Built by teachers, for teachers.

The problem with ESL job boards in 2026.

If you have ever applied for an ESL job, you know the pattern. You upload your CV to one of the big legacy boards. Within 24 hours you have 30 emails from "recruiters" — most of them in countries you didn't apply to, attached to schools they don't actually represent, offering salaries 30% lower than the listing said. They want a 10% commission on your contract. They will not negotiate it on your behalf. They are middlemen, and the only person they help is themselves.

The legacy boards profit from this. They sell your contact information to recruiters. They list jobs without verifying the schools. Salaries are listed as "competitive" or "negotiable" because schools don't have to commit to a real number to be listed.

The result, from a teacher's side: lots of noise, lots of false starts, lots of contracts that aren't what they were advertised. We've all been there.

What we do differently.

ESLteacher.com was built around a small set of principles, none of which are revolutionary, all of which the legacy boards refuse to commit to.

Every salary is posted up front, in real numbers, in local currency. If a school refuses to publish a salary range, we don't list the job. There is no "competitive" on this site.

Every school is verified by a working teacher in that country. We have working teachers in 12 of the 62 countries we cover, and we are growing the verification network. The schools we have heard bad things about — the chains that don't pay on time, the schools that have safety issues, the recruiters running fake school fronts — we don't list them, even when they offer to pay us double.

Teachers apply directly to the school. No recruiter in the middle taking a cut. Your CV goes to the hiring manager. The relationship — and the negotiation — is yours.

Schools pay; teachers don't. Schools pay $79 to list. Featured listings are $199. We have a volume tier for chains. Teachers pay nothing — ever — and we will never charge a teacher.

Resources are free. The country guides, the salary database, the contract templates, the lesson plans — all free, no email signup required. The ESL world has enough gatekeeping. We don't add to it.

Who built this.

ESLteacher was started in Chiang Mai by a small team of working ESL teachers and one tech-side founder who got tired of watching colleagues take bad contracts because the information they needed wasn't where they could find it.

We are still a small team. We pick up our own emails. We answer our own LINE messages. We answer DMs on Twitter. If you write to us about a country and we have a teacher on the ground there, we connect you to them. If we don't, we say so honestly and ask you for the same favor in reverse if you take the job.

Our offices, such as they are, sit on a side road off Tha Phae Road in Chiang Mai. Email is the best way to reach us. We're hello@eslteacher.com.