How to invoice as a tutor in Australia (and actually get paid)

Most tutoring money in Australia moves by bank transfer. A parent receives your invoice, opens their banking app at some point over the next week or two, types in your BSB, and the money lands with a reference like “tutoring” or their child’s first name. No card terminal, no merchant fees, and no cheques — nobody under fifty quite knows what to do with a cheque, including the parents who still offer them. Most invoicing advice online assumes card payments come first, which is the wrong frame for this market.

This post covers the parts nobody teaches you when you start charging for lessons: what an invoice legally needs in Australia, why parents pay late even when they like you, and how to chase money without making Thursday’s lesson awkward. At the end I’ll explain how lessonu closes the loop, with the caveat that should colour everything after it: lessonu is our product.

What a compliant invoice actually needs

Under the GST threshold (most of us)

GST registration becomes mandatory once your GST turnover reaches $75,000 a year, and turnover means revenue, not profit. Per business.gov.au, you have 21 days to register from the point you become aware you’ll cross the line. Below it, registering is optional, and most solo tutors sensibly don’t: registration means charging 10% more or absorbing it, plus lodging activity statements.

If you’re not registered, your invoice is a regular invoice and the requirements are short: your business or trading name, your ABN, the date you issued it, and a description of what you’re charging for with quantity and price. Four lines. The one trap is that you must not write “tax invoice” on it. That phrase is reserved for GST-registered sellers.

The ABN itself is free through the Australian Business Register, and a tutoring practice you run for profit counts as an enterprise, so you qualify. If a website wants to charge you $49 to “fast-track” the application, close the tab.

Over the threshold: the tax-invoice rules

For scale: LearnMate’s 2025 platform average for Years 11–12 tutoring is $66 an hour. At that rate, $75,000 is about 1,100 lessons a year, roughly 22 a week with no school holidays, so most solo tutors never get near the threshold. Add group classes or a second teacher and it arrives faster than you’d expect.

Once registered, you charge 10% GST on lessons and your invoice formally becomes a tax invoice. You must provide one for any taxable sale over $82.50 including GST, or within 28 days whenever a customer asks. It needs everything the regular invoice has, plus the words “tax invoice”, the GST amount itself, and, for sales over $1,000, the buyer’s identity or ABN. A term invoice covering two siblings clears $1,000 without trying.

No, tutoring is not GST-free

This is the fact that surprises people. School and university education is GST-free, so tutors assume their lessons are too. They aren’t. The exemption covers an “education course” delivered by the recognised provider: the school, the uni, the RTO. A private tutor isn’t the supplier of the course. The ATO’s ruling GSTR 2000/30 spells it out using a music teacher as the worked example: a GST-registered teacher giving private lessons to school students is making a taxable supply, and it “is irrelevant” whether the lessons happen in a school building or the teacher’s own studio. Treasury’s report on the GST’s design is blunter still: private tuition sits outside the recognised sector, and the government’s stated intention was to tax it.

One narrow exception exists: a program designed specifically for children with disabilities can be a GST-free special education course under public ruling GSTR 2002/1. The design of the program is what counts — tutoring a student who happens to have a disability doesn’t qualify — so get professional advice before relying on it. And working through a school doesn’t change what you charge: a registered tutor invoices the school with GST (the GST-free supply is the school’s, onward to its students), and an unregistered tutor charges none regardless. For everyone else the upshot is simple. Under $75,000 and unregistered, you don’t charge GST, not because tutoring is exempt but because you’re unregistered. Registered, you charge 10% on every lesson.

Build the invoice around the bank transfer

Since transfer is how the money actually arrives, design for it. Put your BSB and account number on the invoice itself, not in a follow-up text. Give every invoice a reference (the invoice number or the student’s surname) and ask parents to use it, because matching “$280 from R J FAMILY TRUST” to the right family three weeks later is how paid invoices stay marked unpaid.

Invoice per family per month, not per lesson. Four $70 lessons on one $280 invoice is a single banking-app moment instead of four ignorable emails. Write the due date as an actual date, “due 24 June” rather than “net 7”, because nobody outside accounts payable knows what net 7 means. And offer a card link as the convenience option, not the default. Some parents will happily pay 30 seconds after opening the email; the rest will transfer, and both paths should be effortless.

Why parents pay late, and how to remind them

Here is the thing that took me longest to internalise: late payment is almost never about the money. A family paying $66 an hour for tutoring is rarely struggling to find $280. The invoice arrived during school pickup, got mentally filed under later, and was buried beneath forty newer emails by the weekend. You’re not dealing with a debtor. You’re dealing with a busy person who needs the invoice resurfaced at a moment they can act on it.

That reframe changes the whole tone of chasing. You don’t need firmness, you need cadence:

• Day 0. Send the invoice: due date, bank details, reference, card link.
• Due date. A short reminder restating the amount and the bank details, so they don’t have to dig up the original email. Most late payments end here.
• Three days overdue. One line, no apology and no guilt: “Resurfacing this in case it slipped through.”
• A week overdue. Drop the template. A personal message, and the first mention of a consequence, stated kindly: you’ll need the account settled before the next lesson goes ahead.

Two tone rules carry the whole ladder. Never apologise for invoicing; “sorry to chase” teaches people that the chasing is optional. And never mix money with teaching. The message about Maya’s great week on quadratics and the message about the overdue invoice must be separate messages, so that neither contaminates the other.

When to set payment terms upfront

Terms aren’t hostility, they’re legibility. The reminder ladder above only feels fair if the family knew the rules from day one, and two sentences when a family enrols is enough: lessons are invoiced monthly, payment within seven days, lessons pause while two invoices are open.

Stricter terms earn their keep in three cases. New families with no history: take the first lesson or block in advance, then relax to invoicing in arrears once trust exists. Chronic late payers: move them to prepaid blocks of five or ten lessons, framed as a convenience rather than a punishment. And anyone booking a full term: invoice at the start of term, because chasing week-nine money during the holidays is miserable for everyone.

The loop lessonu automates

Everything above is a loop. Lesson happens, invoice goes out, reminders run, money arrives, invoice gets marked paid. That loop is what we built lessonu around. Invoices are generated from the lessons you actually taught — pick the family, pick the period, and the completed lessons land on the invoice GST-itemised in AUD, a couple of clicks instead of a Sunday-night spreadsheet. The reminder ladder runs automatically every day without you drafting a single awkward message, and every invoice carries its own secure pay link. When a transfer lands, you mark the invoice paid in two taps; cash, the same. Or skip the generate step entirely: set a recurring billing rule per family — weekly, fortnightly or monthly — and the invoice builds itself from the lessons taught. Parents who’d rather pay by card tap the link on the invoice, and that’s the only place we take a cut: 1% on card payments, $0 on bank transfer and cash, because taking a percentage of money that moved through your own bank account never made sense to us.

Two details matter more than they sound. Invoices keep the identity they were issued with — register for GST or change your trading name next month and last term’s paperwork stays exactly as you sent it. And the price is flat: A$29 a month for a solo tutor, with a 14-day trial that doesn’t ask for a card.

The honest gaps, since this post has been honest everywhere else: there’s no Xero or MYOB sync yet, so your bookkeeper gets a CSV export; and we launched recently, so where TutorBird can point at a decade of reviews, we can point at zero. If you’re weighing up the field, I’ve written a full comparison of the tutoring platforms AU tutors actually consider.

If the Sunday-night invoicing run is the part of tutoring you’d most like to delete, start a 14-day free trial and send your next invoice from it.