline and a 39% revenue decline, explicitly citing ChatGPT and AI overviews as the root cause. Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz states that students are increasingly turning to free AI tools for the content-delivery tutoring that Chegg had built its business on. This is the most concrete financial signal that AI substitution of commodity tutoring services is not theoretical: it is already reshaping demand.
Will AI replace tutors? What the research says
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for tutors
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is taking this onSchedule and coordinate tutoring sessions, track attendance and billing, and maintain session notes, tasks increasingly handled by scheduling software and AI note-takers, freeing tutor time for session quality and student relationship management.
Schedule and coordinate tutoring sessions, track attendance and billing, and maintain session notes, tasks increasingly handled by scheduling software and AI note-takers, freeing tutor time for session quality and student relationship management.[6],[1]
Administrative scheduling and billing are among the first tasks AI tools automate for independent tutors. Adopt a simple booking and invoicing tool early. The time recovered goes directly back to preparation and follow-up, which is where your student relationships are built and defended.
AI is sitting alongside you hereDesign and curate targeted practice sets for each student, using AI tools to generate adaptive problem sequences, vary question formats, and surface worked examples at the right difficulty level, then personally selecting and sequencing the output based on knowledge of the student's learning patterns, anxiety triggers, and test-day pacing needs.
Design and curate targeted practice sets for each student, using AI tools to generate adaptive problem sequences, vary question formats, and surface worked examples at the right difficulty level, then personally selecting and sequencing the output based on knowledge of the student's learning patterns, anxiety triggers, and test-day pacing needs.[4],[8]
AI can generate unlimited, calibrated practice problems on demand: stop writing worksheets from scratch. Spend the time saved reviewing AI-generated output for quality and alignment to the student's specific gaps, then briefing the student on why each problem type appears on the exam and how to recognize it under pressure.
AI is sitting alongside you hereCommunicate student progress to parents or guardians by summarizing session observations, interpreting assessment trends, and framing next steps in language that calibrates parental expectations and sustains engagement, using AI to draft initial progress-report text then editing for accuracy, tone, and relational nuance before sending.
Communicate student progress to parents or guardians by summarizing session observations, interpreting assessment trends, and framing next steps in language that calibrates parental expectations and sustains engagement, using AI to draft initial progress-report text then editing for accuracy, tone, and relational nuance before sending.[6],[1]
AI can draft clear, structured progress summaries quickly: stop writing them from scratch. Spend the time saved on the pieces AI cannot do: noticing which parent needs reassurance versus accountability framing, surfacing the behavioral observation ("she self-corrected twice without prompting") that builds parental confidence and sustains the engagement that keeps students showing up.
Where tutors go next
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
- Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary
- US median pay
- $105,870 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- -0.3%
- Training and Development Specialists
- US median pay
- $69,280 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +10.8%
- Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors
- US median pay
- $64,330 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +2.9%
What each move takes
Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary
Tutoring center directors and K-12 program coordinators often promote from experienced tutors: the role demands deep knowledge of how students learn, the ability to train and supervise other tutors, and the credibility to advise schools and parents. The administrative scope is significantly larger, but tutors who have built a client base and managed a caseload already demonstrate many of the relevant competencies.
- · Program management and budget administration
- · Hiring, training, and performance coaching of tutoring staff
- · Educational data analysis and reporting to school district stakeholders
- · EdTech vendor evaluation and platform deployment
How has the work of tutors changed since 1700?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Pen, paper, and recitation (pre-commercial tutoring era)
For the first two centuries of American tutoring, every tool was physical and artisanal: Latin primers, arithmetic slates, quill pens, handwritten exercises, and the oral recitation method inherited from medieval European universities. The tutor's primary technology was the textbook and the Socratic dialogue. There was no administrative infrastructure, no standardized curriculum, and no certification requirement. The relationship was purely personal: a young scholar in the household, paid for results measured informally by parental satisfaction. This era ended not with a new tool but with a new institution: when Stanley Kaplan began tutoring students on standardized tests in a Brooklyn basement in 1938, he created the first systematic, scalable method for tutoring toward a measurable outcome.
Standardized test prep materials (Kaplan, 1938)
Stanley Kaplan founded the first commercial test preparation operation in Brooklyn in 1938, offering systematic coaching for the SAT and other standardized tests. Kaplan's innovation was not technological but methodological: he created structured, replicable curricula for tutoring toward a measurable external benchmark. His students traveled from across the country to learn test-taking strategies; by 1975 Kaplan operated many centers nationwide, and the Washington Post Company acquired the business in 1984, making it the largest test prep operation in the nation. The SAT prep era established the blueprint for commercial tutoring: standardized materials, consistent method, reproducible at scale. John Katzman founded The Princeton Review in 1981 after college graduation, tutoring New York students with a more aggressive "beat the test" methodology. Princeton Review grew from fewer than 39,000 students at company-owned sites in 2000 to more than 81,000 by 2002.
Effect on the workThe test prep industry created a new subspecialty of professional tutoring that drew educated people who could not find teaching positions into paid coaching work. By the 1970s tutoring for the SAT, LSAT, GMAT, and MCAT had become a recognized occupational pathway for recent college graduates.
