After 10 years teaching ESL, I've watched salaries swing wildly. A 32,000 RMB Shanghai offer next to a 22,000 one shows why you should know your worth.
A Shanghai school offered me 32,000 RMB a month. Another teacher, a South African who was also claiming native-speaker status, took 22,000 for what is basically the same job. That gap is the clearest picture I have of what's wrong with ESL pay, and after ten years in this work I think teachers create a good part of it themselves.
This is part two of my expectations and reality series. Part one was about a guy heading out with no plan beyond handing his CV around schools and low-level training centres. This one is about money, and about what I've watched happen to it.
I'm going to say something people don't like to talk about. In China, what you're offered often comes down to what you look like and where you're from. If you're white, your salary is higher than it is for those who aren't. It's always been that way and I'm sure it always will be.
My own history shows how arbitrary it is. My first training centre job in the Fujian Province started me at 13,000 RMB, which was a decent salary at the time. Within a month I was on 18,000 because I promised to stay a year. I was the only teacher in the school from a native-speaking country. The rest were from Russia, Azerbaijan, the Philippines and Serbia. Nothing against those people, but I was the marketing tool, and the school paid accordingly.
If you're teaching English, you're doing the same job as anybody else. You should demand the same salary.
When someone accepts 22,000 for a job that's worth 32,000 because they want out of their country, they set a figure that becomes acceptable. I understand wanting out, lots of people want out of mine right now. But that number is part of why China has so many teaching vacancies. Teachers arrive on a local offer, find that the cost of living is cheap but not as cheap as they were told, and leave.
Know your worth.
I made a TikTok about two people here in Cambodia claiming that $1,100 a month is a good salary and easy to live on. Half of that is right: it can be easy to live on. But it isn't a good salary. I pulled together a list of jobs for native English-speaking teachers, and they ran from $1,400 to $2,200 depending on your degree and experience.
My own situation here is a useful contrast with China. I work part-time at an international school, 7:30 to 12:30, five days a week, because I wanted to be back in a classroom. Living is cheap, but if the school job were my only income, it would be hard to survive once you work out the hourly rate. I did get a pay rise this year for staying on another year, and the parents told me they wanted me to stay, which meant a lot.
There were also things nobody told me up front. Two or three parent evenings a year, and sometimes a weekend day, are part of the deal. I learned that over time. They're good evenings, though: you go through tests and quizzes, what the student could do better, what the parent thinks you could do better.
Before I left China, my income looked like this. I taught part-time in a kindergarten, three mornings a week for two and a half to three hours, and earned around 3,500 RMB, about $500 to $550. I did some private institution work and cover teaching. But my main income came from an online app, Palfish. You don't need a degree for it (I have one), but you do need a TEFL and a passport from a native-speaking country.
That passport rule moved with the market. When I started four years ago, South Africans weren't classed as native speakers by some online companies and by China. That changed after the platform seemed to fall out of love with its Filipino teachers, who had been offered the chance to teach in China at half what native speakers were getting. South Africans seem to be in a similar position now. If you're South African and I'm wrong, leave a comment and prove me wrong.
Then came the double reduction policy, around 2020 or 2021. The rules said no teaching kids after 9 o'clock, and training schools would be shut, with foreign influence or heavy foreign financial backing. In my city I lost roughly 2,700 expats in a week. The man I'd gone to work for had 2,500 to 2,600 schools scattered across Fujian and wanted to be the biggest English training provider in the province. It was gone overnight.
Everyone then went after public school and kindergarten jobs, and there weren't enough of them. Fujian had three or four international schools at the time. I moved to teaching online and earned 22,000 to 25,000 RMB a month without leaving my house, working 4 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Tomorrow, training schools close.
That didn't last either. Public schools began offering free extra lessons after class, so parents no longer needed me as an online teacher. My bookings dropped. What I did see was younger students coming onto the platform, with parents booking for them.
I'm different from most teachers on the platform. I put a TV screen behind me and play games on a game board, and I'll shout out Bamboozle, one of the best apps I've found in my whole teaching career. It gamifies learning, and it was my selling point. They aren't sponsoring me, I get nothing for saying it.
Still, I went from just over 100 lessons a week as a full-time job to 37 to 40. When I ask parents why, they say they're trying new apps, and they don't feel the need now, because the app's language isn't connected to their school book.
Working habits changed too. Chinese families used to work six or seven days a week, 11 or 12 hours a day. Many younger, more modern families now choose fewer hours and more time with their kids at weekends. The grandparents are still involved, but the pattern is shifting, and that shifts demand for evening online lessons with it.
Salaries start low, go high and fall again, and the rules can change in a week. Moving countries after ten years has been a real learning curve for me, and teaching in a brick-and-mortar school here has shown me how different the reality is from what I expected. If you're heading out, do the hourly-rate maths, research what the job actually pays in that city, and don't accept a local offer just because it gets you out of your country. The next video in the series looks at the app and how I've seen it change.
