How much does a driving instructor earn?
Driving instructors can earn anything from £15,000 to £50,000 a year or more (after expenses, before tax). The main thing to understand is that all driving instructors are self-employed, even those working at driving schools, so it’s different for everyone. There is no fixed salary for a driving instructor.
I’ve been a driving instructor for over 20 years, so let me share my experience of how this industry works. I’ll highlight the many tricks and cons used by some training providers, and if you avoid all of those, how much you earn as a driving instructor is ultimately up to you.
Watch all of this video for the full picture. Many training providers would stop at 12:51 after they’ve made it sound great, but what I say after that is what you must consider carefully.
The links below let you skip to each part of this page.
Can a driving instructor earn £40,000?
How a driving instructor could earn £40,000
How many hours does a driving instructor work
How much does a driving instructor earn at a driving school?
Income tax for driving instructors
Mortgages for driving instructors
What the average driving instructor earns
Could you earn £40,000 as a driving instructor?
The mythical perfect instructor
How much does a driving instructor really earn?
Why do people work as driving instructors?
Can a driving instructor earn £40,000?
That’s a common question, so here is an honest answer:
Yes, they can, but many won’t.
Driving instructor training providers often exaggerate how much a driving instructor can earn to sell courses because:
There is often more money to be made training instructors than being an instructor.
Companies can easily charge £2,500 for the course. If they get just 10 people a week, that’s £25,000 a week or over one million pounds a year.
New driving instructors who fail to make the money they expected then resort to selling their own instructor training course, or get taken on as trainers by the company they trained with, and the vicious cycle continues!
It’s similar to a pyramid scheme, where you only make money by selling something on to someone else, who then has to sell it on to someone else…
What about cheaper training providers that charge £1,000 or less?
They may not be as cheap as they look. They’ll often tie you into a contract where you end up paying them a weekly/monthly franchise fee.
The fee will usually be around £200 a week for 6 months (£5,200). With some schools, you can still owe this even if you fail your exams.
How a driving instructor could earn £40,000
The simplest trick driving instructor training companies use to exaggerate the income of a driving instructor is to talk about what you earn before expenses and taxes.
For example, you may earn £40,000 but after paying for your car or franchise (which we’ll look at later), fuel, insurance etc., you could be left with £20,000, which you still have to pay tax on.
Not as many companies use this trick now as it’s so widely known, but there are many other catches to watch out for.
Here is the kind of marketing you’ll see from driving instructor training companies when they want to impress you with how much a driving instructor can earn.
***Typical marketing hype***
Imagine a driving instructor charging £40 an hour.
This instructor works 36 hours a week, which consists of doing lessons at 0900-1100, 1200-1400 and 1500 to 1700 Monday to Friday and 0900-1100 and 1300-1500 on Saturday.
Here is what that instructor’s income could look like.
Income
£40 x 36 hours = £1,440
£1440 x 48 weeks of the year (4 weeks holiday per year) = £69,120
Expenses
Ford Puma Titanium at £718 a month = £8,616 a year
Fuel = £3,000 a year
Insurance = £1,380 a year
Total expenses = £12,996
Total (income minus expenses)
£56,124 before tax and national insurance
Become a driving instructor and YOU can be part of this, working fewer hours than in a 9 to 5 office job and being your own boss!
***End of marketing hype***
Let’s break this down and reveal what seemingly honest companies h̶i̶d̶e̶ forget to tell you.
The catch to earning £40,000 as a driving instructor
There is one colossal problem with earning a good income as a driving instructor:
You’ll be working around the clock and exhausting yourself to do it.
You might think working 36 hours a week, as in the example, is like a normal 9-5 office job.
If so, you’ve fallen for a classic instructor training trap!
Let me explain…
How many hours does a driving instructor work
36 hours is just the time you spend doing lessons.
What about the time spent travelling to and from lessons?
Even travelling just 15 minutes each way for each lesson is 9 hours added to your working week. It will often be a lot more than 15 minutes.
