IGCSE Tutor in Dubai

An IGCSE tutor in Dubai costs between roughly AED 33 and roughly AED 650 an hour according to published figures read in October 2026, and the useful bands inside that spread are narrower than the extremes suggest. A qualified subject teacher working online publishes rates in the region of AED 150 to AED 300. A tutor travelling to a Dubai address is quoted between about AED 180 and AED 500 once the journey is inside the number. The low thirties to sixties band is almost entirely university students, and the top of the range is aimed at examination candidates at post-16 level rather than at Year 11.

Three of the six most visible competitor pages in this market publish no price at all, and two of the ones that do quote in US dollars, a currency no UAE family transacts in. One publishes an hourly figure in its page copy that contradicts the price range in its own structured data. That is why this table exists. Each row names the provider that published the figure and the month it was read, and nothing in it is an IB Gram price.

Where IGCSE sits inside that spread is specific. It is generally quoted below Diploma and A Level work by the same providers: one agency publishes IGCSE from AED 150 and IB from AED 200, which is a reasonable indication of the gap. The exceptions are the scarce syllabuses, principally Additional Mathematics and Further Pure Maths, and the Arabic first-language stream, where the thin specialist pool pushes quotes up regardless of level.

We do not publish an IB Gram price list on this page. That is a deliberate position rather than an evasion: a figure printed before anyone knows the subject, the syllabus code, the tier, the session length and the number of weeks would be a guess with a currency symbol in front of it. The free trial lesson and the written plan that follows it are where a real number comes from, and that plan arrives before any payment is taken.

A Dubai student in Year 11 is typically entered for eight to ten IGCSE subjects. At published market rates, funding weekly tuition in all of them would cost more per year than the school fees do. Nobody attempts it, but almost nobody does the arithmetic either, which is how families end up funding the subject that worries them rather than the subject where the money works.

Do it explicitly. Write the subjects down with the current working grade beside each, the awarding organisation and the tier where one applies. Then mark each one with how many marks are realistically recoverable and how quickly. A student two marks below a grade boundary in Chemistry and fifteen below in History has a cheap gain and an expensive one, and the cheap one is not the subject they complain about. Boundaries move between series and are published after the event, so treat this as a ranking exercise rather than a calculation.

Three patterns recur in this market. The first is a student whose maths is sound and whose written subjects are collapsing, usually because nobody has read their writing in months; that is one weekly reader in one subject, not three. The second is a student entered for Core who could hold Extended, where the highest-value spend is a short block before the entry deadline rather than a year of general support. The third is a student whose problem is examination technique across every subject at once, which is a single skill bought once and applied nine times.

The table below works three realistic Dubai budgets against the published bands and shows what each buys. The point of it is not the totals, which are illustrative rather than quoted. It is that the shape of the spend matters more than the size: at every budget level, two subjects done properly beats four done thinly, and one subject plus examination technique beats two subjects without it.

At Diploma level, subject scarcity moves a quote considerably. At IGCSE it moves it less, because the common subjects are taught in every school in the emirate and the supply of people who can teach them is correspondingly deep. There are real exceptions, though, and they are worth knowing before you accept that a high quote reflects quality rather than availability.

Additional Mathematics, Cambridge 0606, and Pearson Further Pure Mathematics 4PM1 are the clearest. They are taken by a small, able fraction of each cohort, usually heading for A Level Mathematics or Further Mathematics, and the pool of tutors who can teach them confidently is genuinely thin in this market. Arabic as a first language, Cambridge 0508, is the second: it needs a specialist in a stream that Dubai schools are required to timetable separately from Arabic as a foreign language, and the available teaching population is smaller than demand.

Two more sit a step below. Computer Science 0478 is scarcer than ICT 0417 because the algorithmic content and pseudocode require a different background, and families routinely book one when they need the other. Accounting 0452 is thinly supplied relative to Business Studies 0450 for similar reasons. Everything else at IGCSE level, including the separate sciences and both main maths routes, is well enough covered in Dubai that a high quote should be justified by something other than rarity.

The useful move is to ask directly. How many tutors do you have for this exact syllabus code, and when could the second one start if the first does not suit? A provider with depth answers immediately. A provider with one person answers vaguely, and the premium you are being quoted is the premium of a single point of failure rather than the premium of expertise.

Several Cambridge IGCSE subjects are tiered. A candidate is entered for either Core or Extended, the two tiers sit on different papers, and the range of grades available differs: Core is generally reported in the lower part of the scale while Extended reaches the top of it. Confirm the exact papers and available grades for your child's syllabus in the current Cambridge syllabus document, because they vary by subject and are revised between editions.

