It is not impossible to make more than I made as an American high school teacher in China while enjoying the lifestyle that comes from living a developing countries cost of living. It’s the land of $5 massages, $2 meals, and easy-to-find $20/hr part-time work. It usually takes time though. For comparison, Saudi Arabia is usually hailed as having the best salaries for TEFL teachers in the world. An older friend looking to buy a house and retire with his wife in Thailand did the calculations of what it would take to get that house factoring in salary and cost of living expenses. Two years, he said, in Saudi Arabia but just three in China. The bottom line is that you won’t be poor teaching in China, and in fact can have a higher quality of life than teaching in America.

Expect your first job to be awful and then move into the kind of work you’d like to be doing if you decide to stay. Bear in mind an overwhelming majority of teachers head home after the first year. As a rule of thumb I’d say don’t settle for less than 6000/month inside a city for a first job. Considerations can be made based on benefits like paid vacation time, airfare, housing, or bonuses. My base salary at my college is around 7000/month, but I work 8:30 to noon about nine months a year. It leaves a lot of time to travel and outside work.

Language training centers (Meten/Metro, Web, Wall Street, English First, etc) in big cities usually start at around 11,000 a month and go up to 14,000 in the big cities like Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing. They say they want a year experience and a TEFL certificate, but I’ve never seen them actually check. They want a demo class and will offer a job based on a complicated calculation of how much they need fresh white bodies that week and how well you performed. They usually only give two weeks of paid vacation a year though and the working load, while not hard, is more than other places – leaving no time for outside work. 150/hr is standard for part time work at these places. It’s usually easy to pick up 6pm to 9pm shifts there when they’re busiest.

Colleges usually pay less but the visa is assured and the vacations are wonderful. Per teaching hour they’re pretty competitive. They also usually offer cheap or free private housing too. If, like me, you have degrees and experience in an academic field that is not TEFL you can usually talk them into letting you teach a few English-language classes as electives. I teach a Globalization & Development class once a year.

Private students in big cities usually begin at 150 and go up to 250 if you can sustain the relationship and prove yourself. If you’re a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed muscle builder fluent in Chinese you can command up to 350. The downside is that private students can be less consistent by cancelling classes, or the classes just taper off after awhile. For some, like me, the idea of selling your educational services can feel strange. I prefer to take less and let the language center handle the business and hand-out consistent and steady part-time working hours. There are also recruiters who match parents and with teachers – usually for teaching children.

Preschools and Kindergartens pay unusually well. Salaries from 14,000 to 20,000 are not uncommon. From my own observations, kindergartens usually don’t have very long vacation time and often want teachers to work Saturdays too. You get a consistent high salary working here, but the per-hour pay is actually not very competitive. The difference, I hear, is that you’re only spending 1-2 hours a day doing “real” teaching. The rest is babysitting.

A final type of job that I don’t recommend is working for contractor placing teachers in public schools. This was my first job. These are businesses (often billed as “exchange societies” or the like) that recruit doe-eyed college grads in bulk and dump them in Chinese classrooms for one year horror shows. Most Chinese public schools don’t have the right paperwork or resources to hire the waijiao (foreign teachers) that parents demand. Usually the bulk of demand is in the more flexible curriculum of primary schools. Expect to be dropped in a classroom of 30-50 students who speak barely a word of English, given no teaching materials to teach your single 45-50 minute course once a week, and very little assistance or coordination from the school itself. Your purpose is much more promotional than educational. The schools usually expect nothing from the teachers. Salaries can range from 3500 to 7000 a month. Usually contracts are back-loaded because most teachers quit. My first job was 3500/m but a $1000 bonus at the end and full airfare reimbursement if you stay through the whole contract. Once I realized I was conned with the whole “exchange society” thing, it seemed too costly to quit and loose my airfare and bonus. That was the point.