HOW MUCH: Do PhD Students REALLY EARN? (2021 London)
👉 1-on-1 Tutoring (Maths, Physics, Python, Piano): https://bit.ly/3nA2rbw
👉 Investing (You and I get up to £100 for depositing £1): https://bit.ly/3nA3YOA
A PhD Student can have multiple sources of income:
• Maintenance- An STFC funded PhD student working in London has an annual maintenance allowance little over 17k (tax free).
• Teaching – Assuming you are a teaching assistant for 1 term (lasts 3 months), typical courses have 3 hours/week, plus admin and office hours, you can get roughly £1000 over the 3 months (at a rate of 15.32/hr)
• Marking – Assuming you are a marker for 1 term (lasts 3 months), for a relatively big course you can typically mark 4 sets of 50 papers, assuming 3 papers/hour (which is actually quite difficult sometimes), you can get roughly another £1000 over the 3 months (at a rate of 15.32/hr)
• Now of course, you can do the same again in terms 2 and 3. But here let’s assume you only do teaching and marking once.
• Tutoring – Another great source of income. Assuming £30/hour, 5 hours/ week which is totally doable, repeat for 36 weeks, assuming no teaching over Christmas, Easter and summer breaks. You can get roughly another £5400 over a year.
• Investing- Lastly, investing. If you put all the extra income (from teaching, marking, and tutoring) into an index fund like VUSA or IUSA, which tracks the SP500 index, and assuming an 8% annual return. you would get roughly £600 more a year (again tax free because the profit is less than 12k). Historically, VUSA has average return of 15% for the last 7 years, IUSA has average return of 10.88% for the last 17 years.
• This gives a total of just over 25k per year.