36 hours worth of lessons means 18 lessons (each 2 hours long) with 30 minutes travelling for each lesson (15 there, 15 back) is 30 minutes x 18 lessons = 540 minutes or 9 hours. Your 36-hour week is now a 45-hour week, including 9 hours of unpaid work.
You may only do one-hour driving lessons, so there will be more travelling between each pupil, and you end up working even more hours. There are other things you’ll need to do, which we’ll look at soon, so you can easily end up working 50 hours a week.
Earning £40 an hour might sound good compared to minimum wage jobs, but many driving instructors will often earn far less to start with.
Depending on where you are in the country, many driving instructors will earn nothing close to £40 an hour. It’s often as low as £15 to £20 an hour after you take into account discounts and introductory offers.
You can even end up earning nothing because many schools give away free lessons to attract pupils.
We’ve mainly spoken about being an independent driving instructor so far, but how much could a driving instructor earn at a driving school?
How much does a driving instructor earn at a driving school?
Many people think they’ll earn more working at a driving school on a franchise where you pay a driving school to hire a car and be supplied with work. 🤣
Why am I laughing about them supplying work? Driving school contracts often state they make no promises of you ever getting work. They take on as many PDIs and ADIs as they can to get as many franchise payments as possible, spreading the work as thinly as they can in the process.
You may think you’ll earn more if a driving school charges £45 an hour but that isn’t how it works.
How much does a driving instructor earn working at a driving school? Let’s look at introductory driving lesson offers, pricing and other problems you can face on a franchise.
Guaranteed place at our school
Have you seen those adverts for becoming a driving instructor where they promise you a guaranteed place/job if you pass?
It sounds great. I mean, they must have tons of work and be crying out for instructors if they can promise you a position with them, right? You’ll be booked for months ahead and making lots of money, right?
The con here is quite hilarious, except for those poor people who fall for it.
What this “guaranteed job” means is that they guarantee to sign you up to a franchise. In other words, they make you sign a contract agreeing to pay them £200 a week for 6 months!
Don’t go thinking that means you’ll get work. These contracts often include a clause saying they make no promises to supply you with any work, yet you must pay your £200 a week, or they will take legal action against you.
I’ll talk more about franchises soon.
Driving school introductory offers
Driving schools often do deals like five lessons for £50 or ten lessons for £100 because they need lots of pupils for all of the instructors they’re taking on.
The school doesn’t lose money – you do.
Many pupils take a few cheap lessons and then move on to another school to get their cheap deals. You will be earning £10 an hour minus your expenses so you could end up working for £3 an hour, or even for free.
Trainers don’t shout about that in their advertising.
Low prices attract pupils who want to pass as cheaply as possible, have no interest in lessons and constantly ask when they can take a test. Get people who just want it all done fast and cheap, and your life as an instructor will be awful.
There are many cons to these deals, like the lessons only being 45 minutes long or it not being the first five lessons that are cheaper, but the first, fifth, tenth, etc.
You’ll be the one having to explain these tricks to understandably angry parents when you pull up outside your pupil’s house earlier than expected, or they have to go in and get money for a £45 lesson they thought was £10. Good luck with that.
I thoroughly recommend reading my page on driving lesson introductory offers to see how much money they cost both you and your pupils.
People always want discounts, until they’re the ones running the business…
Other ways you’ll lose money
Driving schools are quick to shout about the headline rate of £40+ an hour you’ll be earning.
What they don’t tell you is that you’ll often not be earning that much.
You can give cheaper lessons for a range of reasons, including:
- Block booking discounts
- Student discounts
- NHS discounts
- Intensive course discounts
There are many other ways you’ll lose money, too.
Pupils will cancel lessons. You may be able to charge them if that’s written into the contract, but they may feel that’s unfair, and you’ll lose them completely.
Many driving school contracts aren’t even legal because they state you can charge the pupil, but they don’t mention what happens if the instructor cancels a lesson.
Did you know that for a contract to be legal, it must be fair to all parties? That means if you charge a pupil for cancelling a lesson, you must pay the pupil if you cancel.
The person signing must also be over 18, which many learner drivers aren’t.
Some pupils don’t turn up for lessons. Some damage the car, and you can end up paying more to repair it than you earned from the lesson.
