Udemy Review: Everything You Need to Know About Teaching on Udemy

Udemy is an educational platform. Learners use it to find expert-taught courses on an array of subjects, and instructors use it to share their expertise.

While you can offer free courses on Udemy, signing up as a premium instructor gives you the option to sell courses and earn a passive income each time a learner purchases your course.

Payment structure

How you’ll actually earn money on Udemy comes down to how learners access your course:

• Course sales: Individual learners can purchase your course and gain unlimited lifetime access to the content you created. Each time someone buys your course, you’ll get paid a percentage of the sale.
• Subscriptions: Some Udemy students have a subscription plan, such as a personal subscription or business subscription, which grants them access to your content as long as their subscription is active. In this case, you’ll get paid a percentage of the total revenue earned by courses in the subscription pool.

Udemy’s payment structure has changed numerous times over the years. Currently, instructors get 37% of the revenue from outright sales.

For subscription shares, instructors currently get a percentage of the income that Udemy puts aside for instructors contributing to a subscription pool. This percentage is currently 20%, but it’s set to drop to 17.5% in January 2025 and 15% in January 2026.

Here’s how that works. At the end of the month, Udemy calculates how much time all Udemy subscribers spent on your course content. If 1% of their time was spent on your courses, you would receive 1% of the 20% revenue pool that Udemy put aside for instructors whose courses are available to subscribers.

In terms of how you’ll get paid, you have the option to get paid via PayPal, Payoneer, or direct deposit. Udemy payments are delivered to instructors monthly after the 30-day period for course refunds has ended.

Costs and fees

There are no membership fees for teaching on Udemy, but the platform will take a whopping 63% cut of your revenue on all the courses you offer. However, for students who purchase your content using your coupon or referral link, Udemy will only take a 3% cut.

Types of courses you can offer

There are currently 13 categories of courses you can offer on Udemy:

• Development
• Business
• Finance and accounting
• IT and software
• Office productivity
• Personal development
• Design
• Marketing
• Lifestyle
• Photography and video
• Health and fitness
• Music
• Teaching and academics

However, there are far more subcategories for you to choose from. For example, in the category of design, you could do anything from mobile app design to pattern making. In other words, chances are good that if you have some level of subject matter expertise, you can probably teach it on Udemy.

For your course to be eligible for Udemy, it needs to have at least 30 minutes of video content, at least five lectures or learning modules, and adhere to Udemy’s course materials guidelines. You may not be able to sell your course if Udemy categorizes the subject as a restricted topic.

Udemy Business

Udemy Business is the leg of Udemy that specifically serves businesses and corporations. You can’t sign up for Udemy Business—instead, Udemy regularly reviews courses and adds qualifying courses to the Udemy Business offerings.

If your course is chosen for Udemy Business, it will become accessible to those who have purchased a Udemy Business subscription. Since these learners aren’t buying your course outright, your earnings will be based on overall student engagement.

Even though you can’t directly sign up for Udemy Business, Udemy provides content opportunity information to highly ranked instructors, giving them insight into what courses it might be interested in adding to Udemy Business next. This allows you to make a course that aligns with current content opportunities.

Getting started on Udemy is relatively straightforward, and it’s free for any instructor to create and use their Udemy account.

Start by going to the website and clicking “Teach on Udemy” and then “Get Started.” You’ll be asked to fill out a questionnaire, and then you’ll be directed to your instructor dashboard. From there, you’ll be able to use your account to sell courses on Udemy by following the steps outlined below.

1. Create your profile

From your instructor dashboard, you need to create an instructor profile that complies with Udemy’s profile standards. At minimum, you’ll need to meet the requirements below:

• Present only accurate, consistent, and verifiable information
• Use a photo of yourself only (no stock images)
• Refrain from using any outside links or contact information
• Craft streamlined copy that’s easy to read and understand

2. Undergo identity verification

Udemy will require you to undergo an automated identity verification process. You’ll be asked to confirm that you own the course content you’re publishing and provide both your ID and information regarding your place of residence. A third party will review these details, and then your profile will be verified within 2–3 business days.

3. Do market research on your subject area

To help you figure out whether you’ll actually be able to make any money from a particular topic, Udemy offers a marketplace insight tool to assess the demand for your niche. You can use this tool to get an idea of the student demand, search volume, and typical revenue for a particular topic.

Avoid choosing an overly broad topic, but also make sure you’re picking a topic that isn’t so hyper-specific that hardly anybody is searching for it. Striking a balance will allow you to attract more students and produce a high-quality course.

