Educator earnings and payments

Understanding your compensation for Outschool classes

Updated over a week ago

Outschool educators determine their earnings by setting all enrollment fees for their classes, along with a minimum and maximum class size.

Outschool's business model is to take a service fee each time a learner enrolls. Outschool takes 30% of the family’s payment, and educators receive 70%. This means that we only succeed when you succeed, and our interests are aligned. To that end, all class fees must be paid through the Outschool platform.

Payout mechanics

Payout logistics

We send payouts to educators via PayPal. For each section, you are paid 70% of the class price multiplied by the number of enrolled learners [0.7 x (price x number of learners)].

All educators, regardless of location, are paid via PayPal in the United States dollar (USD). If you transfer money from PayPal to a bank outside the US that uses a different currency, the bank may charge you a fee for conversion to local currency using their own currency exchange rate. Outschool is not responsible for these fees, so please contact your bank or credit card company to learn more.

For educators based in South Korea, there are two options available to create a PayPal account. Korean nationals can provide their national ID number and link their local Korean bank accounts. Alternatively, foreigners living in South Korea who possess a bank account in PayPal’s supported countries can link banks from their country of origin without the need for a national ID number. Please see PayPal’s supported countries; your region must, at minimum, have the capability to send, receive, and withdraw money.

Payment schedules

For fixed-duration classes (one-time, flex, and multi-day), you are paid for a section 7 or 8 days past its start date. Payments begin processing each morning (Pacific Time) from the email address payments@outschool.com. If your section starts in the afternoon or evening, payment may not process until the next morning, completing your payout 8 days past the section start date.

For ongoing classes, you are paid in a batch payout on a Sunday, 7-13 days after weekly meetings have occurred. It may take up to 24 hours from Sunday morning Pacific for you to receive payment for ongoing classes, as these payments process throughout the day, separately from other class payments.

For Ongoing class sections that meet on Sundays, please note that classes held on Sunday before 4pm PST / 5pm PDT are included in the previous week's batch payout, and classes held on Sunday after 4pm PST / 5pm PDT are included in the following week's batch payout. For example, Sunday, Nov 26, 3:30 PST class would be included in your payout for the week of Nov 19 - Nov 26, not for the week of Nov 26 - Dec 3.

The end time for subscription periods shifts by one hour when daylight saving time starts or ends in the United States. Sunday classes that meet between 4pm and 5pm Pacific experience a change in payout date when the time change occurs.

For 1-on-1 courses, you'll receive payment on a Sunday, 7-13 days (or effectively 2 Sundays) after the week’s meetings have occurred.

For Groups, families pay on a monthly subscription basis. Monthly batched payments go out to educators on the 15th of the following month. For example, you’ll receive payment for November’s Group subscriptions on December 15th.

If you currently accept weekly payment for enrollments in fixed duration classes, you will receive payment on a Sunday, 7-13 days (or effectively 2 Sundays) after the week’s meetings have occurred. It can take up to 24 hours from Sunday morning PT for you to receive the payout.

In rare cases, a technical issue may cause a payout delay of up to 48 hours. In these instances, you may contact support@outschool.com for a status update.

Batched payments

For educators who may receive payment for multiple sections in one day, you will receive one payment per day, as a single batched payout. Organizations will receive one payout per day, per organization teacher. If you receive a batched payout, you will see an itemized list in PayPal, by section, which includes:

  • Amount($)

  • Number of learners

  • A link to the section for each item included in your payment.

Please note that educators and organizations with many sections may see an ellipsis with a link to the Insights tab, to download the CSV file if the number of sections overflows the PayPal memo.

Linking your PayPal account

You’ll see a field called PayPal Email in your account settings. In order to receive Outschool payments, you’ll need to enter the email address attached to your PayPal account. Please note that you will need to sign up for PayPal if you don’t already have an account.

Educators are responsible for maintaining their own account security. Payments will be sent to the payout address on file, so educators should monitor all activity on their Outschool account while reporting any irregular activities. To provide an extra level of security, all changes made to an educator or an Organization's PayPal payout email address are subject to a 5-day verification period and review by our Trust & Safety Team.

When updating payout emails in PayPal, educators and organizations are responsible for updating their corresponding Outschool account simultaneously. Failure to do so may result in not receiving payments and the impacted account may be subject to fees if additional action needs to be taken by the Outschool team to help remedy payment.

We recommend linking your bank account to PayPal and choosing the standard transfer option to transfer funds out of PayPal. This will allow you to avoid incurring the 1% instant transfer fee that results from linking a debit card. See this article from PayPal’s support center for more information.

Reviewing payments in PayPal

You can take the following steps to review your Outschool payments in PayPal.

  1. From paypal.com, click on the Log In button to log in

  2. Once logged in, click Proceed to Account Overview or My PayPal

  3. Click Activity in the blue bar at the top of the page

From here, you can see all completed sent and received payments. You can also use the Filters button to review only received payments, set start and end dates, and use the Statements button to download detailed statements and tax forms.

Sending money back to Outschool  

Sometimes there are cases where you will need to issue a refund to a parent after you have already been paid out for that section and no longer have the ability refund from your end.

When this happens, you will need to contact us at support@outschool with the following information:

  • A link to the section with the enrollment

  • The learner(s) name

  • The refund amount

Prior to contacting Outschool Support, we will need you to send back your 70% of the refund to payments@outschool.com via PayPal, using the send money feature. Outschool will cover the 2.9% sending fee, so you don’t need to worry about adding that on to your payment. Once we receive this payment, we will then issue the refund from our end. 

We want to ensure that parents receive their refunds in a timely manner, so failure to send your payment right away could result in restriction and removal. If we don’t receive your payment after one week, it will result in a warning. After two weeks without payment, it will result in a suspension in which we will unlist your classes and we will not approve any new ones.  

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