IGCSE Home Tutor in Town Square

The headline hourly rate is not the cost of tutoring, and the gap between the two is where families feel misled even when nobody lied to them. Here is what commonly gets added, and what to ask about before you agree anything.

Session length versus hour. A rate quoted per session rather than per hour is not comparable to one quoted per hour, and a fifty-minute session priced as an hour is a ten per cent increase nobody mentioned. Ask whether the figure is per hour or per lesson, and how long a lesson is. Then there is the minimum commitment: some providers quote a rate that assumes a block of ten or twenty sessions paid up front, and the single-session price is higher. Ask what happens if you stop after one.

Cancellation and rescheduling terms matter more in a community with a long school run, because traffic and illness genuinely cause late changes. A twenty-four hour cancellation policy with a full charge inside it is normal and worth knowing about; so is whether a missed session can be made up at all. Travel surcharges apply to in-home arrangements and are frequently quoted as a separate line into outer communities, which is honest but needs asking for.

Then the ones that are easy to forget. Assessment or diagnostic fees charged separately. Report or progress-review charges. Materials fees, which should make you ask what is being supplied, because awarding-body past papers and mark schemes are copyright and should not be sold to you by anybody. And VAT treatment — we will not state the UAE VAT position on tuition as fact without a Federal Tax Authority citation, so ask any provider plainly whether their quoted figure includes it.

Sorting by price rather than prestige shows what each step upwards actually adds, which is the only useful way to compare. The bottom band buys attention and company. The middle buys specification knowledge. The top buys scarcity, and sometimes a credential you cannot verify.

Working up through the published figures: budget online tutoring AED 33-65 an hour, with Tutopiya at AED 33-52 and EdFlik at AED 45-65. Tuition-centre group classes typically AED 60-150 per student per hour. Qualified online subject tutors AED 150-300, with Unitors publishing IGCSE from AED 150. IGCSE, IB and A Level specialists AED 200-450 and above, with TutorChase at AED 270 and Bestimate putting the band at AED 200-450 plus. In-home one-to-one AED 180-500 including travel. Premium named tutors AED 500-650 and above, with BartyED publishing AED 650.

Two cautions at the top end. A premium rate is evidence of scarcity rather than of outcome, and any claimed examiner status should be treated as a claim until it is evidenced. Examiner status also gives nobody access to marking, boundaries or paper content, whatever is implied. We do not describe our own tutors as examiners, because current examiner status is not something we can demonstrate to you.

Every figure belongs to the provider named beside it and was read from their own published page in October 2026. None is an IB Gram price. We quote after a diagnostic and a free trial, because board, tier, year group and weeks remaining all change the answer, and a number quoted before those are known is not a quote.

Tutoring is the discretionary line in an education budget that already has several non-discretionary ones, and seeing it in that context changes how it gets spent. KHDA confirmed on 22 May 2026 that private school fees in Dubai would not increase for the 2026-27 academic year, under the emirate's second economic incentives package valued at AED 1.5 billion within a AED 2.5 billion total. So the fixed line is flat this year, which is a reason to spend the discretionary line deliberately rather than reactively.

The Dubai market is also expanding rather than contracting. KHDA reported 387,441 pupils across 227 private schools in 2024-25 offering seventeen curricula, with UK curriculum at 37% of enrolment, and the emirate is adding seven new private schools for 2026-27 — four UK curriculum and three International Baccalaureate — creating 16,846 new places, after six schools opened during 2025-26 and enrolment rose 6%. A growing UK-curriculum cohort is why this market has so many general tutors advertising into it.

The practical question for a household is not what an hour costs but what a decision costs across two years. A fixed-scope block in Year 9 at published mid-band rates runs to perhaps AED 1,500-3,000 for six to ten sessions. A weekly session across Year 10 runs to roughly AED 6,000-12,000 at the mid band. A Year 11 specialist intensive across two subjects for five months can reach a similar total on its own, from a worse starting position.

The table below sets those out as indicative totals built from the published market bands rather than from our prices. They are not quotes. The purpose is the last column, which is the thing an hourly rate cannot tell you.

These are the patterns we see most often when a family arrives after a year of paying somebody else, and each has a question that would have prevented it.

First, a budget generalist handed an exam-year student. At AED 33-65 an hour a capable graduate genuinely helps a Year 8 with homework. Put the same person in front of a Year 11 entered for Extended tier and they will teach plausible material that is not the specification, agreeably, for a term, with no change in paper performance. The low hourly rate is precisely what stops anyone examining the total. The preventing question: which specification do you teach, and at which tier?

Second, the wrong board. Cambridge 0580 and Pearson 4MA1, or 0625 and 4PH1, set different papers with different tiering and practical routes. A term of the wrong board's past papers trains the wrong instincts about what a question wants, and it is invisible until the real paper arrives. One email to the school office prevents it.

