A make-up lesson policy that doesn't cost you money

The short version

• Make-ups are a scheduling liability, not a courtesy. Every credit you bank is an hour you owe out of your own calendar later.
• The cost is in hours, not dollars. A 28-student studio giving unlimited make-ups spends about 50 hours a term on them.
• Three dials control your exposure: notice window (24 or 48 hours), cap (0 to 3 credits), and expiration (14 days to 6 months). Real published studio policies sit inside those ranges.
• A credit is a right to reschedule, never a right to a discount. Pick one. Doing both quietly doubles the cost of every absence.
• Track credits in a ledger with an expiry date and a status column, even if it's a spreadsheet.

What a make-up credit actually is

A make-up credit is a promise to deliver teaching time you have already been paid for. It is not a refund, not a discount, and not a prepaid lesson package.

That distinction sounds pedantic until a family asks you to knock $60 off the November invoice and schedule the make-up. Then it's the whole ball game.

Your cancellation policy decides whether a missed lesson earns a credit. Your make-up policy decides what happens to the credit after that. The two documents have to agree, or families will read whichever one favors them.

What unlimited make-ups cost in hours

Here is the calculation almost nobody runs. The numbers below are illustrative, but the structure is the point. Substitute your own.

Assumptions: 28 students, weekly 45-minute lessons at $60, a 15-week fall term, each student missing two lessons in the term, and eight minutes of messaging and rescheduling per make-up.

The capped row assumes about 40% of absences land inside the notice window and earn nothing, and that roughly 15% of issued credits expire unclaimed. Both are conservative.

The gap is 28 hours a term. Across two terms that's about 57 hours a year, which is a week and a half of full-time work, taken out of your evenings and Saturdays.

Now look at the same 42 hours as capacity. Spread over 15 weeks, that's 2.8 hours a week — nearly four recurring 45-minute slots you can't sell, because make-ups are holding them. Count only three of those slots at $60 a week for 15 weeks and it's $2,700 a term, or $5,400 across the year.

Unlimited make-ups don't cost you a refund. They cost you the studio you could have had.

What real studios actually publish

Before you decide your own numbers, it helps to see the range. These are eight make-up policies published on real studio and community-music-school websites, checked September 16, 2026.

Three things stand out. Nobody publishes a notice window shorter than 24 hours. Nobody caps above three credits. And four of the five studios that issue a trackable credit put a deadline on it, from 14 days to six months.

If you were worried a cap of two would look harsh, it doesn't. It sits in the middle of what working studios already post publicly.

The four models

No make-ups. Tuition reserves a place in your schedule, and the reservation is what the family buys. This is only defensible if you say so in the enrollment agreement, up front, and if you honor teacher-initiated cancellations with a real make-up.

Limited credits. A student earns a credit when they cancel with notice, up to a cap, and the credit expires. This is the model that needs a ledger, and the one most teachers should pick.

Swap list. You publish a roster of enrolled families who have opted in to sharing contact details, and families trade lesson times with each other. Landrum Music Studio runs exactly this: the family arranges the swap, then emails the teacher to confirm. Your only job is confirming, which is the whole point.

Flex week. You bill an annual tuition divided into 12 equal payments and teach fewer weeks than the calendar has — the studio-business writer Wendy Stevens describes teaching 38 weeks a year and holding the remainder as flex. Absences absorb into the buffer instead of generating individual credits.

The swap list only works if you stay out of the negotiation. The moment you start texting three families to find a match, you have converted a zero-hour model into a high-hour one. Publish the list, state that arranging the swap is the family's job, and require an email confirmation to you before it counts.

Copy-paste make-up lesson policy language

Replace the bracketed values with your own, and put the result in your studio handbook alongside the other policies families sign. These are drafting starting points, not legal advice; if your state regulates prepaid instruction or your studio operates as an entity, have a local attorney read your enrollment agreement.

Model 1 — No make-ups

Tuition reserves your student's weekly lesson time for the full term. Lessons missed by the student are not credited, rescheduled, or refunded, for any reason. If I must cancel a lesson, I will reschedule it at a mutually workable time or credit it to your next invoice.

Model 2 — Limited credits

Lessons canceled with at least [24] hours' notice earn a make-up credit. A student may hold up to [2] open credits at one time; absences beyond that are not credited. Credits must be used within [30] days of the missed lesson and expire after that. Cancellations with less than [24] hours' notice, and no-shows, do not earn a credit. Make-up credits have no cash value and are not refundable.