This is the most consequential decision in a Dubai Year 10, and most parents do not know it has been taken. It is usually made by the school, on the basis of internal assessment, somewhere between the middle of Year 10 and the entry deadline in Year 11. A student entered for Core is working towards a ceiling. If that ceiling is below what a post-16 route requires, the problem is not a tutoring problem at all; it is an entry problem, and it has a deadline.

The cost consequence runs the opposite way from what families expect. Teaching a student to the top of the Core tier is usually a short job, because the content is bounded and the papers are predictable. Moving a borderline student from Core to Extended is a longer job, because the additional content is real and the papers ask different kinds of question. And supporting an Extended candidate who is struggling is longer still, since the difficulty is rarely one topic. The rate does not change across those three; the number of hours changes by a factor of three or four.

Pearson works differently and this is worth knowing before comparing quotes. Its Mathematics A syllabus is tiered into Foundation and Higher, but most other Pearson International GCSE subjects are untiered, so one paper set serves the whole ability range and there is no tier decision to make or to reverse in those subjects. That removes an entire category of risk in most of the timetable, and it is one of the few structural differences between the two boards that changes what a family should buy.

The two awarding organisations that dominate international GCSE in Dubai charge similar market rates for tutoring, because the labour is the same. What differs is everything a plan depends on: the syllabus codes, the paper structures, the tiering, the grading scale and the calendar. A tutor who starts work without establishing the board is teaching from the wrong specimen papers, and that is not a small inefficiency at AED 200 an hour.

Grading is the most visible difference and the one that confuses Dubai families most. Cambridge reports IGCSE results internationally on the A* to G scale. Pearson reports International GCSE results on the 9 to 1 scale. A student taking subjects from both boards can finish Year 11 holding one certificate in letters and another in numbers, and there is no official conversion a parent should rely on for comparison. Ask the school which scale applies to which subject.

The calendars differ too, and the published dates matter because entry deadlines sit months before examinations. Cambridge runs June and November series. It also allocates every exam centre to one of six administrative zones and states that it is essential to use the correct version of the timetable for your zone, and that it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam after using the wrong one. Pearson runs May or June and November series, and publishes provisional timetables ahead of each one, so every plan should be built against the live official timetable rather than a date someone has restated.

Pearson's published dates for the November 2026 International GCSE series make the deadline gap vivid. The final timetable runs from late October to 19 November 2026, and the results do not reach students until the new year: the November 2025 series reported to students on 22 January 2026. Entries for a November series close in the preceding summer, months before the first paper, and the exact date is the one printed on your centre's statement of entry rather than anything worth restating here. Cambridge's June and November series run on the same logic, with entries closing well ahead of the papers. Whichever board your child sits, the shape is the point: the tier decision and the subject list are settled long before anybody feels urgent about them, which is why a tutoring plan that starts in the term before the series is already working inside a fixed entry list.

Ten hours at the mid online band is a real purchase for most Dubai families and a small one against a nine-subject timetable. Spent in the right order it moves a grade. Spent in the usual order, which is weekly general support in whichever subject feels worst, it mostly produces reassurance. The ordering below is the part of this page worth more than the rate table.

Hour one is diagnosis and nothing else. A full past paper, done under time, marked properly against the published mark scheme by somebody who knows the syllabus. Not a conversation about how things are going. The output is a list of components and error types, which is what the remaining nine hours get spent on. Families resist this hour because it feels like paying for an assessment, and it is the single highest-value hour in the block.

Hours two to four go to examination technique on whichever component the diagnosis identified, because technique transfers. A student who learns to read the command word, allocate time by marks and show method in a way a marker can follow applies that in nine subjects, not one. Hours five to eight go to the two highest-yield content gaps, defined as the ones with the most marks closest to reach. Hour nine is a second timed paper. Hour ten reviews it and decides whether to buy another block.

What not to buy first, in order of how commonly it is bought first: general weekly homework supervision, which is the easiest thing to purchase in this market and the least likely to change a grade; a full syllabus sweep, which spends the budget on content the student already holds; and the premium tier, since the published AED 500 to AED 650 band in Dubai exists for post-16 candidates and no provider offers a reason to apply it to Year 11. Free moves matter too: past papers from the official site, marked against the published scheme, plus one specific conversation with the subject teacher, reduce the hours you need to buy.

