1-to-1 IB Tutor in the UAE

A one-to-one IB hour in the UAE is advertised anywhere between AED 33 and AED 650. The band is that wide because five different products are being sold under one word. A university student revising alongside a Year 10 pupil and a trained Diploma teacher marking Paper 3 answers are not the same purchase, and the market prices them accordingly.

The table below collects what providers in this market actually publish, read in October 2026. Each figure belongs to the company that published it, not to IB Gram. We do not run a public rate card, because the sensible number depends on the subject, the level and how many weeks are left; a family gets a quote after the free trial lesson, when there is something real to quote against.

Two patterns in the table matter more than the headline numbers. First, the in-home band overlaps the specialist band almost exactly — so paying for a visit often buys travel rather than expertise. Second, small-group pricing looks like a discount per student until you divide the hour by the headcount, which the next section does. Three of the better-ranked pages in this search publish no price at all, and two quote in US dollars, a currency no UAE family is invoiced in.

Monthly packages are quoted in this market too: around AED 799 for eight online sessions, and AED 1,599 to AED 1,799 for four two-hour in-home visits. A package is only cheaper per hour if the sessions are actually used, so ask what happens to an unused session and whether it expires. Ask also whether a quoted figure includes VAT, because a rate that turns out to be exclusive moves a monthly budget by a real amount.

Parents comparing three quotes for identical work usually assume one provider is overcharging. More often the three quotes are pricing different risks. A tutor who teaches Higher Level Physics has fewer competitors than one who teaches Standard Level Biology, and a tutor who will mark a timed Paper 2 before Thursday is selling their evening as well as the lesson.

The drivers below are the ones that move a UAE quote materially. Level and subject scarcity between them explain most of the spread. Slot time explains a surprising amount of the rest: the 4pm to 6pm Gulf Standard Time window is the only one most families ask for, so it is the only one with no spare supply. Session length cuts the other way, because a 90-minute block costs a tutor less in switching time than two 45-minute ones.

Use the final column as a script. A provider who cannot say which level a tutor has taught, which board, how work gets marked, or what happens to a cancelled hour is quoting a number rather than a service. Ask for the private tuition work permit position too — it is free to hold, so there is no cost excuse for not having one.

Two practical levers are left once you know the drivers. Take a later slot, and the same tutor often has availability at a lower point in their own week. Buy 90 minutes rather than two separate hours, and the per-hour figure usually falls, because the tutor loses less time to setting up and winding down. Insist on being quoted in dirhams: a rate advertised in dollars shifts with the exchange rate on the day you pay it.

Small-group tuition looks like the obvious saving. Four students at AED 120 each pays a tutor AED 480 for the hour, which is why centres offer it, and each family pays less than half a one-to-one rate. The question nobody in this search answers is what each student receives for that money.

Divide the hour by the headcount and the picture changes. In a pair, an even split gives each student thirty minutes of directed attention. In a group of four, fifteen. In a tuition-centre class of eight, under eight minutes. In a school class of twenty-two, under three — and that teacher is also managing behaviour, collecting work and answering the loudest hand. The split is never even in practice, which helps the confident student and nobody else.

That arithmetic does not make groups worthless. A group is a perfectly good way to work through a past paper everybody has already attempted, or to cover a topic nobody in the room has met. What a group cannot do is diagnose. A student who has been getting 4s for two years has a specific, personal reason for it — a misread command term, a missing algebra step, an essay structure that collapses in the third paragraph — and finding it takes a tutor watching one student work. That is the hour you are buying at the one-to-one rate.

The pair deserves a word of its own, because it is the arrangement families ask for most. Two siblings in one hour works when both sit the same paper at the same level in the same session; it works badly when one is in Year 11 and the other in DP2, which is the commonest version. Thirty minutes each, aimed at two different problems, is usually worse value than one child getting a full hour and the other getting one the following week.

Most families searching for a one-to-one IB tutor picture someone in the room, and that market genuinely exists in the Emirates: Bestimate's 2026 Dubai table puts a visiting tutor at AED 180 to AED 350, and in-home listings reach AED 500. Those bookings usually carry a two-hour minimum, because no tutor drives to Mudon or Khalifa City for sixty minutes. Monthly in-home packages in this market sit around AED 1,599 to AED 1,799 for four two-hour visits.

IB Gram delivers one-to-one IB tuition as live online lessons, timed to Gulf Standard Time. Home visits are a service offered only in India. That is a limit worth stating plainly rather than burying, and the comparison below is why we think it is the better buy for a UAE family rather than merely the cheaper one.

