Free tool
What one lesson has to be priced at
Work backwards from the income you need to the rate a single lesson slot has to carry, with tax and studio costs counted rather than assumed away.
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How much practice does this date actually require
Count the repertoire, divide it by the weeks left and the days a student really practices, and the plan either fits the week or it does not.
Recital and exam dates get chosen from a calendar, not from arithmetic. Then eight weeks later a student is under tempo on two of three pieces and the teacher is deciding what to cut. The math that would have caught it takes about a minute: total repertoire minutes, divided by the weeks left, plus the technique the level demands, divided by the days the student honestly sits down.
Use this before you commit a student to a program. If the daily figure comes out at twice what the family has ever managed, the fix is one fewer piece, an easier selection or a later date, and it is far kinder to make that call in week one than in week seven.
Your result
Total repertoire minutes left
1,260
All the polishing work still ahead across the program.
Practice minutes per week
186
Repertoire plus technique the week has to hold.
Minutes per practice day
46
What one sitting has to cover on the days the student practices.
Total hours to the date
31.0
Hours at the instrument between now and the performance.
If the daily figure is above what this family has ever sustained, cut a piece or move the date rather than hoping the last three weeks make it up.
Estimating minutes per piece without guessing
The one number teachers hesitate over is minutes per piece, so anchor it in work you have already seen. A two page early intermediate piece taken from reading to a confident recital performance commonly runs somewhere around five to eight hours of focused practice spread over a couple of months. A graded exam piece with memory required, or a longer movement with a difficult development section, runs well past that. Look back at a student who performed something comparable last spring and count the weeks it actually took.
Level matters more than length. A beginner needs more repetitions per bar than an advanced student and gets fewer usable minutes out of a sitting, so the same page of music is not the same amount of work across your studio. Set the figure per student rather than per piece and the plan holds up better.
Making the weekly number survive contact with the family
A weekly total only means something if it is broken into days and into named tasks. Two hundred minutes a week reads as impossible to a parent. Fifty minutes on four days, of which twenty are the second page of the sonatina at a slow marking, reads as a plan. The daily figure this tool produces is the number to put on the assignment sheet, not the weekly one.
Then check the plan against reality after two weeks rather than at the end. If logged practice is running at half the daily target, you still have time to drop the third piece, simplify a repeat or shift a student to a shorter program. Waiting until the run through week turns an adjustable plan into a disappointing performance.
Questions about this calculator
Is this for exams or recitals?
Both, and the difference is in the inputs rather than the method. A graded exam adds technical requirements, sight reading and ear tests, so raise the technique minutes. A recital usually needs fewer pieces at a higher polish, so raise minutes per piece instead.
What if the student practices seven days a week?
Set practice days to seven and the daily figure drops accordingly. Be honest rather than aspirational, because a plan built on seven days that gets four is the most common way a recital preparation quietly falls behind. Most school age students land on four or five.
Should technique come out of the same time?
It is counted separately here on purpose, because technique is the first thing dropped when a date gets close. Keeping it as its own weekly line makes the trade explicit, so if something has to give you are choosing it rather than losing it by default.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The weekly practice assignment sheet you can fill in tonight
A single page you complete in the last two minutes of a lesson that tells a student and a parent exactly what to do on each of the next six days.
From this figure to Tuesday's music stand
The number above is a plan until it reaches the practice room. Inside PracticeSheet those minutes become checkable lines with sections, tempo markings and a practice log you can read before the student walks in. A short demo shows what that looks like for one of your students rather than a sample studio.