Bad weather, such as snow, can stop you from working and remember you won’t be paid if you’re ill or on holiday.
Never base your income on the highest rate alone because you’ll often earn a lot less.
Franchise problems
One huge drawback to a franchise is the restrictions it brings.
The things that allow some instructors to earn money, such as making videos showing their personality and how much fun lessons will be with them, are inaccessible to you.
Some schools have strict rules about their instructors putting videos online, and they will want to view the video first. If it isn’t generic and safe in every way, then you won’t be allowed to publish it.
You’re not going to get anywhere like that! Do you think anyone wants to watch yet another video on bay parking with a generic instructor saying the same things?
If you don’t want to do social media, then don’t become a driving instructor. Many pupils expect to see videos of an instructor workin,g and you won’t get anywhere if you don’t put yourself out there.
Are you thinking that you want to work at a driving school because you just want to teach people and let someone else handle all the advertising and admin? Then don’t bother because you’ll be yet another frustrated driving instructor lost in a faceless driving school, wondering why you aren’t earning £40,000 a year.
If you do the same as everyone else, you’ll get the same as everyone else.
Franchise costs that affect how much a driving instructor earns
A franchise can be a huge weight around your neck as well. It can cost hundreds of pounds a week, and you end up working for hours just to pay that off before you even make anything for yourself.
Franchises cost over £300 a week in the early 2000s, and during 2020, many driving instructors had to pay £150+ a week despite not being allowed to work.
Having a franchise can be a massive drawback.
See my page on the truth about being a driving instructor for more about franchises.
Car costs
Did you spot the problem with the figures given in the marketing hype, where the instructor earned around £56,000?
Most people won’t have, and this is what I mean by companies hiding things while looking very open and honest.
That price was for a car contracted to do a maximum of 20,000 miles a year. There is no way you’re going to be doing 20,000 miles or less a year on a 36-hour work week. Not unless you’re one of those instructors whose car sits still for 90% of lessons.
The same car costs £70 a month more with a higher mileage allowance. That’s £840 a year more out of your income. If you exceed your mileage allowance, then you’ll be charged around 13p per mile, which means £13 for every 100 miles you do or £130 for every thousand miles. That’s far more than if you started on a higher mileage tariff, and you can’t change your allowance mid-contract.
There are many more catches, such as being charged for scratches and scuffed alloys when you return the vehicle.
More things to consider
Here are some extra things to consider when working out how much a driving instructor can earn.
You’ll need to allocate time in your diary for having the car serviced, cleaning it and answering calls/emails.
You’ll need a business bank account, which can cost around £10 a month. It’s against the rules of most (all?) banks to use a personal account for business reasons. If you do, your bank account can be closed.
There are other fees to pay, such as your ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) registration. This is a fee you must pay if you collect data about people through electronic means such as texts and emails.
The ICO fee is small, but it’s yet another thing people aren’t aware of, and all of these things add up and affect how much a driving instructor can earn.
You’ll also need to put time aside to do your financial accounts for your tax return – even if you have an accountant.
Let’s look at income tax because it brings up a problem that many who become instructors won’t even know about – payment on account.
Income tax for driving instructors
I am not an accountant, and I am not financially qualified in any way. This is not financial or legal advice; it’s how I see things from over 20 years of experience.
You’ll need to keep a record of everything you earn and spend, such as payments for lessons, fuel receipts, car repairs and franchise payments.
An accountant will not be able to record what you earn and spend; their job is to process the figures you give them. It makes it much easier, and I thoroughly recommend having an accountant but they won’t do everything for you!
Even with an accountant, you have to keep records, and you are responsible for paying your income tax and national insurance.
Now let’s look at the dreaded payment on account! 😲
Payment on account
Payment on account is when you pay some of next year’s tax bill this year.
When you first become self-employed, you’ll sometimes pay very little tax for the first year. This is because if you start in October, your financial year will only be from October until April.
Your next tax return will be for a full financial year (April 6 to April 5), and you can get hit with a big tax bill.