The decisive column is the tutor pool. A visiting arrangement limits you to specialists within a drive of your community, which for Higher Level Chemistry in Al Ain or Computer Science in Ras Al Khaimah may mean nobody at all. Live video makes the subject, not the postcode, the thing that decides the match. It also removes the twenty minutes at the start of a visit when a tutor is still parking, and makes the screen a shared whiteboard that keeps a record of every worked solution.

What a family needs at their end is modest: a laptop or tablet, a headset, and a connection steady enough for video, which in most UAE homes means sitting near the router rather than buying anything. A second device as a document camera helps in maths and the sciences, because a phone propped over a page lets the tutor watch the working appear rather than see only the answer. None of that adds to the hourly rate.

An hour of one-to-one teaching has a shape, and a parent who knows the shape can tell within a fortnight whether the money is working. The commonest failure in this market is not an unqualified tutor; it is an hour spent on homework supervision. The student is busy, the room is quiet, nothing is diagnosed, and four months later the grade has not moved.

The breakdown below is the structure our tutors work to for a Diploma or Cambridge IGCSE student. The two blocks that matter most are the diagnostic at the start and the timed practice near the end. Diagnosis is what you cannot buy in a group; timed practice under exam conditions is what converts knowledge into marks, and it is the first thing to disappear when a tutor is being paid to be agreeable.

Each right-hand column is something you can check without sitting in on the lesson. Ask to see a marked answer with a criterion or mark-scheme reference against it. Ask what was set for next week and whether it was looked at. If a student cannot name one thing they were doing wrong and can now do differently, the hour was supervision, and supervision is available at a quarter of the price.

If the shape is missing, ask for it before changing tutor. Plenty of capable teachers drift into homework help because that is what the student brings to the screen and nobody has said otherwise. Say that you want timed questions and a marked answer every week, and give it a fortnight. A tutor who adjusts was under-briefed; a tutor who cannot has been selling you an hour of company at a specialist rate.

The internal assessments are the best-value hours a Diploma family can buy and the most dangerous ones to buy carelessly. Best value, because a 20-mark exploration or a 24-mark scientific investigation is roughly a fifth of the subject grade and is produced over months rather than in two hours in a hall. Dangerous, because the work must be the student's own and because this search contains sites selling finished internal assessments for AED 3,750.

The boundary is not vague. A tutor may teach the skill, explain the criteria, question the method, point at a strand that is not being met, and give feedback on a draft the student wrote. A tutor may not provide sentences, restructure the argument on the student's behalf, supply a research question, or edit the text to completion. The student's coordinator will be asked to confirm the work is authentic; buying words puts the whole Diploma at risk, and no grade is worth that trade.

Figures below are the published limits and mark allocations most UAE families ask about. Confirm the current numbers against your child's own subject guide or coordinator before planning around them, because the IB revises guides on a subject cycle and no syllabus document is reproduced on this site. Where hours are genuinely worth buying is early: at the planning stage, when a weak research question can still be replaced, rather than three days before submission when nothing lawful can save it.

Hours bought at the wrong time of year are the biggest avoidable waste in a UAE tutoring budget. Demand concentrates into the eight weeks before a session, which is when rates sit at the top of the market and the specialists are already booked. The same hours, bought three months earlier, cost less and do more, because there is still time to change something.

Cambridge and Pearson publish their dates, and those are the ones quoted below. Cambridge runs a June and a November series with Checkpoint tests in March, May and October, and every centre is allocated to one of six administrative zones. Using the wrong zone's timetable is a real risk: Cambridge states it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam after doing so. Ask your school's exams officer which zone your centre sits in before planning anything around a timetable you downloaded.

No IB session or results date is published on this page. The IB's own site could not be verified from this project, and a wrong date on a page like this would plan a family's year around fiction. Treat the May session as the one UAE schools sit, and confirm the exact window, the upload deadlines and the results date with your child's IB coordinator.

One scheduling point that costs families money every year: entries are made by the school, months before the papers. Cambridge's final entries for the March 2027 series fall on 27 November 2026, which is before most parents have thought about the exam at all. If a level or a tier needs changing, that decision belongs in the weeks before the entry deadline, and it is worth an hour of a specialist's time to get right.

Five bodies regulate private schools in the UAE, and which one holds your child's school file changes what you can read before you spend. Dubai sits with KHDA, which oversees the quality of private education in the emirate. Abu Dhabi and Al Ain sit with ADEK, which supervises private-school licensing and accreditation. Sharjah's authority and Ras Al Khaimah's Department of Knowledge both regulate private education and approve fees, curricula, programmes, courses, activities and assessment methods. Ajman, Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah sit with the federal Ministry of Education.

