Udemy Used to Have to File Every Cut to Your Pay. Since May, It Doesn't.

The most consequential sentence Udemy ever wrote to its instructors ran in a November 2023 post that read like housekeeping: the change was "calibrated against our expected growth rate, with the goal that total instructor payouts will equal or exceed their current levels each year."

Underneath it was a schedule. The subscription share would go to 20% in January 2024, 17.5% in January 2025, and 15% in January 2026. The marketplace revenue share of 37% was not changing. Udemy disclosed the whole ladder via an SEC filing in November 2023.

That third rung landed this January. The instructor pool for every subscription product is now 15% of monthly subscription revenue, split by share of minutes consumed.

And then the paperwork stopped.

The promise, measured

Class Central puts peak instructor earnings at $209.5 million in 2023 — the year the promise was made. Class Central, run by CEO Dhawal Shah, has tracked the payout line since.

Udemy's final annual report says instructors earned $168 million in 2025. Content costs — which Udemy defines as "the payments to our instructors" — were 32% of consumer segment revenue that year, down from 35% in 2024.

The company's own side of the ledger moved the other way. Net income improved by $89.3 million in 2025, its first profitable year, and Udemy attributed the swing to "the reduction in the instructor revenue share for all subscription offerings, the continued shift in mix of revenue toward" its higher-margin lines, among other factors.

It is rare to get a company writing down, in a public filing, that cutting creator pay helped it turn profitable. You got it because it had to.

What actually switched off in May

The Coursera combination closed on May 11, 2026, after stockholders approved it on April 9; each Udemy share was exchanged for 0.800 Coursera shares. Udemy's common stock was delisted from Nasdaq. "Together, Coursera and Udemy have the scale, the data, and the talent to move faster," said Coursera CEO Greg Hart, describing a plan to build "the world's most comprehensive skills platform for the AI era."

Ten days later, on May 21, Udemy filed a Form 15 terminating its registration and suspending its reporting duty. Approximate number of holders of record on that form: 1.

Udemy is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Coursera, its shares no longer trade, and it files no further public financial reports.

That is the part nobody said out loud. The 2024, 2025 and 2026 cuts came with effective dates you could read a year in advance, in a document Udemy was legally obliged to publish, alongside the annual payout total that let anyone check the promise against the outcome. Both of those instruments are now gone. A fourth cut needs only an email.

The early-warning system was the filing

Udemy told instructors that for now nothing changes. Take that at face value — it still leaves creators with no audited annual number to argue with next time.

The history is not reassuring. On the Q3 2025 earnings call, Udemy's CFO said the company was "intentionally reducing" single course sales to push users toward subscriptions — Udemy keeps 82.5% of subscription revenue versus 63% from one-off purchases. Ads arrived on free courses in July 2025 across 170 countries, with no share of that money going to instructors.

Even the starting point is now contested. Ruzuku, reconstructing the ladder from Udemy's filings, notes the widely quoted 25% figure could not be sourced to any Udemy document, so its timeline begins at 20%. That is what happens to a record when the filer walks away from it.

For most people this is not a portfolio question. An independent study of hundreds of thousands of Udemy courses found the average instructor earns $3,306 a year, with 75% earning under $1,000. January's sales are paid in the first ten business days of March, and any balance under $25 is held until December.

Industry analysis published after the deal closed projected combined payouts could fall in 2026, citing the completed 15% cut and a new platform fee Coursera introduced on its own content-partner revenue — a projection, not a company statement.

Which is now the only kind of number anyone outside the building is going to get.