This is because you’ll owe whatever you owe for your first full tax year, plus 50% of that amount again. For example, if you owe £10,000, you’ll pay £15,000.
To make it more confusing, the amount you owe is split into two payments. One is due by July 31 and the other by January 31.
These large amounts of tax can leave you with far less money than expected, and it seems like you’re paying 50% more tax than you owe. You’re not, it evens out, but imagine what it’s like being hit with a tax bill for £15,000.
I have never fully understood this, so be sure to talk to an accountant about it.
Click here to read about payment on account on the HMRC website
Save for your taxes
You may think income tax is 20% of what you earn.
It’s more like 26% because it’s 20% tax and 6% national insurance. Click here to read about national insurance.
And it’s not 26% of it all, you only pay tax and national insurance after the amount you’ve earned after your personal allowance, which is £12,570.
These figures can change over time, so those are just for an example.
Don’t take my word for any of this because I’m not an accountant.
The point of this section is to make you aware that you will not keep all of what you earn. Be sure to factor this in when calculating how much a driving instructor can earn.
Mortgages for driving instructors
Again, I am not financially qualified, and I am not a mortgage broker. This is just my opinion from having had mortgages as a driving instructor.
People often say it is hard to get a mortgage if you’re self-employed, but it’s not really.
The only catch is that you need two years of accounts. With accounts being done a year behind, you may have to wait three years, depending on when you started. For example, you start working as a driving instructor in October 202,1 and in April 2022, you get your first accounts showing around six months of income (October to April). That amount will be low (because it’s not for a whole year) so you won’t be able to show two years of full accounts until April 2024 – around two and a half years after you started.
Most places will want to see your last two years of accounts signed by a chartered accountant.
They add your gross income (after expenses, before tax) for the last two years together and divide it by two for an average.
This is where many instructors realise they’re not earning as much as they thought. They think they’re earning £40,000, but that’s their net income (before expenses). Every lender I’ve seen will look at your gross income (after expenses), and some even want your income after paying tax.
Examples of mortgages for driving instructors
£18,000 + £20,000 = £38,000
£38,000 / 2 = £19,000
That figure of £19,000 is then multiplied by whatever multiplier the lender offers (usually 4.5 times) to give the total they’ll lend you.
£19,000 x 4.5 = £85,500
£85,000 plus your deposit is your budget to buy a home.
That’s assuming you have no children, no debt, an excellent credit rating and at least a 10% deposit. It will likely be less if you don’t meet the criteria.
Even if you do somehow earn £40,000 for two years, you would only be lent £180,000.
Don’t fiddle your figures!
Some people have the idea of fiddling with their figures to borrow higher amounts. That’s fraud, and you can go to prison for it, or at least get a huge fine and a criminal record.
If there’s too much difference (more than about 20%) between the two figures you submit, you will likely encounter problems. You can’t say you earned £15,000 one year and £50,000 the next year unless you really did and can explain why there’s such a difference.
I have heard of driving instructors hiding their expenses to take out larger mortgages. For example, they earn £28,000 but instead of taking out their car and fuel to show their true income of £20,000, they declare nothing to keep their income artificially high. They mistakenly think nobody will mind because they’ll be paying more income tax.
That’s mortgage fraud, which can also result in a prison sentence.
How people get caught
They’d catch you out because you can’t be a driving instructor and be spending nothing on petrol, electricity, or whatever your car runs on.
There are many ways people get caught out when they think they are being clever.
I’ve heard of people who earn £15,000 for years, then suddenly earn £100,000 for two years, before it mysteriously falls to £15,000 again once they have their mortgage. Don’t think that will go unnoticed by HMRC!
Again, none of this is financial or legal advice!
Don’t go basing any decisions on it, I’m just giving you a rough idea. Speak to a financial advisor for an accurate guide.
What the average driving instructor earns
Driving instructors can expect to earn £15,000 to £30,000 a year after paying expenses but before paying tax and national insurance.
I know this from talking to hundreds of instructors over the years, talking to accountants who do the books for instructors and having experienced the highs and lows myself.
