A tutor who lists TOEFL on Preply shows a median hourly rate of $22. The same tutor — same credentials, same platform — listing IELTS instead shows $21. The two tests pay within a dollar of each other on Preply and italki, and within seven dollars on Wyzant. Test choice is rarely a tutor's most consequential pricing decision. (One important caveat below: italki rates here are the trial-lesson rates displayed on search cards, not the transacted session rates. The relative test-to-test gap holds, but the absolute italki numbers are understated. See methodology.)

What is consequential — what determines whether a test-prep tutor clears $20/hour or $60/hour — is which platform they list on. Issue 1 documented that mechanism for TOEFL specifically. This issue extends it: the same platform-segmentation pattern holds for IELTS, with a single instructive difference. On Wyzant alone, specializing in one test instead of listing both pays roughly 20% more per hour. On italki and Preply, the specialist premium is zero.

We scraped 1,135 TOEFL-tagged tutors and 870 IELTS-tagged tutors across the three platforms on May 14, 2026 — the same reference date as Issue 1, matched browser session, matched methodology. The headline numbers:

Source: Chalk Index scrape, May 14 2026. Italy-IP authenticated session. Listed-rate medians from each platform's specialty filter URL.

TOEFL clears slightly above IELTS on every platform, but the gap is essentially noise on Preply and italki. On Wyzant it's real — a ~14% TOEFL premium ($56 vs $49) that reflects the platform's overwhelmingly US-bound buyer pool, where TOEFL is the default and IELTS is the alternative.

On italki, the test-to-test gap closes entirely once you control for tier. italki structures supply into Professional Teacher and Community Tutor tracks (introduced in Issue 1's italki section). Within the Professional Teacher tier alone, TOEFL and IELTS tutors both display a $21 trial-lesson rate on the search card — same product, same buyer pool, identical trial price. The $1 blended gap is composition noise from the small Community Tutor share. The two tests aren't being priced differently on italki at the trial-rate level. The transacted session rates are set separately and visible only on tutor profile pages, where typical Professional Teacher TOEFL/IELTS rates run $25–40 per 60-minute lesson — materially above the $21 trial display. The italki rate medians in this issue and Issue 1 should be read as trial-rate-anchored measurements; relative-rate findings hold directionally, absolute italki rates underestimate transacted rates. See methodology.

The rest of this issue is what the two-test comparison tells us about who is teaching what to whom, and where specializing actually pays.

The platforms aggregate different national admissions footprints, and that shows up immediately in the test-tag composition.

Among tutors who list exactly one of the two tests:

This isn't a finding about test quality or content. TOEFL and IELTS are substitutable for most academic admissions purposes. The composition difference reflects which national applicant pool each platform's marketing reaches. italki's referral mix is heavy on European cashback affiliates and Chinese search; both populations skew IELTS. Wyzant's referral mix is California State University Fullerton and the Clever single-sign-on for US K-12 schools; both populations skew TOEFL.

There's a second layer of demand for IELTS that TOEFL doesn't address at all: immigration and employment. The UK skilled-worker visa, Canada's Express Entry, Australia's permanent residency points system, and several Gulf-state work permits all accept or require IELTS — and most don't recognize TOEFL. A 30-year-old engineer applying for Canadian PR needs IELTS; a 19-year-old applying to NYU needs TOEFL. They're different people with different urgency and different income, but they appear as identical line items in our tutor-listing data. The IELTS pool on italki is partly an immigration pool. The IELTS pool on Wyzant — small as it is — is almost entirely an admissions pool.

Of the tutors we scraped, the number who list TOEFL and IELTS only — without also tagging TOEIC or PTE:

Restricting to the exclusive TOEFL+IELTS pool — tutors offering exactly these two academic-admissions tests and no others — isolates a credible two-test product. A tutor offering TOEFL and IELTS together is plausible; the same tutor offering TOEFL, IELTS, TOEIC (Japan/Korea employment test), and PTE (Australia/UK admissions alternative) is harder to defend — those four tests serve materially different populations. The rest of this section uses the exclusive dual-lister population (Preply 52, italki 89, Wyzant 85) so the specialist premium below compares like with like.

