Leave too little and every lesson starts late. Leave too much and you lose billable hours. Here is a formula that gets the gap right for each pair of homes.
The gap between two in-home lessons is the drive time between the two addresses plus a buffer. That is it. Gap equals drive plus buffer. Everything else in this guide is about getting each of those two numbers right instead of using one flat number for the whole studio.
A flat gap, such as "fifteen minutes between every lesson", is wrong in both directions at once. It is too short for the pair of homes across town and too long for the pair of neighbors, so you end up with late starts on some days and dead time on others.
Use a map service to get the drive time between the two actual addresses, not between neighborhoods. Two homes in the same zip code can be five minutes or twenty-five minutes apart depending on the road layout, a creek, or a freeway on-ramp. If you want to check a pair quickly, the free drive time calculator on this site does it for two addresses.
Ask for the drive at the time of day the lessons actually happen. A map's default answer assumes light traffic. A drive that is eleven minutes at 10 a.m. can be well over twenty at 4:30 p.m. on a school day. Many map services let you set a departure time, and for a weekday afternoon lesson route that setting matters more than any other choice you make.
The buffer covers everything that is not driving: parking, walking to the door, getting the instrument out, saying hello, and the minute or two the previous family ran over. A buffer of five minutes is the floor for a teacher who wants to arrive on time, and fifteen minutes is generous. Most teachers settle at around ten.
Pick one default and write it down so it is a policy and not a mood. Then adjust for known differences: add time for an apartment building with a locked lobby, a gated community, or a house with a long driveway; shave it for a family you have visited every week for three years.
The numbers below are made up to show the arithmetic, not typical values. A violin teacher finishes a lesson at 4:00 and the next family is 12 minutes away at that hour of day. With a 10 minute buffer the gap is 22 minutes. The next lesson cannot start before 4:22, and since most teachers want clean start times, it is placed at 4:30.
If the next family is the sibling of the student just taught, in the same house, the drive is zero and the buffer can be zero too. They are one stop. This is why siblings on one teacher on one afternoon is such a strong scheduling pattern: it removes a whole gap.
Gaps rarely land on a round start time. Decide whether you round up to the next quarter hour, the next half hour, or run exact minutes. Rounding up wastes time, but it also gives you slack, and slack is what absorbs a late-running lesson. Many teachers round to the nearest quarter hour and treat anything tighter as a day that needs a second look.
Whatever you choose, apply it the same way everywhere. A schedule where some gaps are rounded and some are exact looks fine on paper and falls apart the first time a lesson runs over.
The cheapest drive time is the drive you do not take. Instead of placing students in the order they replied, group them by area and chain a teacher's day along a route: one end of town in the early afternoon, moving steadily toward the other by evening. Two students who live four minutes apart, placed back to back, save more than any buffer tuning ever will.
This is also the moment to look at the first and last lesson of each day. The first drive from home and the last drive back are not billable, so a teacher's day that begins and ends near their own home is a better day for the same hours of lessons.
Decide this before you build, because it changes the math. If you pay teachers for driving, or if driving counts toward the longest day you are willing to schedule, then every minute of drive is a cost. If you do not pay for it, teachers are still spending it, and a day that looks like six hours of lessons may feel like nine. Either way, track total drive per teacher per week and look at the number.
The failures here are consistent across studios of every size.
Checking one gap is easy. Checking a hundred is not. Set the Tune works out the drive between every pair of homes at lesson-time traffic, requires the gap to cover drive plus buffer, and treats siblings at one address as a single stop. The page on in-home lesson scheduling covers how it works, and you can open the demo to see real drive times on a sample day.
Leave the drive time between the two addresses plus a buffer of about 5 to 15 minutes. Ten minutes is a common default. Use the drive time for the hour the lessons actually run, not the light-traffic default.
Usually no. Siblings at the same address are one stop, so the drive is zero and the gap can be zero.
Most maps show light traffic unless you set a departure time. Set the weekday afternoon time to get a realistic number.
That is a business decision for each studio. Whatever you decide, track weekly drive time per teacher so you know what it costs in time even when it is unpaid.