Many great instructors earn very little because they’re bad at marketing. The pupils they have love their lessons, but they just aren’t very good at attracting pupils, and they sadly go out of business or their talent ends up lost in a sea of instructors at a big driving
Many bad instructors earn decent money because they’re great at marketing. You may think that it’s better to have it this way than be a great instructor with no work, but it’s not! The cracks soon start to show when pupils don’t get the results they want.
Something magical happens when you are a great instructor who is great at marketing.
Something to consider
I want to share one funny thing about being a driving instructor.
Whenever anyone asks you what you do for a living and you say you’re a driving instructor, I can guarantee that at least 70% of people will say something like
“My friend does that, and my barber is training.”.
It always makes me laugh how many people are, or were, driving instructors!
How do you think you’re going to earn good money from a job that is so common? The simple rules of supply and demand mean the more of something there is, the less it’s worth.
The driving instructor market is more saturated than the Atlantic Ocean.
If the market is oversaturated, even with so many driving instructors leaving the industry and failing their ADI part 3 exam, think how many people are training!
Example of typical earnings for a driving instructor
Let’s do the figures as we did above, but replace the marketing hype with realistic figures.
This is for someone working on a franchise which includes a supply of pupils and an insured car with all maintenance included.
They charge £30 an hour on average (taking into account introductory offers and block booking deals) and get enough work to do 30 hours a week. Bear in mind that driving schools will spread the work as thinly as they can across as many instructors as possible, so they make more from them each paying a franchise fee. This results in less work for each instructor.
You’ll also be lucky to get 4 weeks franchise-free a year. It’s often only one or two weeks, and it’s not free anyway; they add the cost to all of your other payments.
Income
£30 x 30 hours = £900
£900 x 48 weeks of the year = £43,200
Expenses
50 weekly franchise payments of £200 = £10,000
Fuel = £3,000
Total expenses = £13,750
Total (income minus expenses)
£29,450 before tax and national insurance
You can see how this is far less than the figures above!
But it’s still more than the figure I gave to start with of around £20,000 so what’s up?
Here’s the biggest thing of all that training providers don’t tell you:
You won’t consistently work 30+ hours a week as a driving instructor.
Why? Once again, let me explain…
Why you’ll struggle to do 30 hours a week
Many would-be driving instructors work out their income based on a 40-hour week. Sometimes, they may even do it on a 30 or 35-hour work week.
Many driving instructors work a 20 to 24-hour week.
I know this from talking to hundreds of instructors over the years while at driving test centres.
Some instructors work more hours, but they suffer for it.
People often mistakenly think that this difficulty in keeping your hours up is because there isn’t enough work, because you can’t fit pupils in around each other due to them all wanting the same times, or that you’re just not getting much work because your marketing isn’t very good.
While those things are true and play a role, the main reason is:
Being a driving instructor is physically and mentally exhausting!
If you think you know better and are laughing because you used to work in the police, as an air traffic controller or some other stressful job, then fine.
I’ve heard those exact things before and had people laugh at me for saying that being a driving instructor is exhausting. A few months later, they contacted me and said, “You were right!”.
I have had physical jobs like working as a delivery driver starting from 6 a.m. each day, working nights as a cleaner and doing welding and manufacturing work in factories from 9 to 5.
None of those were as exhausting as being a driving instructor.
What’s so hard about it?
You won’t understand until you’ve done the job for a while.
You’ll likely encounter all these things and more:
- Road rage (some people hate learners)
- Car crashes and near-crashes (think this only happens if you don’t teach properly? See what happens when that theory meets reality!)
- Stress and anxiety
- A sore throat from talking so much
- Repeating yourself over and over and then doing it all again with the next pupil
- Abdominal cramps and pains from sitting all day
- Trapped nerves from harsh braking
- One mistake, like speeding, can mean the end of your career.
- People coming up to your car and moaning about learners using “their” road
You can read more about those things on my page, The good and bad of being a driving instructor.
I recommend reading funny driving lesson stories and funny driving test stories to see other things that can happen!
With these things in mind, you’re unlikely to work more than 24 hours a week. That takes the income from the example above way down to what you’re really going to earn.
