Can you make money on Teachers Pay Teachers?

The short answer is YES. The long answer is yes but depends on how much work you want to put into it.

If you are like most teachers you have heard of, if not used, Teachers Pay Teachers before. Sometimes it’s for a quick filler activity, an easy sub lesson or to help you plan out an entire unit. Usually we are so busy with the day to day parts of teaching that we don’t stop and think about how we could be making extra money from what we already are doing.

In 2014 I was hanging out in my work bestie’s room after school and we were both commenting on how we wish we had some extra income. We started brainstorming ideas of easy ways that wouldn’t require a lot of work on our part. This of course lead us to Teachers Pay Teachers.

How to decide what kind of account

If you have never looked at the seller side of TPT there are two different versions of it: basic and premium.

There were some advantages and disadvantages so both types of accounts but in the end we decided to start with a basic seller account.

So why did we pick Basic?

We weren’t sure yet if any of our materials were good enough to sell to other teachers. We didn’t see the point of investing money into something that we had no experience with.

It might be hard to give up 25% of your profit but until you have proven success, it’s better to use the free version while you work out the kinks.

We set our own goal of $60 as the amount we would need to sell before we spent the money on a Premium Seller account. That means we only made $33* on our first $60 instead of $48 but in the grand scheme of things $15 is less than $60. *Please note this does not include the transaction fees!

We created a name, The Wright Ladies, and designed a banner. We didn’t waste to much time on the naming and design aspect because at the end of the day teachers want to see the resources.

Resources

So let’s talk about what kind of resources you could add to your TPT store. I recommend starting with the materials you are already making for your classroom. When you start out you don’t want to have to spend all your time creating materials. Instead pick a few of your best lessons/activities to upload. Before adding them to your store just a few things to think about:

  • Is it your own work?
  • Did you take any clipart or pictures off the internet? Make sure they are free use!
  • Do you need to depersonalize it? Things to remove: your name, period/class, school specific info.
  • Do you need to make an instruction page or answer key?
  • Is it easy to understand?
  • Is it visually pleasing? This doesn’t mean it needs to be bright colors or crazy fonts. Clean lines and fonts sell well and are easier for students to use.

I was teaching middle school life science and civics at the time, and my friend was teaching math. Between the two of us we uploaded 10 resources to start and kept adding from there.

This Constitution Test Find Someone Who Review was one of them. I provided the word document, answer key and PDF version of it for $1.

I bet you are wondering how much we made? Going into it we decided to split the profits 50/50 and in the first month we made a profit of $40.65. Within two months we were at $99.81 and upgraded to the Premium Seller account. Within a year we had made $1,891. Not bad for two teachers who just wanted to make a little bit of extra cash.

Teachers Pay Teachers Update as of 2020

So you probably have figured out that 2014 was a long time ago and want to know what the status is now. Well here you go!

Our lives got busy as you could imagine! My friend got married and has two kids now. I started coaching travel soccer and moved to a new school. We just didn’t have the time to keep actively adding to our store after 2017 but it is still active with 165 resources. We both agreed to continue sharing the profits without having the pressure of both having to add similar amounts of material. Every month we still make anywhere from $50+ on our materials, and yes some months are much higher than that!

In 2016 I was teaching Civics and Economics in Virginia. I created five giant review packets to help my students prepare for our end of the year standardized test, SOL (and yes that’s really it’s name). My kids did really well on their test and said the packet really helped them. The next year I decided that I would upload them to TPT in a new store, Made For Middle School.

This school year, 2020-2021, my school started the year completely virtual. Having to learn a new management system (Canvas) over the summer encouraged me to work on my design skills. My fellow teachers loved my designs and told me that I should sell them. So I did. Once the year started I quickly realized that I needed to increase the number and quality of digital assignments I have my science students do. Since I was already making them for my classroom I figured I might as well add them too.

So all in all you can make money on TPT. To start it might be just a little spending money; I always joked that it was my grocery money. As you get going you can decide if you want to put more time and effort in to make it a full time side gig.

Feel free to check out my Teachers Pay Teachers Stores for inspiration