None of those bodies endorses a tutoring service, and IB Gram claims no approval, accreditation or partnership from any of them. What they give you is free diagnostic information: an inspection report names the subjects where attainment or progress is weak, which is a far better guide to where an hour should go than a general sense that maths is hard. A school rated well overall can still have one department that has lost two teachers in a year.

The permit question is separate and worth getting right. Private tutoring in the UAE runs on a MoHRE private tuition work permit introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023. It is granted free of charge for two years, and eligible applicants include teachers registered in government or private schools, government and private-sector employees, unemployed residents, university students and school students aged 15 to 18. Anyone tutoring without one is subject to fines and penalties under the applicable laws; no schedule of amounts is published, so no figure is quoted here. Because the permit costs nothing, a tutor without one has no price-based excuse.

Equivalency is the step that turns a school-leaving certificate into something a UAE institution or employer will accept, and it catches families late. It is a paperwork process run by the Ministry of Education and the emirate's attestation channel, not a teaching problem — and not something a tutoring company performs, guarantees or speeds up. What a tutor can do is tell you which grades the file will need while there is still time to earn them.

The British-track requirements are published. A student must show five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates at no less than grade E or grade 3, with Arabic and Islamic education excluded from that count of five, plus either one accredited Advanced Level subject at no less than E or two Advanced Subsidiary subjects at the same grade. One page ranking for these searches tells UAE parents they need six IGCSE subjects. The published figure is five.

For the IB Diploma there is no points threshold quoted here, because none has been read on the Ministry's own site. Anyone publishing an IB equivalency score without that source is guessing with your child's year. Check moe.gov.ae or your emirate's attestation channel directly, start the file in the final year rather than after results day, and do not treat tutoring as a requirement of the process — it is not, and nobody should sell it to you as one.

Families arriving from an American-curriculum school have a different checklist. The published requirement there is a score of 5 in the IELTS academic test, 61 in the TOEFL iBT, or 450 in the reading and writing section of the SAT, with at least 450 in SAT Math before applying. Those are test bookings with their own deadlines, so they belong on the same calendar as the exam entries rather than being discovered in the final term.

Families costing a Diploma usually budget for six subjects and forget three. Private schools in the UAE are not obliged to follow a particular curriculum beyond Arabic language, social studies and Islamic studies, and in Dubai those subjects are mandatory in every private school whatever the licensed international curriculum. They carry reports, they carry marks, and they take time out of the same evening as Higher Level Chemistry.

KHDA's mandatory-subject requirements are specific. Instructional time is calculated on a 40-minute lesson unit, schools may vary lesson length provided the weekly total is met, and it is advised that any mandatory-subject lesson runs at least 25 minutes. Schools must organise separate classes for Arabs and non-Arabs in Arabic as a first language, Islamic Education and Social Studies; combined classes for both groups are prohibited because the curriculum expectations and the language of instruction differ. Teachers of Arabic and Islamic Education need KHDA's own sign-off to teach them.

There is one hard constraint on tutoring here. For the mandatory UAE subjects, using different or additional content without prior permission from the Ministry of Education is prohibited. A tutor therefore works with the school's own material and the stream the child is placed in — not an imported workbook and not a parallel syllabus. That is an honest limit, and it is the opposite of what most of this market implies by listing Arabic as a subject chip and saying nothing else about it.

A page about value owes you the other half of the argument. One-to-one tuition is a strong purchase for a diagnosable problem in one or two subjects. It is a weak purchase for everything else, and families who buy it for everything else are the ones who conclude that tutoring does not work.

Four hours a week across four subjects, bought in February of the exam year, will not raise six grades. A student who has not read the set texts is short of weeks, not hours. A student who misses sleep because the timetable already runs to 10pm does not need another appointment in it. A student who has chosen three Higher Levels against their own strengths has a subject-choice problem that a tutor can advise on and cannot solve. And nobody can promise a grade: the paper is marked by the board, and a provider promising a specific score is selling something they do not control.

The honest version is cheaper than the alternative. Pick the one subject where the gap is clearest, buy six to eight hours, insist on marked work and timed practice, and review it against the next assessment the school sets. If the marks move, extend. If they do not, change the tutor or the diagnosis rather than adding a second subject. That is how a UAE family spends AED 2,000 a month well, and it is the same method whether the rate is AED 180 or AED 450.