Private tutoring in the UAE is regulated by permit, and a family comparing quotes should know that the cheapest rates in this market frequently come from people who have not obtained one. The private tutor work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023. It is granted free of charge for two years. Eligible applicants include teachers registered in government or private schools, employees in the government and private sectors, unemployed individuals, university students, and school students aged fifteen to eighteen.

MoHRE's own service for it is called Issuance of a New Work Permit - Private Tutor Licensing, listing no fees and a two-working-day completion time, applied for through the MoHRE smart app, website and e-services system. Because it is free and fast, there is no cost argument for not holding one. Individuals offering private tutoring without a permit from MoHRE are subject to fines and penalties outlined in the applicable laws; no fine schedule is published, so no amount should be quoted to you by anyone.

Two further points belong in a Dubai price conversation. A tutoring operation with premises and staff is a different legal object from an individual tutor: it requires a KHDA Educational Services Permit for a training institute, with initial approval first, a maximum of six months to complete the permit and licence steps, and annual renewal requested at least thirty days before expiry. Those are two different documents, and a provider conflating them is telling you something. In Abu Dhabi, separately, ADEK's professional-ethics rules for private and charter school staff prohibit teachers from giving paid private tuition to students enrolled at their own school, and the MoHRE permit's code of conduct also bars serving students affiliated with the tutor's own school.

What this means practically is one question, asked once, before money moves: do you hold a MoHRE private tuition work permit, and may I see it? The permit is free, so a refusal is not about cost. And the related temptation should be named: your child's own subject teacher, privately, is the arrangement the rules are designed to prevent, and it puts a teacher's position at risk as well as a student's.

This page is about cost, so the format question is a cost question. An in-home hour in Dubai is quoted between roughly AED 180 and AED 500 by the published sources read in October 2026, against roughly AED 150 to AED 300 for a qualified subject teacher working online. The difference is not teaching. It is a journey, and in this city at 17:00 the journey is not short.

The journey also distorts the product. A tutor who has driven forty minutes needs the session to be worth the drive, which is why in-home lessons in Dubai are typically sold at ninety minutes rather than sixty. For a Year 11 working on examination technique that extra half hour has some value. For a Year 10 doing weekly content work it mostly has the value of being easy to sell. The format quietly sets the session length, and the session length is a cost.

IB Gram does not make home visits in Dubai. We do not run in-person lessons anywhere in the UAE; home visits are a service we provide only in India. Every lesson described here is one-to-one over live video, scheduled in Gulf Standard Time. We state that before an enquiry rather than after one, because two providers in this market route UAE families to numbers outside the UAE without disclosing it, and one shows a Dubai footer address on an Abu Dhabi page. Disclosure costs nothing and is the cheapest trust signal available.

The honest accounting includes what the format gives up. Nobody is in the room to notice a phone, close a door or tidy a desk. Handwritten working needs a document camera or a phone propped over the page, which takes a setup conversation once. Practical science has a real limit: the Cambridge alternative-to-practical paper can be taught thoroughly over video because it is a written paper about practical work, but a practical test sat in a school laboratory needs the laboratory. We say that rather than talking around it.

A page about cost should be clear about the limits of spending, because the providers who are vague about them are the ones who sell the most hours. No rate in this market buys a grade. Grade boundaries are set by the awarding organisation after each series and published afterwards, they move between series, and nobody teaching your child knows where they will fall. Any provider promising a particular grade, a promised number of marks, or money back tied to a result is offering something they cannot control.

Nor does money buy syllabus documents, past papers, mark schemes or grade-boundary tables as a package. Those belong to Cambridge and Pearson, they are available through official channels, and a provider supplying them as downloads is reproducing material it does not own. We reference them and link to the official source, which is both the lawful position and the more useful one, since the official version is current and a copied one is not.

Money does not buy assessed work either. Where an IGCSE subject carries a non-examined component, the submission must be the student's own, and a tutor teaches, questions and gives feedback on what the student has produced. A tutor who offers to supply content for an assessed piece is offering the student a malpractice finding, and that risk sits with the student rather than with the provider that sold it. The same applies to the Arabic, Islamic Education and Social Studies streams Dubai schools are required to run, where KHDA prohibits the use of different or additional content without prior Ministry of Education permission.

Finally, money cannot buy back a missed entry deadline. Entries on both boards close months before the papers, tier decisions are made before that, and a family that discovers in March that a child was entered for the wrong tier has a problem no amount of tutoring resolves. The cheapest intervention available in this entire market is a fifteen-minute conversation with the school in Year 10 to establish, in writing, which board, which syllabus codes and which tier each subject has been entered for.