Udemy doesn't pay instructors one flat percentage — it pays two very different ones depending on who actually brought in the sale, and most instructors underestimate how much that split matters. This calculator turns your course price, monthly sales, and the share of those sales driven by your own coupons or referral links into an honest monthly and annual net-revenue estimate.
How it works
Udemy splits every sale into one of two buckets. If a student buys through a coupon code or referral link you promoted yourself — your email list, your site, a social post — that's an "instructor promotion" sale, and you keep 97% of what they paid, with Udemy taking a flat 3% processing cut. If a student instead finds your course organically through Udemy's own search, marketplace, or paid ads, with no coupon or referral link involved, Udemy keeps 63% and hands you 37%, because Udemy footed the marketing bill to bring that student to your course page in the first place.
This calculator takes your monthly sales and splits them using the instructor-sales percentage you set: that share becomes coupon sales paid at 97%, the rest becomes marketplace sales paid at 37%. Each bucket is priced separately, then summed and multiplied by your course price to get monthly net revenue. Multiplying by 12 gives a rough annual projection, and dividing net revenue by gross list-price revenue gives your effective blended share — a single number that shows how much of that 97/37 split actually survives contact with your real sales mix.
Worked example
Say your course is priced at $50, you sell 40 units this month, and 30% of those sales come through your own coupons or referral links (the rest through Udemy's marketplace).
- Coupon sales: 40 × 30% = 12 units at 97% → 12 × $50 × 0.97 = $582
- Marketplace sales: 40 × 70% = 28 units at 37% → 28 × $50 × 0.37 = $518
- Monthly net revenue: $582 + $518 = $1,100
- Projected annual net revenue: $1,100 × 12 = $13,200
- Effective revenue share: $1,100 ÷ ($50 × 40) × 100 = 55%
That 55% effective share sits between the 37% marketplace floor and the 97% coupon ceiling — exactly where you'd expect for a mix that leans more marketplace than self-promoted. Push the coupon-sales share up to 60% instead and the same 40 sales at $50 net $1,460 a month, a meaningful jump for the same unit count, because more of the revenue escapes Udemy's 63% marketplace cut.
How to interpret your result
The effective revenue share is the number worth watching over time, more than either raw dollar figure. It tells you, in one percentage, how much of your list-price revenue Udemy's cut is actually eating — and it moves almost entirely based on how much traffic you drive yourself versus how much you rely on Udemy's marketplace. An instructor who never promotes their own course sits near 37% no matter how good the content is; an instructor who builds an audience and drives most of their own sales can push that number toward 90%+.
Treat the annual figure as a rough projection, not a forecast — it assumes this month's price, sales volume, and coupon/marketplace mix hold steady for a full year, and Udemy's near-constant sitewide discounting makes that a shaky assumption. Course prices you enter here should reflect what students actually pay after Udemy's default promotions, not your list price, since that's the number Udemy calculates your share against.
Methodology & sources
The formula: couponSales = monthlySales × instructorSalesPercent / 100; marketplaceSales = monthlySales × (1 − instructorSalesPercent / 100); monthlyNet = coursePrice × (couponSales × 0.97 + marketplaceSales × 0.37); annualNet = monthlyNet × 12; effectiveSharePercent = monthlyNet ÷ (coursePrice × monthlySales) × 100. Every output rounds from unrounded intermediate math, so the three figures stay internally consistent with each other.
The 97%/37% split is Udemy's own published instructor revenue share: instructors keep 97% of a sale made through their own coupon or referral link, and 37% of a sale where no coupon or referral link was used, per Udemy's Instructor Revenue Share support documentation — see Udemy Support: Instructor revenue share. That marketplace split has held at 37% even as Udemy has separately cut its Udemy Business subscription payout (20% → 17.5% in January 2025 → 15% in January 2026, a different revenue stream this calculator does not model). One honest caveat: Udemy's list prices are close to fictional for most buyers — the platform runs near-permanent sitewide discounts, so a $199.99 course routinely transacts at $9.99-$19.99. Enter the price students are actually paying, not your sticker price, or this estimate will overstate your real payout by several multiples.