Third, paying the travel premium for proximity when proximity was not the problem. In-home visits are published at AED 180-500 an hour including travel, and from Al Qudra Road a real share is driving. For a younger child who needs presence, that is money well spent. For a Year 11 working past papers it buys a journey. Fourth, buying five subjects in February when two could move and three could not — spending the specialist exam-year rate across a load that dilutes every session and exhausts the student.

No amount of tutoring lifts a student above the ceiling of the tier they are entered for, which makes tier the first thing to establish and the thing parents are least often told clearly. Cambridge offers many subjects in Core and Extended versions; Pearson runs Foundation and Higher tiers. Core and Foundation cover a reduced syllabus and cap below the top grades.

Spending in the wrong direction is easy here, and invisible on an invoice. A family paying specialist rates for a child on Core, aiming at a grade the Core paper cannot award, is buying something that cannot be delivered. A family paying budget rates for a child on Extended who needs the full syllabus covered is buying something too thin to work.

The decision is usually taken by the department during Year 10 on class performance and is often reversible for a while. That window is where tutoring has its maximum financial leverage, because moving tier opens grades no amount of later practice can reach. Once the centre confirms entries, months before the papers, the question is closed and the money can only buy technique.

So the sequence that spends well is: establish the tier per subject, check it against the post-16 route your child actually wants, change it in Year 10 if there is a mismatch, and only then buy teaching. Reversing that order is how a family spends a year of fees inside a ceiling nobody mentioned.

The trial lesson is one full lesson with the specialist who would actually continue, with no card required and no obligation. It is not taught by a salesperson and it is not a shortened sample.

It is free because explanation style decides whether the money works, and nothing written down predicts it. A tutor with exactly the right specification knowledge and the wrong pace for your child produces a term of pleasant sessions and no movement — and you cannot tell which you have hired from a profile, a qualification list or a phone call. One hour tells you. Charging for that hour would mean families commit on worse information, which is bad for them and, over time, bad for us.

The diagnostic sits before it. The student works through real questions from the correct board at the correct tier while a specialist watches. That is where the genuine gap appears, and it is usually narrower than the school report implies: method not written down, a command term misread, one topic missed during a move between schools.

Being precise about the word free matters, because it is misused in this market. Ours means one full lesson, with the proposed tutor, no card, no obligation to continue, and no condition attached. Where any provider attaches a condition to something described as free — a minimum block, a card on file, an eligibility rule — that condition should appear on the same screen as the word, and frequently it does not.

This belongs in a cost discussion because it is a risk you are carrying without being told. Private tuition in the UAE requires a permit, introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023 Regarding the Introduction of Private Tuition Work Permits and issued by the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation. MoHRE's own service is Issuance of a New Work Permit — Private Tutor Licensing, applied for through its smart app, website or e-services, with a stated two-working-day completion time.

The permit is granted free of charge for two years. That matters commercially: because it costs the tutor nothing and takes two working days, there is no price reason for anybody to lack one, and a tutor who cannot produce it has made a choice rather than faced an obstacle. Eligibility is wide — teachers registered in government or private schools, employees in the government and private sectors, unemployed individuals, school students aged 15 to 18, and university students.

MoHRE states that individuals offering private tutoring without a permit are subject to fines and penalties outlined in the applicable laws. No fine schedule is published, and Khaleej Times reported that the ministry did not specify the amounts or detail the penalties, so any specific figure circulating informally should be disregarded. We are not going to repeat an unverified number on a page a parent might act on.

The permit's code of conduct also bars serving students affiliated with the tutor's own school, as do Abu Dhabi's ADEK professional-ethics rules for school staff there according to press reporting. Separately, an organisation operating tutoring from premises in Dubai needs a KHDA Educational Services Permit for a training institute, with annual renewal requested at least thirty days before expiry. IB Gram holds no KHDA, ADEK, SPEA, MoE, MoHRE, Cambridge or Pearson approval, accreditation or partnership, claims none, and has no UAE office or centre.

No guarantee of a grade, a tier change or an improvement. In a market where several ranking pages do offer guarantees, declining is information rather than modesty, and any guarantee worth the word would need published refund terms honoured on the same page.

No statistics without a sample size, a date and a method, which in practice means none at all. No average grades achieved by students we have taught, no percentage improved, no satisfaction score, no self-generated star rating. Competitors publish figures like 4.9 from several hundred reviews, occasionally in two conflicting versions on the same page, and none states how the number was produced. Self-asserted review markup is also against Google's structured-data policy.

No awarding-body material as downloads. Past papers, mark schemes, syllabus documents and grade-boundary tables belong to Cambridge and Pearson; we cite and link them rather than hosting them, and you should ask why any provider charging a materials fee is supplying them. No description of tutors as examiners either, because current examiner status is not something we can evidence.

And no home visits anywhere in the UAE at any price, because there is no UAE visiting service to buy. What we will sell you is the smallest thing that solves the problem — if the diagnostic shows eight sessions on one topic, that is what we propose, even though a weekly arrangement running to the series would be worth considerably more to us. The scope goes in writing before the first session, and the review at the end is an honest review rather than a renewal conversation wearing a review as a costume.