Summer Jobs for Teachers: One Pays $100 an Hour, One Pays $16

A teacher grading AI-generated math solutions from a kitchen table can clear $100 an hour. A teacher supervising a cabin at a sleepaway camp clears about $16. Both show up on lists of summer jobs for teachers. Only one of them is worth the hours.

Every June, millions of K-12 teachers get roughly ten or eleven weeks off and a question nobody in the district office answers for them: what pays. This is not a guide to leaving teaching. It ranks the income options teachers use to fill the break, priced the way a district never prices your own job: by the hour.

If you are weighing whether to leave the classroom permanently rather than just fill a summer, that is a different question with different math and it deserves its own answer, not this one.

Price it by the hour, not the summer

A high school teacher earns a median of $72,040 a year, per BLS data for May 2025. Spread across roughly 185 contract days, that is $389 a day. But teachers work well past the contract day: RAND's 2025 State of the American Teacher survey put average hours at 49 a week, which works out to $39.70 an hour across a 37-week school year.

That number, $39.70, is the benchmark for everything below. A summer option that pays more than that is a genuine raise for the hours you put in. One that pays less is only worth it for reasons other than money: flexibility, resume value, or simply liking the work.

Tier one: pays more than your hourly rate

AI model evaluation and problem authoring

AI labs pay subject-matter experts to write problems at a controlled difficulty, grade model output against a rubric, and explain precisely why a wrong answer is wrong. That is not adjacent to teaching. It is teaching, minus the classroom management, done from wherever there is wifi.

Published bands run $40 to $100 an hour for math, physics, and PhD-level science authoring, $25 to $60 for business and operations content, and $15 to $30 for general evaluation work. Fresh 2026 data from Mercor puts the overall average AI trainer rate around $31 an hour, with domain experts in specialties like law and medicine earning $60 to $160 an hour depending on the platform, and senior coding evaluators earning $65 to $110. The work is remote, asynchronous, and paid weekly for hours logged, which makes it the clearest match for the "online summer jobs for teachers" search: no client relationship to build, no lesson plan to write, just subject knowledge you already have.

The catch: it is project-based, so volume arrives in waves rather than a guaranteed weekly total. Treat it as hourly income, not a salary.

Independent tutoring and test prep

Skip the platform once you can. Wyzant tutors average $20.58 an hour and Varsity Tutors tutors average $18.03, both after the platform keeps its cut, which runs about 25% on Wyzant. Independent tutors who find their own students average $34.60 an hour overall, with experienced tutors (one to three years) charging $45 to $75 and specialists with a track record charging $75 to $150. SAT and ACT tutoring specifically runs $45 to $100 an hour independently, well above what test-prep companies pay their own instructors: Princeton Review tutors average $26 an hour and Kaplan tutors average $20, according to Glassdoor.

The gap between what a company pays its tutors and what parents pay the company is the entire opportunity here. A platform is useful for finding your first three or four families. After that, every hour you keep on-platform is an hour priced below what the market pays.

Freelance subject-matter writing

Publishers, edtech companies, and content agencies pay for writers who can explain a subject correctly, not just fluently. General freelance writing rates in 2026 average $45 to $80 an hour for experienced writers, but subject-matter expertise carries a real premium: expert writers average $1.25 a word against a $0.42 general average, and legal or healthcare content runs $1.20 to $2.00 a word. A teacher writing explainer content in their certified subject is exactly the "expert" a content buyer is paying extra for.

Curriculum writing for publishers and districts

Per-unit or per-project contracts writing lessons, assessments, and teacher guides. Upwork's published range for curriculum development is $35 to $65 an hour, with a median of $50. Your subject and grade band decide demand, and districts writing their own extended-year or intervention curriculum sometimes pay directly rather than through a publisher.

The catch: rates vary widely between publishers, and projects are often scoped optimistically. Track your actual hours on the first contract before agreeing to a second.

Tier two: close to even

Summer school teaching

The most obvious option, and the one most teachers already know about. National averages sit around $29 an hour, per Glassdoor's 2026 data, but district pay varies enormously. Missouri districts average $28.30 an hour and New York City averages $33.01. Fairfax County, Virginia, pays general education teachers their per diem rate up to a cap of $58.69 an hour, with consult and homebound extended-year work at a flat $50.

The advantage over every other option on this page: it is the same job, the same building, and it counts toward your evaluation history. The disadvantage: it is still teaching, on a break you were counting on not teaching.