Commercial tutoring center franchise (Kumon 1974 US, Sylvan 1979)
Two franchise systems transformed tutoring from an informal personal service into a standardized commercial industry. Sylvan Learning was founded by former schoolteacher W. Berry Fowler in Portland, Oregon in 1979; by 1986 it had hundreds of franchises and went public on NASDAQ. By 2003 Sylvan had grown to hundreds of centers in several countries. These franchise systems created the modern tutoring center job: a salaried or hourly position at a physical learning center, with scripted curricula, standardized diagnostic tools, and institutional oversight. For the first time, tutoring work was organizationally embedded rather than purely freelance.
Effect on the workThe franchise center model created thousands of structured part-time and full-time tutoring positions that did not exist before 1979. By 1993 Sylvan alone employed instructors at hundreds of locations.
No Child Left Behind supplemental education services mandate (2002)
The No Child Left Behind Act, signed by President George W. Bush on January 8, 2002, required schools identified as persistently failing to offer supplemental education services (SES) -- essentially publicly funded tutoring -- to low-income students, with Title I funds available per child for approved providers. For-profit tutoring companies could qualify as SES providers, creating a federally subsidized demand channel for commercial tutoring that had not previously existed. The NTA estimate of one million paid tutors by 2003 partly reflects this new funding stream alongside the broader parental demand surge. Research later found NCLB supplemental services had little to no measurable effect on student outcomes, and the mandate was weakened by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015.
Effect on the workNCLB's SES mandate created institutional demand for tutors in low-income school districts that had previously been largely priced out of the private tutoring market. The requirement contributed to the fourfold expansion in paid tutoring between 1998 and 2003 documented by the National Tutoring Association.
Online tutoring platforms (Wyzant, Tutor.com, Varsity Tutors, Chegg Tutors)
The 2010s saw the emergence of platform-mediated online tutoring as a new distribution channel, reducing geographic barriers and enabling tutors to reach students nationally. Wyzant, founded in 2005, became one of the largest US tutoring marketplaces; Chegg acquired Tutor.com in 2014 and rebranded it Chegg Tutors (subsequently Chegg Study+). Varsity Tutors was founded in 2007. These platforms shifted tutor compensation from center-employed wages toward gig-economy structures: tutors set their own rates, worked independently, and competed for student reviews. The online channel also expanded the labor supply by allowing college students and recent graduates to pick up tutoring work without a physical center affiliation. The formal BLS employment count for SOC 25-3041 covers payroll-employed tutors and undercounts this growing gig-economy layer.
Effect on the workOnline platforms expanded the tutor labor pool beyond the reach of franchise centers by eliminating geographic barriers to entry. This increased supply competition, contributing to downward pressure on center-employed tutor wages relative to independent premium tutors.
ESSER-funded high-impact tutoring (pandemic learning loss recovery)
The COVID-19 pandemic closed schools nationwide in March 2020, creating an acute learning loss crisis. States collectively invested over $700 million of ESSER set-asides in targeted tutoring programs. The share of districts offering tutoring rose between 2021 and 2022. This federal investment created a temporary surge in school-employed tutor positions. The ESSER spending cliff (funds expired September 2024) threatened to unwind many of those positions; fewer than half of states announced plans to sustain tutoring funding after ESSER.
Effect on the workESSER created the largest single government investment in tutoring employment in US history. A substantial share went to instructional support including tutors. The expiration of ESSER funds in September 2024 created employment uncertainty for school-based tutor positions.
AI tutoring agents (Khanmigo, Synthesis Tutor, Duolingo Max, ChatGPT)
By 2023, large language models had matured enough to power credible Socratic tutoring interactions. Khanmigo launched to Khan Academy's paid users in March 2023 and expanded to all free-tier users in March 2026 after a two-million-student pilot that produced a 32% improvement in learning velocity. Synthesis Tutor launched conversational adaptive math tutoring for K-5 students. Duolingo Max brought agentic tutoring to eight million subscribers. Chegg, whose homework-help and tutoring business had been growing, saw a 40% subscriber decline and 39% revenue decline in FY2025, directly attributing both to ChatGPT and AI overviews. The BLS projected a 5.1% employment decline for tutors from 2024 to 2034, the first projected contraction in the occupation's modern history, explicitly citing AI tutoring platforms.
Effect on the workThe arrival of capable AI tutoring platforms is the most significant technology-driven threat to tutor employment since the occupation reached its modern scale. McKinsey estimates AI will automate 20-40% of administrative tasks for educators; content delivery and practice-problem generation, previously core tutor activities, are now substantially automatable. The tutoring role is shifting toward the emotional and motivational coaching dimensions that AI platforms consistently underperform.
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Browse all rolesTutors employment and pay by year
View all 6 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1998 | 250,000 | n/a | Est., Christian Science Monitor Researched context | Report |
| 2021 | 147,100 | $36,470 | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 174,980 | $36,680 | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 162,300 | $39,580 | BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 174,660 | $40,090 | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 175,070 | $43,350 | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |
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