The dual-listing pattern is the natural answer to a real buyer question: "Which test should I take for the school I want to attend?" A tutor credible to both answers is useful to a wider applicant pool. The question is whether they get paid more for that flexibility.

For each platform, we computed the median hourly rate for tutors who list TOEFL only, and compared it to the median for tutors who list TOEFL + IELTS together (exclusive — no other test tags).

On Wyzant, single-test specialists clear ten dollars more per hour than dual-listers. That's a real, defensible premium. On Preply the difference is two dollars — small enough that it could be sample noise. On italki, dual-listers actually charge marginally more than TOEFL-only tutors.

The mechanism behind the Wyzant premium is the buyer pool. Wyzant's US-bound buyers — typically parents paying US private-tutor rates for university-admissions prep — read a single-test specialty as a credibility signal. A tutor whose listing reads "TOEFL specialist, MA in TESOL, 1,200 hours of TOEFL coaching" suggests focus. The same tutor with "TOEFL, IELTS, SAT, ACT, general English" reads as a tutor who needs the work. On Wyzant, the first listing earns ~20% more.

italki and Preply buyer pools don't pay for that signal. The buyers there are mostly comparing on price, location, language pairs, and review counts — not on specialty discipline. A tutor on italki who lists both TOEFL and IELTS is reaching more buyer queries without paying a credibility cost, and the rate stays flat.

This complicates the standard advice circulating in teacher communities ("specialize to charge more"). The advice works on Wyzant. It doesn't work on the global platforms. A tutor choosing whether to add IELTS to their TOEFL listing is making a different decision depending on which platform they're on.

Issue 1 noted that 485 tutors on Preply list IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC, and PTE simultaneously — four tests with materially different scoring rubrics, formats, and populations. That was the Preply filter UI count, a full-pool measurement. Our specialty-filtered scrapes catch only a tiny fraction of that population.

In our top-240 sample for each test, only 10 tutors appeared in all four scrapes — a 4.2% box-checker density. In the full Preply TOEFL pool of 4,456 tutors, the filter UI shows 485 four-test listers — a 10.9% box-checker density.

Box-checkers are 2.6× denser in the long tail than at the top of each specialty sort. Preply's algorithmic surface rewards specialization, or at least suppresses tutors whose profiles dilute their signal by listing too many specialties. The deep pool is where the box-checkers live, and where a buyer who paginates past the first few results encounters them.

This has a practical consequence for tutors making strategic decisions about which specialties to list. The box-checking tax exists, but it's algorithmic, not financial. Listing all four tests doesn't depress a tutor's stated rate — the 10 four-test tutors in our Preply sample charged a $22 median, indistinguishable from the platform's prevailing test-prep rate. What it depresses is visibility. The penalty for box-checking is being moved further down the search results, not being forced into a lower price band.

That's a softer penalty than rate compression, but a more durable one. Tutors making themselves visible in search results don't always recover from algorithmic burial.

The rate distributions for TOEFL and IELTS tutors, when overlaid per platform, are nearly identical in shape on Preply and italki. On Wyzant the TOEFL distribution sits modestly to the right of the IELTS distribution but tracks the same general curve.

This is the visual confirmation of the table at the top. Each platform mixes two underlying buyer populations — an academic-admissions buyer who treats TOEFL and IELTS as substitutes, and (on italki especially) an immigration/employment buyer who needs IELTS specifically. Both populations price tutors through the same listing surface, so the rate distributions converge even when the underlying buyer needs don't. The Wyzant distribution as a whole sits dramatically to the right of the italki and Preply distributions; the within-platform TOEFL/IELTS difference is small everywhere.

The implication: a tutor's decision to add IELTS to a TOEFL profile (or vice versa) doesn't repackage them for a different buyer. It expands the search surface they appear on without changing the buyer pool they're presenting to. The decision that does change the buyer pool — and therefore the realistic clearing rate — is which platform to list on.

Three platforms, three different strategic answers to the same question.