Test and assessment scoring

Pearson, ETS, and Measurement Incorporated hire seasonal scorers to grade open-response and essay items against a rubric, and the seasonal calendar fits teachers well: the heaviest hiring runs from February through June, tapering into midsummer as state testing windows close. Pearson's seasonal scorer pay averages around $27 an hour, typically ranging $21 to $34. ETS scoring work more commonly runs $10 to $20 an hour, and Measurement Incorporated listings report an average closer to $12 an hour, so it pays to compare all three before committing a summer to it.

The work needs no client relationship and no lesson planning, just a rubric and attention to detail. It suits a teacher who wants defined, short-term contract work rather than an ongoing commitment, and who does not mind that the hours are unpredictable and can dry up once a testing window closes.

Tier three: below your rate, and why people still take it

Camp counselor work

This is where honesty matters most, because "summer camp" tops nearly every generic list of summer jobs for teachers, and the pay does not hold up next to the other options here. Current listings average $15.89 an hour, ranging $7.69 to $22.36, and many resident camps still price the job as a weekly stipend, commonly $250 to $750, bundled with room and board rather than paid as wages at all.

For a teacher earning $39.70 an hour in the classroom, camp counselor work is a real pay cut, not a side hustle. It can still make sense if free housing and meals matter to your summer budget, or if you want the specific experience of running programming for kids rather than a classroom. Go in knowing it is priced as an experience, not as income.

Camp director

The one camp role where the math changes. Industry compensation surveys have put seasonal camp directors at a median around $833 a week, ranging from about $475 in the South to near $1,000 in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, against a counselor's $250 to $750. It requires camp-specific management experience most teachers do not walk in with, but a teacher who has run a summer program, coached a team, or managed a department is a plausible candidate, and the jump in pay from counselor to director is the largest single move available in camp work.

Retail, delivery, and gig work

The honest baseline everything else should beat. Uber drivers gross a median of $21.18 an hour; Uber Eats delivery averages $24.68; DoorDash grosses $18.93 but nets closer to $11 to $13 an hour once gas and mileage are subtracted, per 2026 driver-earnings data. It requires no application process, no portfolio, and no ramp-up, which is the entire appeal. It is also the floor every option above this section should clear before it is worth your time.

Where the online summer jobs for teachers actually are

Skillora's AI training jobs board pulls live listings from Mercor, micro1, Alignerr, Outlier, DataAnnotation, and Terac into one feed, refreshed daily and filterable by pay, subject, and experience level. For a teacher, the two most relevant slices are science, where math and physics problem authoring sits at the top of the published pay bands, and business operations, for teachers with a finance, economics, or business background. Every listing shows the published rate and stated requirements, and browsing is free.

Where a marketplace runs a referral programme, Skillora may earn a fee if you sign up through our link. It costs you nothing, and it has no effect on how listings are ranked or on what we publish about these platforms.

Two things before you apply. These platforms screen with a recorded or live AI interview instead of a resume review, and teachers tend to do well at it once they treat it like a lesson: state the point, work an example, name the likely misconception. The screening guide compares how many attempts each platform allows before locking you out, which decides the order to apply in, and the best AI training jobs roundup ranks platforms on pay and entry bar. Apply to more than one; each is a queue tied to a different set of client contracts, and demand shifts between them through the summer.

Before the last bell rings

1. Work out your real hourly rate. Salary divided by contract days, then adjusted for the hours you work, not the hours on the calendar. Most teachers have never run this number, and it changes which summer options look worthwhile.
2. Apply to remote work in May, not June. AI training platforms and tutoring marketplaces both run screening processes that take one to two weeks. Starting the week after dismissal means losing that time from your paid weeks.
3. Ask your district for its extended-year pay scale before assuming the national average. The gap between Missouri's $28 an hour and Fairfax County's $58.69 cap is too large to guess at.
4. Move tutoring clients off-platform once trust is established. The platform's cut is the single largest cost in tutoring income, and it is entirely avoidable after the first few sessions.
5. Set aside tax on anything paid as a contractor. AI training work, freelance writing, independent tutoring, and most curriculum contracts are 1099 income with nothing withheld.
6. Treat camp work as a lifestyle choice, not an income plan, unless the role is camp director.

The short version

Price every summer option by the hour, against your own $39.70. AI model evaluation and independent tutoring can clear it several times over. Curriculum writing and freelance subject writing sit close to it. Summer school and test scoring land near even. Camp counseling and gig work sit well below it, and are worth taking only for reasons that are not about the money.

The highest-paying work on this page needs nothing you do not already have: a teaching credential and a subject you know cold. That is worth pricing correctly before the break starts, not after it is half over.