As a driving instructor, how many hours do I need to work?
Being a full time Approved Driving Instructor is a hard job. People outside of the industry deem it as easy but forget the complexities of the profession. From the early starts, to the late night organising diaries, to no-show pupils and the marketing of your business. So all in all, how many hours should you work a week, including all the admin and business side?
Understand where you spend your time.
Before we figure out how many hours a driving instructor should work, we need to address the types of work ADIs do on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Some of this work breaks down into:
- Teaching
- Marketing
- Finance
- Business Management
- Customer Service
By understanding the roles, and how much time is spent on each, you can then work out how many hours you currently spend on the job and how many hours you will want to reduce or increase that by.
At the end of the day, it's your business and your choice of how many hours you work.
So now, that we know what the types of work you as a driving instructor do, it's time now to think about how many hours are spent in each area and if you'd like to work more or less in those areas.
Calculate your working hours ⏰
Use this tool to help understand, how many hours per week you spend on teach task.
We estimate your total number of working hours are currently:
29 Hours
There is an error with your Hours Spent Teaching value, please ensure it is between 0 and 80
There is an error with your Hours Spent Marketing value, please ensure it is between 0 and 80
There is an error with your Hours Spent Finance value, please ensure it is between 0 and 80
There is an error with your Hours Spent Business Management value, please ensure it is between 0 and 80
There is an error with your Hours Spent Customer Service value, please ensure it is between 0 and 80
There is an error with your Hours Spent Doing Other Tasks value, please ensure it is between 0 and 80
By giving your email, we may get in touch to find out some additional details about your business and to chat through some ideas to see if we can help.
Number of teaching hours
Typically driving instructors are mostly paid for the hours that they spend in the car teaching. That means it's important that time is well utilised, and you can get the most of the core teaching hours.
In the UK, core teaching hours in the summer are between 8am and 9pm as there is plenty of light, especially if you're up north. day light in Aberdeen at 11pm at night is not uncommon. In the winter though, your time table is more restricted to hours around 8am and 6pm.
Using this, it's really important to maximise your teaching hours and understand how much revenue can be generated. After all, it's your income that will dictate how many hours spent teaching you will want to work. Two months ago, we found out that instructors mostly work between 4 and 6 hours per day, 90% of instructors said they worked 5 hours per day. Using this tool means you can work out, how much you can earn by entering different values for your rates and working days per week.
Driving Instructor Salary Tool 💻
We estimate your annual salary as a driving instructor works out at as:
£36,685
There is an error with your Lessons per Day value, please ensure it is between 0 and 11
There is an error with your Days per Week value, please ensure it is between 1 and 7
There is an error with your Weeks per Year value, please ensure it is between 25 and 52
There is an error with your hourly rate, please ensure it is between 15 and 60
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Reducing Admin
The key to managing your hours is ensuring that your nightly / weekly admin is reduced as much as it can be. As an ADI, the more time spent learning is more time earning. And typically ADIs tell us their favourite part of the job isn't the admin, website management it's the time spent with the learner drivers.
By cutting down on Admin, you can seriously improve your happiness levels.
There are several ways to reduce this admin by being more organised. Granted, this is still admin task, but by staying organised you can reduce the ammount of time spent on them:
- Managing pupils in an organised way, via calendars or Microsoft excel.
- Capture your incomes in a spreadsheet.
- Making sure you have captured your expenses with photos and keeping receipts.
- Texting pupils before lessons, ideally 24 hours before.
- Use shared accounting software with an accountant.
Right now we building a new app - but it's a little secret - so if you want a sneak peak you can sign up here.
Personal Goals
And at the end of the day, the number of hours you work should depend on you and what your goals are for life. Why are you are teaching? Why do you earn money? What do you want to do with that money?
We strongly recommend working backwards from there. Think about your goals, think what a great life looks like to you and find out how to make that possible.
For some extra reading, you can check out Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It's great for becoming more organised.
John Lewis, ADI from Barmouth Driving School, says "So long as we can pay our bills and enjoy life, it's up to the individual. That's the beauty of this job, we choose our own hours."
And we agree.