Bringing on a co-instructor usually happens for good reasons, you need someone who covers a subject you don't, or a cohort's grown large enough that one person can't handle every live session and every question in the community without burning out, and in the early excitement of teaming up, the conversation about money often gets handled with a handshake and a rough percentage rather than anything written down. That works fine for exactly as long as the relationship stays easy, which is usually right up until the first disagreement about who did more work, whose name should be listed first on the storefront, or what happens to future revenue if one of you steps back from teaching. By then, untangling the business and the friendship at the same time is a lot harder than it would have been to just write the terms down clearly before you started working together.
Deciding what you're actually splitting
The first real decision, before any percentage gets discussed, is what exactly the revenue share applies to, because "we'll split it fifty fifty" means something very different depending on whether that's fifty percent of gross enrollment revenue, fifty percent after payment processing, or fifty percent of net after you've also paid for ads, editing, or a community moderator to keep the group running smoothly. A lot of co-instructor disputes trace back to this exact ambiguity, one person assuming the split is on the full sticker price and the other assuming it's on whatever's left after every business expense, and both interpretations feel completely reasonable to the person holding them until you actually sit down and compare notes side by side. Writing this down specifically, with an example calculation using a real number from a real month, removes almost all of the room for that kind of honest but genuinely costly misunderstanding down the line.
Ongoing revenue versus one time contribution
The split that makes sense also depends heavily on what kind of contribution you're compensating, a co-instructor who's teaching every live session in a cohort and answering questions in the community for the full run of the program is doing meaningfully different work than someone who recorded four guest lessons once and hasn't touched the course since that recording day. Some creators handle this by paying a flat fee for a defined one time contribution and keeping the ongoing revenue share for whoever's actually still teaching, others prefer a straightforward ongoing percentage regardless of continued involvement because it's simpler to track and administer over time, and neither approach is wrong on its own, but the two people involved genuinely need to agree on which model you're using before enrollment opens, not after the first big sales day when the numbers actually start meaning something real.
In practice, most arrangements settle into one of three shapes, a one time guest lesson paid as a flat fee upfront where the only real thing to nail down is the exact deliverable and deadline, an ongoing co-teaching role paid as a percentage of net revenue where the important detail is agreeing precisely what counts as "net" and how often it's actually paid out, or a full co-ownership arrangement with an even or negotiated split of everything, where the one clause that matters most is what happens if one partner exits later on.
What a basic agreement should actually cover
You don't need a dense legal document to get most of the value here, a short written agreement that both people sign covers the essentials, the percentage split and what it's calculated on, how often payouts happen and through what method, who owns the course content and the brand name if the partnership ever ends, and what happens to future access and revenue if one instructor stops actively teaching but the course keeps selling. It's also worth addressing, even briefly, what happens if you eventually want to bundle the co-taught course together with other products in your catalog, since that changes how revenue gets attributed and is much easier to agree on in advance than to renegotiate after the bundle's already live and selling. None of this needs to feel adversarial to write, in fact treating it as a normal, expected part of setting up a partnership, the same way you'd expect any two people going into business together to write something down, tends to make the actual conversation far less awkward than people fear it'll be going in.
What happens when someone wants to leave
The clause creators skip most often is also the one that causes the most damage when it's missing, which is what happens if a co-instructor wants out, whether because they're moving on to something else or because the partnership simply isn't working anymore. Without something written down, this usually turns into an uncomfortable, ad hoc negotiation happening at the exact moment goodwill between the two of you is already running low, over questions like whether the departing instructor still gets paid on future sales of a course they helped build, whether their name and likeness can stay on existing marketing material, and whether they're free to teach a similar course elsewhere afterward. Agreeing on rough answers to these questions while the partnership is still going well, even if you never expect to actually need them, means an exit, if it ever happens, is a known process rather than an argument that has to invent its own rules from scratch under pressure.
The same basic thinking scales down usefully to smaller arrangements too, a guest expert brought in for a single masterclass inside your course, or someone you're paying a small percentage to promote your course to their own audience, benefits from the same clarity even if the stakes are much lower than a full co-instructor partnership. A short written note confirming the fee or percentage, what it's based on, and when it's paid takes five minutes to send over email and avoids the far more common small dispute, someone assuming a one time guest appearance entitles them to an ongoing cut of a course that grows well beyond what either of you expected on the day they recorded it.
Keeping the operational side simple once it's agreed
Once the terms are actually settled, the platform running underneath the partnership should make the split easy to honor rather than something you're manually reconciling from a spreadsheet every month, which is part of why creators running co-taught programs tend to prefer a setup where enrollment, payment records and automations all live in one place rather than scattered across each instructor's own separate tools and logins. Clear, centralized records of who enrolled when and what they paid make the actual payout conversation a five minute task instead of a recurring source of low grade tension between two people who otherwise work well together, and that operational simplicity, more than the specific percentage you land on, is often what determines whether a co-instructor partnership survives past its first year of actually running.
A good co-instructor relationship is genuinely one of the better ways to grow a course business faster than you could alone, but it only stays good if the money side is settled in writing before the excitement of launching together takes over completely, because the terms you'd have happily agreed to on day one become a lot harder to negotiate fairly once real revenue, and real disagreement about who earned what, is already sitting on the table between you.