Skillshare doesn't pay teachers a fixed rate per minute watched, no matter what any rate card implies. Instead it pays out of a royalty pool that gets split across every teacher's watched minutes each month, so your payout depends as much on the platform's total viewing activity as it does on your own. This calculator turns your minutes watched, the per-minute rate from your dashboard, and any referral bonuses into a monthly and annual earnings projection.
How it works
Skillshare sets aside a share of that month's total membership revenue as the teacher royalty pool. Every teacher's payout is their slice of that pool, proportional to their share of total minutes watched by paying members across the whole platform: your minutes watched ÷ total platform minutes watched, times the pool. Skillshare then reports that math back to you as a single per-minute rate in your Teacher Analytics dashboard, which is what this calculator expects you to enter.
Multiply your minutes watched this month by that rate and you get your monthly royalty. Multiply the monthly figure by 12 and you get a rough annualized projection — useful for planning, but only as reliable as the assumption that this month's rate and minutes hold steady all year, which they rarely do. On top of the royalty, this calculator adds a referral estimate: multiply your referrals this month by the value you set per referral (defaulted to $100 — see the Methodology section for why), then sum royalty and referral into a total monthly figure.
Worked example
Say you watched 20,000 minutes across your classes this month, your dashboard shows a per-minute rate of $0.05, and you didn't refer any new members.
- Monthly royalty: 20,000 × $0.05 = $1,000
- Annual royalty (monthly × 12): $1,000 × 12 = $12,000
- Referral earnings: 0 × $100 = $0
- Total monthly earnings: $1,000 + $0 = $1,000
If you'd referred three new paying members that month instead, at the default $100 referral value the referral line would add 3 × $100 = $300, pushing total monthly earnings to $1,300 — a real bump on top of the royalty, and one that doesn't depend on the pool's size at all.
How to interpret your result
Treat every number here as a projection built from the rate you already know, not a forecast of a rate you don't. The calculator can't predict next month's per-minute rate because nobody can — it's a function of total platform revenue and total platform minutes watched, both of which move independently of anything you do. A viral class you publish this month raises your own minutes watched, but if overall platform viewing grows even faster, your per-minute rate can still fall even as your minutes climb.
The annual figure is the number to be most skeptical of. It assumes this month repeats twelve times, which almost never happens — new classes, seasonal viewing patterns, and platform-wide shifts in the royalty pool all move the real number around. Use it as a ballpark for planning, not a figure to budget against.
Methodology & sources
The formula: monthlyRoyalty = minutes watched × per-minute rate; annualRoyalty = monthlyRoyalty × 12; referralEarnings = referrals × referral value; totalMonthly = monthlyRoyalty + referralEarnings. All outputs round from unrounded intermediate math, so the pieces stay internally consistent.
Three honesty notes on the inputs. First, the $0.05-$0.10 per-minute range in the rate field's help text is a rough historical band pulled from teacher-reported figures, not a published guarantee — Skillshare's own Help Center article on teacher earnings explains that the rate is recalculated from the royalty pool every month and can land outside that range; always use the actual rate shown in your dashboard, not the default here. Second, the old flat $10-per-referral bonus is stale and no longer how the program works: Skillshare replaced it in April 2022 with a percentage model, currently 60% of the referred member's first-year subscription payment — around $100 at current annual pricing, which is why that's the default in the referral-value field above. Treat $10 as legacy history only; the percentage model is the only one running today, so set the referral-value field to whatever your own Referrals dashboard reports rather than trusting the default blindly, since Skillshare's subscription pricing (and therefore the dollar value of that 60% cut) can change. Third, referral payouts aren't universal: as of January 1, 2026, Skillshare gates its Teacher Referral Program behind an eligibility threshold — you need at least 50 followers and at least 75 minutes watched in a given month to earn any referral payout that month, so a teacher below that bar should treat this calculator's referral line as $0 regardless of how many people they referred.