Could you earn £40,000 a year as a driving instructor?
Here’s a chance for you to see what it’s like being a driving instructor working a 36-hour week.
This won’t work if you just read it and imagine what it would be like in your head. You have to actually do it to understand.
You’re going to do three driving lessons a day for six days a week. Each lesson is two hours long, with a different type of learner and involves a 20-minute drive to the pupil, doing the lesson and then a 20-minute drive home.
Lesson 1 – 9 a.m. start
Drive for 20 minutes, then stop for 3 minutes (to simulate picking up a pupil).
Drive somewhere quiet, then spend around 1 hour and 50 minutes pretending to teach someone how to move off. Don’t just do it in your head. Speak out loud to an imaginary person, explaining the car controls in detail and then moving off and stopping in first gear several times.
In their first two-hour driving lesson, most learners who are taught properly will be able to:
- Understand the basic controls of a car
- Move off uphill, downhill and on a flat road
- Change to 2nd and 3rd gear
- Do some braking on their own
- Understand how the clutch works and what makes a car stall
- Understand the difference between lower gears and higher gears
If you find at the end of the lesson you’re driving all over the place, turning left and right, and driving like a full licence holder, that’s not realistic!
That’s for instructors who just tell people what to do to make it look easy and impress people with how quickly they’re learning. It isn’t teaching them anything; they’re doing what you say but they can’t do it independently when you stop talking.
Drive back to the location you picked them up from, arriving at 1100, then drive home.
Lesson 2 – 1 p.m. start
Drive for 20 minutes, then stop for 3 minutes (to simulate picking up a pupil).
This pupil has already had some lessons, so spend two hours driving around where you live. Imagine you’re focusing on roundabouts, crossroads or whatever you choose. Don’t just drive around aimlessly, pretend you’re giving a lesson, and think of what problems the pupil will be having.
Make sure you get back to where you picked them up at 3 p.m., then drive home.
Lesson 3 – 5 p.m. start
Drive for 20 minutes, then stop for 3 minutes (to simulate picking up a pupil).
This pupil is almost at test standard and wants to practice bay parking. Drive to a car park and spend 30 minutes reversing and driving forwards into parking bays. Then go and do some high-speed roads, large roundabouts or whatever you can find. If possible, drive a test route and imagine you’re giving them a mock test (some routes are online in videos or in satnav route files).
Get them back home for 7 p.m. and then drive home.
What to do next
Repeat all of that for six days a week, mixing up the lessons so sometimes you do the first one last. You can do different times too, or even one-hour lessons, so long as you do six hours of teaching per day.
That is what you’ll be doing when working 36 hours a week as a driving instructor.
How do you feel?
This is what you’ll need to do every week for years if you want to earn decent money.
If you want to earn £40,000+ as a driving instructor, you’ll need to add several lessons to this week. That could mean doing a lesson from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. or starting earlier in the morning and only having half an hour between lessons.
The mythical perfect instructor
What about the perfect driving instructor?
They never tire, never stop for a toilet break and never need to eat.
Road rage never bothers them; they never get ill and work every week, every year, without ever having a holiday or any time off for themselves.
Their car never breaks down or gets flat tyres, and nobody ever damages it.
They get tons of work for free through social media with content that creates itself. No pupil ever cancels lessons, gets ill or forgets to turn up.
All of this allows them to book 8 hours of lessons a day, all back-to-back with pupils who conveniently all live next door to each other, only a one-minute drive from the instructor’s home and are happy to pay the full price for lessons from start to finish.
This is impossible, yet it’s how some people work out a potential income.
Here’s my experience of this job when I had it as good as you can get it.
How much does a driving instructor really earn?
Here’s a realistic example of an instructor charging £30 an hour and working a 22-hour week.
This is a real-world scenario where you don’t earn the full rate of £35+ an hour with everyone, pupils cancel and life happens.
This is someone doing quite well and towards the higher end of what you can expect to earn.