Wyzant. Specialize hard in one test. Single-test specialists clear ~$60 medians, p90 around $100, with premium tier extending into the hundreds. Dual-listers leave roughly $10/hour on the table. The buyer pool — US-based parents and US-bound international students paying US private-tutor rates — reads specialization as credibility, and pays for it. The cost of specializing here is reach: the IELTS pool on Wyzant is small (~93 single-listers), so a TOEFL specialist has a much larger buyer pool than an IELTS specialist on this platform.

italki. Dual-list TOEFL + IELTS if you're credible to both. There is no specialist premium, and the buyer pool tilts IELTS-heavy globally. A tutor with credentials in both academic-admissions tests is reaching meaningfully more buyer queries — particularly the Asian and European immigration/admissions populations that drive italki's traffic — without paying a credibility cost. italki's commission varies by lesson type — 0% on trials, 21% on single lessons, 19% on 5-packs, 17% on 10-packs, 15% on 15- and 20-packs, 30% on group classes. A teacher selling mostly single lessons keeps 79% of listed rate; a teacher selling longer packages keeps 83–85%. The "flat 15%" framing circulated in teacher communities holds only for the package-heavy minority. See Issue 1's italki commission chart for the full schedule.

Preply. Similar to italki — no meaningful specialist premium — but with a sharper algorithmic penalty for over-listing. Adding IELTS to a TOEFL profile is fine; adding TOEIC and PTE alongside without a real claim to either probably pushes the profile into long-tail algorithmic territory where buyers rarely scroll. Preply's commission structure has two layers: a 100% tax on every new student's trial lesson (Preply keeps the entire trial fee, indefinitely, for every new acquisition), and a tenure-based tier on paid lessons that steps from 33% down to 18% based on a tutor's total cumulative platform hours. The floor is reachable in roughly ten months at 10 hours per week. Once a tutor is established, the durable commission cost on Preply is mostly the trial-lesson tax on each new student — which never goes away. Any strategic move that reduces top-of-sort visibility is expensive because it slows book-building and forces more new-student acquisitions to maintain the same revenue.

These are not coaching prescriptions. They are descriptions of how each platform's pricing structure responds to specialization. A tutor's actual decision depends on which buyer pool they're credible to, what their realistic competition looks like in that buyer pool, and how much algorithmic visibility they need to maintain a stable booking flow.

Scrape methodology. 1,135 TOEFL-tagged tutors and 870 IELTS-tagged tutors scraped May 14, 2026 from an Italy-IP authenticated browser session. Preply uses ?tags=toefl and ?tags=testprep_ielts URL filters (note: IELTS uses the testprep_ prefix while other tests are bare); italki uses ?keyword=toefl and ?keyword=ielts; Wyzant uses ?keyword=<test>&is_online=true&subject-was-verified=false. Sample sizes per platform-test combination: Preply 240/238, italki 313/441, Wyzant 582/191. Scrape captures the rate text rendered on each platform's listing card.

italki rates are per-lesson-type — listing-card rates are trial rates, not session rates. italki tutors set separate prices for each lesson type they configure (Trial Lesson, TOEFL Prep, IELTS Prep, Conversational English, etc.). The rate displayed on italki search-card listings is the trial-lesson rate, which tutors discount to attract first-time bookings. Transacted TOEFL or IELTS session rates are set separately and visible only on the tutor's profile detail page; typical Professional Teacher rates for a 60-minute test-prep session run $25–40, materially above the $19–21 trial-rate display we cite throughout this issue. The italki rate medians in this issue and Issue 1 should be read as trial-rate-anchored listing-card displays. Relative-rate-gap findings between italki and other platforms hold directionally; absolute italki rates underestimate the transacted rate. A proper per-lesson scrape across italki tutor profile pages is on the work list for a future issue. Preply and Wyzant rates are listed-hourly-rate displays and represent the rate a buyer transacts at; the per-lesson distinction is italki-specific.

Preply specialty system is multi-checkbox-with-blurb. Preply tutors opt into specialties by checking boxes (Business English, IELTS, TOEFL, BEC, ESL/ESOL, Conversational English, English for Job Interviews, ~50 in total) and writing description-blurbs per checked box. A tutor with TOEFL checked is not a "TOEFL specialist" in any gated sense — they marked the checkbox and wrote a paragraph about it. The 4,456 Preply TOEFL count cited in Issue 1 and the 4,456 IELTS-approximated count here are broad opt-in measurements, not specialist counts.