When using Udemy’s marketplace insight tool, take note of topics with little or no data. Udemy claims that these topics are your best bet since the lack of available information indicates a gap in the marketplace that you can fill.

4. Create and upload your first course

Once your profile is set up and verified, you can create your first course. Courses must include recordings and videos.

Handily enough, Udemy offers their own free course on how to create an online course on Udemy. This is worth checking out if you decide that Udemy is the best platform for you and you’re not quite sure how to go about making your own courses.

Once your course recordings and videos are uploaded, along with all necessary information (such as the course summary that Udemy requires), the Udemy quality review team will look over your course. If your course passes review, it will go live on the site; if not, it will be returned to you for edits and resubmission.

5. Apply to become a premium instructor

In order to make money off your course, you have to become a premium instructor. The process is free, but it takes an extra 2 business days.

To become a premium instructor, build your first Udemy course and then go to your course’s management page and view its pricing. There, you’ll see an option to begin the premium instructor application process.

The application process includes writing up a bio and providing payment information. After your payment method is approved, you’ll be able to begin selling your course on Udemy.

Online reports suggest you can make anywhere from $200 to $17,000 per month on Udemy. But there’s also a chance you’ll earn next to nothing. Just as is the case when selling anything, you’ll be able to earn more money selling a course on Udemy if it provides a great amount of value and is in demand.

The amount you can make on Udemy depends on how much you charge for your course, how many students take your course, and how students actually sign up for your course (i.e., whether they use your referral link).

You’ll keep 97% of the revenue if a student purchases your course using an instructor coupon or referral link, but you’ll only keep 37% of your revenue otherwise. These percentages are calculated after taxes, deductions, or fees, such as the 30% fee imposed by Apple or Google for sales on iOS and Android.

How Udemy subscriptions affect your income

If your course is included among those available to Udemy subscribers, then some users will be able to access your course without buying the course outright.  In this case, you’ll be paid your earned share of the 20% revenue that Udemy puts aside for instructors contributing to subscription course pools.

Having your course included among Udemy’s selected subscription offerings may help you earn more by getting you exposure to more learners. However, the income you get from subscriptions may be pretty low if your course doesn’t attract much attention from subscribers.

Before you start teaching on Udemy, hear what other Udemy instructors have to say about whether the platform is worth it. Here are a few stories, reviews, and feedback points shared anonymously online by alleged Udemy users.

Case A

“I have three courses. It was a gamble that did not pay off. I started in 2019 with course one and over a year since last one. I was also in a Udemy mastermind group to try to get more sales and courses. Currently I’m down to $80 month total from Udemy. If I had dedicated that much time and energy promoting in my own website then I would have made far more money. Friends that started the same time as me with the same topic and never tried Udemy are making 100k to over a million dollars a year … My topics are over saturated and the teachers with bogus certificates have taken over. My advice is check how much competition and then maybe put one course up to see how it goes.”

Case B

“The reality is that regardless of the official price of the course, the students are buying for about $15, and after fees, currency conversions, affiliates and taxes, the instructor is left with about $5/student enrolled.

“A minority of instructors will be the first good course in their niche, and get 1000s of students. They can earn 5 figures easily. They might even have multiple courses.

“The majority of instructors will have only 10s or 100s of students, and therefore less than $1000 for a course that might take many weeks to put together.”

Case C

“All the folks I’ve come across killing it on Udemy started 4-5 years ago and rode the wave building out their niche. It’s almost like an MLM situation where the founders and first movers do well, everyone else it’s still possible, just harder.

“Comes down to social proof and the idea that most of the traffic coming in buying courses favor (of course) those with the most students and highest reviews … I launched my course in October last year and I get a trickle of 2-3 sales a month, had an ok spike at launch and ended up giving away a couple hundred on free promo and have no regrets so far.”

Case D

“Setting up a Udemy course can be worth it as a side hustle, but consider competition and choose a unique topic. Be aware of Udemy’s revenue share and focus on creating high-quality content. Explore other platforms like Coursera and Skillshare. Ensure you have ownership rights for your content. Success requires consistent effort and promotion.”

Now that you have a better understanding of how Udemy works and how you could make money on the platform, the last thing you should do is take into account the platform’s main advantages and disadvantages, according to real users.

The consensus among many Udemy instructors is that it can be worthwhile to teach on Udemy—but only if you find a good niche to fill that remains largely untouched. Without that, you’ll struggle to compete with instructors who already dominate the market.