Income
£30 x 22 hours = £660
£1440 x 48 weeks of the year (4 weeks holiday per year) = £31,680
Expenses
Ford Puma Titanium at £718 a month = £8,616 a year
Fuel = £2,500 a year
Insurance = £1,000 a year
Total expenses = £12,116
Total (income minus expenses)
£19,564 before tax and national insurance
So far, we’ve only used theoretical figures, which mean very little. It’s like when you see miles per gallon figures for cars, which you’ll never actually get in real life.
Let’s look at what I actually earned as a driving instructor to show you the raw truth of how little driving instructors earn.
What I earned as a driving instructor
Here’s how good I had it and the income that it generated.
I was one of the first driving instructors on YouTube (I think the first), having started in May 2008. Some of my videos, like Common Driving Test Mistakes, had over a million views.
I became so popular that I got recognised in the street, in shops, and on the road. People pulled up next to me at traffic lights wanting to talk.
I’m telling you this to show I wasn’t struggling for work.
I was fully booked six days a week and had pupils waiting six months or more to start. I was charging a higher rate than any national driving school and had no discounts at all. Everyone paid full price from start to finish, and I was paying under £400 a month for my car.
I couldn’t afford to have time off for holidays, so I worked 50 weeks of the year. I didn’t go on a holiday for 7 years, and when I did, it was four days in Cornwall. My next holiday was 10 years later, when I had one week in Cornwall.
My gross income (after expenses, before tax) from 2003 to 2020 ranged from £5,000 to £17,000. For two years, I made over £20,000, peaking at £21,000.
That includes working at two national driving schools for a year each and working independently for the rest of the time. My income was at its lowest while working at driving schools.
But how can it be that little?
I know what you’re thinking.
You’ve got your calculator out, and after bashing away, you can’t see how the figures are so low.
This is exactly how training companies get you!
All of the things I’ve listed on this page result in a low income.
Here’s a brief summary:
- Losing money from discounts and intro offers
- Not working as many hours as you expect
- Franchise fees
- Ever-rising costs of fuel, cars and insurance
- The sheer number of driving instructors competing for work
I can’t tell you how many times I have gotten emails from people saying they’d read my site and thought I was talking rubbish, so they went off and trained to be a driving instructor. Several years later, they realised I was right and wished they’d listened to me.
This leaves us with one final, interesting question.
If it’s this bad, then…
Why do people work as driving instructors?
People who have spent years as driving instructors don’t do it for the money.
Many instructors have already made money from other careers and paid off their mortgages.
They believe in teaching safe driving and enjoy being out on the roads, meeting new people and helping them gain their independence.
Some appreciate the benefits of being an instructor, like having a new car every few years and the freedom that being self-employed brings. Many are semi-retired and only enjoy a part-time job for something to do or a bit of extra money.
These are the people who should be working as instructors rather than those who are not interested in road safety and just want to make money.
This page is not meant to put you off being a driving instructor. I enjoyed the job for many years, and it does have positives, despite what you may think after reading this page!
Be an instructor for the right reasons, and you’ll love it.
Be an instructor just to make money, and you’ll hate it.
My final thoughts on how much a driving instructor can earn
You can make good money from this job, but don’t expect it to be easy.
Invest your time in becoming a knowledgeable, personable instructor whom people enjoy learning with. Spend time making videos that demonstrate your knowledge.
Focus on becoming the best you can, and the money will follow.
If you make the mistake of focusing on how to earn money and get rich quickly, you’ll never enjoy the job, and you won’t make any money.
Enjoy being self-employed, something that can bring you much more freedom than a 9-5 job can. Just remember it also has its downsides.
There is a lot of unpaid work involved (social media, advertising), and you won’t just get to go home and switch off until tomorrow because emails will need answering and calls will be coming in.
I spent over 20 years working as a driving instructor and loved it. I enjoyed meeting people, being out and about and seeing all sorts of crazy things.
The memories I have from my time teaching will always be with me, and I wouldn’t change anything if I could go back and do it again.
Maybe you’ll enjoy it too 🙂
Further reading
Read other pages like Funny Driving Lesson Stories, which describe some of the crazy things I mentioned above. Or learn The Truth About Being a Driving Instructor.
Watch my video playlists on:
How to pass your Standards Check