Self-selection on platform skill tags. Issue 1's methodology caveat applies fully here. Tutors who list TOEFL or IELTS are tutors who tagged that test in their skill list — not tutors who have demonstrably specialized in it. The 4-test box-checking phenomenon is real, and the dual-listing analysis in this issue partially controls for it (TOEFL+IELTS dual-listing is a defensible product combination; TOEFL+IELTS+TOEIC+PTE is not). The medians we report should be read as "the median rate among tutors who list these tests" rather than "the median rate among test specialists."

Cross-tag analysis denominator. The dual-listing counts and specialist-premium medians run on the union of four test-filter scrapes per platform (TOEFL ∪ IELTS ∪ TOEIC ∪ PTE), de-duplicated by tutor identity: 729 unique Preply tutors, 799 italki, 690 Wyzant. The headline TOEFL/IELTS median rates in the opening table use the per-test scrape directly. Different denominators answer different questions — the former tells us about cross-listing behavior; the latter tells us what a buyer searching one test sees.

Sample-size imbalance in the Wyzant specialist premium. The Wyzant comparison pits TOEFL-only tutors (n=478, median $59.50) against exclusive TOEFL+IELTS dual-listers (n=85, median $50). The 5.6× sample imbalance means the TOEFL-only sample captures a wider range of tenure, reviews, and rate ceilings, and the $10 premium may reflect those compositional differences in part rather than pure buyer-perception of specialization. The directional finding — Wyzant rewards focused listings, the global platforms don't — is robust to that confound. The exact magnitude is not.

Sample-vs-pool box-checking. Our specialty-filtered scrapes capture top-of-sort tutors only. Box-checking density in our sample (4.2% on Preply) materially understates the full-pool density (10.9% per Preply's filter UI). The full-pool density is the better estimate for what fraction of the addressable supply is generalists/box-checkers; our sample-derived numbers reflect the top-of-sort surface that a buyer browsing default-sort actually encounters.

Listed rate as cleared rate. Same caveat as Issue 1. Listed rates approximate but aren't identical to transacted rates. Preply discounts trial lessons heavily and applies a 33% commission to first lessons; the effective transacted rate is lower than the listed rate, especially for new students. italki's lesson-type commission schedule (see Issue 1) means the listed-vs-transacted gap depends on whether the teacher sells single lessons or packages. Wyzant adds a buyer-side service fee that varies by tutor rate. The relative rate gaps between platforms are robust to these adjustments; absolute rates are not.

Personalization. All three platforms personalize their default surfaces by IP, account history, and locale. Italy-IP results may differ from US- / India- / China-IP results. Multi-region replication from US, UK, Spain, Vietnam, India, and Brazil VPN endpoints remains on the work list and will inform a future issue.

Single-point measurement. This is a snapshot. We cannot make trend claims ("rates rising," "supply growing," "specialty premium widening") without multiple measurements over time. Both Issue 1 and Issue 2 share a May 14 2026 reference date for comparability; trend analysis will become available once we have multiple scans separated by months.

Issue 3: Business English. The vertical with the most direct corporate-buyer story. Does the platform-anchored segmentation pattern hold when the buyer is an HR department paying for executive coaching, not a student paying for admissions prep?

Issue 4: Overseas EFL contracts in Japan and Korea. The two anchor markets for international English teaching — JET, EPIK, eikaiwa, hagwon. Listings, compensation packages, requirements. What does the full first-year package actually pay once housing, airfare, and severance are counted, and how does that compare to clearing rates online?

Data: 1,135 TOEFL-tagged + 870 IELTS-tagged tutor listings scraped May 14, 2026 across Preply (n=240/238), italki (n=313/441), Wyzant (n=582/191), from an Italy-IP authenticated browser session. Cross-tag overlap analysis from per-tutor identity matching (Wyzant tutor_id; Preply tutor_id extracted from profile URL; italki composite key on tutor_name + lesson count). Unified dataset and analysis scripts available on request.