Model 3 — Swap list

Families who opt in appear on the studio swap list with a name, lesson time, and email address. If you need to miss a lesson, contact another family directly and arrange a trade. Email me once both families agree, at least [24] hours before the earlier of the two lessons, and I will confirm the change. I do not arrange swaps on a family's behalf. Lessons missed without an arranged swap are not credited.

Model 4 — Flex week

Annual tuition covers [38] weeks of instruction, billed in 12 equal monthly payments. The studio calendar publishes scheduled breaks; the remaining weeks are held as flex time for illness, weather, and emergencies on either side. Individual missed lessons are absorbed by this buffer and are not separately credited or refunded.

The make-up credit ledger

If you issue credits, you need a record. At 20 students a spreadsheet is genuinely fine. Here is the layout.

Add one summary cell: =SUMIFS(Length,Status,"Open")/60. That gives you open credits in hours — your actual liability. If it reads 9.5 hours in October, you owe nine and a half hours of Saturdays.

Set a second cell to count open credits per student, =COUNTIFS(Student,B2,Status,"Open"), so the cap enforces itself before you say yes to a third one.

Filled in, on a two-credit cap, it looks like this:

Two open credits at 45 minutes each is 1.5 hours you owe. Ben is at the cap, so his next cancellation is a conversation you have already had in writing — not a decision you have to make on a Tuesday night.

This is the ledger LessonCadence keeps automatically, with the policy engine checking the notice window at the moment a family reschedules and banking or declining the credit without you in the loop. The spreadsheet works fine at 20 students, and it is the right place to start.

How make-up credits interact with monthly invoicing

This is where the money actually goes, and it is almost never discussed.

The failure is simple. A student misses October 14. You take the lesson off the October invoice, dropping it from $240 to $180. Then you teach the make-up on November 20 and don't bill for it, because in your head it was already handled.

You just gave away $60. Do that for 56 absences in a term and it's $3,360 — a bigger number than anything in the hours calculation above.

The rule: a credit is a scheduling right or a money right, never both. If you reduce the invoice, no make-up is owed. If you bank a make-up, the invoice does not change.

In practice that means billing the full monthly tuition, then showing the make-up as a $0 line item that names the lesson it replaces:

That $0 line does two jobs. It shows the parent the credit was honored, and it stops the "but we paid for that already" conversation before it starts. If you bill from actual attendance rather than a flat rule, the same principle holds: the make-up carries the invoice period that paid for it, not the one it was taught in.

One more distinction worth keeping precise. A make-up credit is not a prepaid lesson package. A package is money paid in advance for lessons not yet scheduled; a make-up credit is time owed for money already earned. Prepaid packages for tutoring are on the LessonCadence roadmap, not in the product today.

When credits pile up: expiry, withdrawal, and the accounting question

An unused credit is an obligation. If a family withdraws holding two open credits, you either teach two lessons after they've stopped paying or you say no to a family on the way out.

Write the answer down before it happens. Opus 1 Music Studio is the one studio above that addresses it head-on: credits expire 30 days after a membership ends. A rule like that is defensible precisely because it was disclosed at enrollment.

Credits you hold also have a bookkeeping dimension. IRS Publication 538 is clear that on the cash method you report income in the year you receive it, so tuition covering a lesson you still owe is already income this year; an accrual-basis studio can elect to defer some advance payments by a year. This is not tax advice. If you carry meaningful credit balances across a year-end, ask your accountant — our studio bookkeeping walkthrough covers what to bring them.

The family that games it

Every studio has one. They cancel at 25 hours' notice, every month, with a different reason.

You don't need a new rule for them. You need the cap, and you need to apply it the same way you apply it to everyone else. That's the entire enforcement mechanism.

When they hit the cap, send the same sentence every time: "That's your second credit this term, so the lesson on the 14th stays on the calendar. I'll see you then." No explanation, no negotiation, no exception you'll have to remember next month.

A serial 25-hour canceler is not the same problem as a family that simply doesn't show up; repeat no-shows cost you differently, and the cap is the wrong tool for them.

Inconsistent enforcement is worse than a loose policy, because it teaches families that the rule is really about who asks hardest. If you find yourself making exceptions for one family in three, your cap is set wrong — raise it for everyone and enforce the new number.