The life as a professional dancer is exciting, always changing and full of passion. But living your dream can also be very challenging and sometimes even tiring.
When you have to hop on every job you can get, side-hustel like there is no tomorrow and still run out of money in the middel of the month, it’s time to change something!
I collected 20 ways for you how to make good money as a professional dancer.
Table of Contents
Teaching: the safe income
Teaching is for sure the most popular income stream of professional dancers. With group lessons, classes and especially with privat lessons you can make some good money.
To start, you can either get hired as a dance teacher or rent your own place and start from the scratch.
As a teacher in a dance school the ratios are mostly 50:50 to 60:40 or you get a fixed salary by the school. You can also team up with local companies to organize lunch break or after work dance classes.
The second option, to rent a place, will take some more organization and a little risk from you, but you will be able to make a lot more money. Aks around in local churches, gyms, yoga studios etc. and see how much they would ask for a rental. Be also aware how many students you would need to cover the rent.
Read here what your students should bring to their first dance class!
Perform as a professional dancer
What we all want to do as professional dancers is perform. That’s why we get up in the morning, why we practice for hours in the dance hall and what our dreams are all about.
Now, you have different possiblities to get a job as a performer. I recommend you to do all of them, because as you might know, you won’t get every job.
Get portfolios at local or national show and event agencies. They will propose you for dinner shows, cabarets, club evenings, weddings and special events. But also dancing in Movies, Music Videos or Commercials is possible. You surely don’t have to take every job they offer. But these are usually fun and well-payed events, you don’t want to miss.
The next possiblity is to go to open castings and auditions. There are free platforms like au-di-tions or danceeurope, but also high quality platforms with a monthly fee like Backstage, Answers4Dancers and Calltime. Even on Instagram or facebook you might find some open auditions.
Another way is to find yourself an agent, that organises auditions for you and gets you into jobs. An agent will ask you a commission for every job you take. But they usually have a very good network and access to the big jobs.
Get creative as a Choreographer
There is more and more request for special wedding dances, graduation shows and birthday surprises. Offer your skills as a choreographer and create unforgettable dances for other people.
The best working strategy here is the word of mouth. Try to animate your friends and family, to make some advertising for you.
You can also upload your work offer on platforms like ebay, Fiverr and Upwork. Sometimes it even helps to post a story on Instagram or Facebook.
Photography and Videography
If you are good with the camera, than dance photography and videography is for you!
Wheter you go to dance competitions, theater shows or you shoot in a studio – there are lots of dancers in need for some nice shots.
In the beginning, before the good money comes in, you will have to make yourself a name. Try to use stock platforms like iStock or social media like YouTube and Instagram. As always, success needs some time!
Write about dancing: Advise by a professional dancer
You loved writing essays in school? Than you should write about dancing!
There are quite some dance magazines, that are always in need of a new perspective and fresh voices. You can pitch your ideas to magazines like Dance Magazine, Dance Spirit, Pointe Magazine or Dance Informa.
Starting a Blog might be a good idea as well. This one comes with a little more effort. But once your blog takes off, you can make money with ads, affiliate-marketing, sponsored posts and so on.
The professional dancer online
Not only teaching in the dance hall can bring you a good income as a professional dancer. Especially after Covid, people love to take online-classes.
By creating video tutorials and online courses, you can even create a nice passive income. Particulary for pro dancers having more time for practice and auditions is a big plus.
Use platforms like YouTube, you own Website or OnlyFans (yes, it’s not all about +18 content there!).
Monetize your social media
The no.1 dream job of today’s teenagers? Beeing an Influencer!
Use the skills that you have to create a big audience on Instagram, TikTok or Twitch. But even if you have a small follwer count, you can start to monetize your social media.
For having success, try to collaborate with other dancers to build your network and be flexible in what your audience wants to see from you.
Possible topics are dance tutorials, your own thrilling choreographies or insights in the life of a dancer.
Work as a fitness trainer
As a professional dancer you anyway have good physics and a well trained body. So why not use that to earn some money?
Especially women love to take dance fitness classes. You can either create your own class to combine dance and fitness or become an istructor of an existing program like Zumba.
If you want to go one step further, a fitness trainer license might be for you. With group, private and online lessons you can create a stable second income stream.
Take part in a TV Show as a professional dancer
Become famous and work in the TV is a dream of many people. As a dancer you are already used to the spotlight, so why not take your chances with TV?
You could either try to work as a instructor or backgroud dancer in shows like Dancing with the stars. Or you take part in talent shows like So you think you can dance, World of dance or Americas Got Talent (or your countries equivalent).
You will not only get payed, but you recieve a lot of publicity, that helps you with your further career.
Become a Make-up and Hair stylist
Especially the girls under the professional dancers become experts in hair and make-up styling during their career. If you are really good or willing to make a special training, you can earn some money with your skills.
Whether you become a stylist in a theater, create looks for music videos and commercials or help to prepare dancers in competitions: beautiful make-up and hair styles are always needed.
Work as a dance judge
When you are a professional dancer, you are already dancing on a very high level. So why not evaluate beginners or mediocres?
When you judge a competition just for fun, you will probably not earn much or nothing at all. To judge professionaly, in many countries you will have to aquire a licence.
Look at the money and time you are spendig for this as an investment in the future. Many dancers of a certain age switch their careers from the professional dancer to the judge. So you might as well start now, to fullfill the requirements.
Sell dance related things
If you are good in hand crafting, why not create dance related things and sell them to beginners or other professional dancers?
You could sew practice, show and competition outfits, create personalized dance drawings, embellish dancer stuff like shoe bags and pre-show tracksuits or do something completely different.
Your creativity will be the only limit with this extra income stream. By selling your items via Ebay, Etsy, Instagram, Amazon or even your own online-shop, you can create a great income for yourself.
On a cruise ship as a professional dancer
A very fun side-hustle is to dance on a cruise ship. All the big cruise lines are constantly looking for professional dancers to entertain and teach their guests.
You will be on sea a couple of weeks up to some months, creating shows, teaching the vacationers and just doing what you love to do all day.
Depending on your contract it is possible that your tasks on board include child care and other entertaining activities as well. But you will not only get a quite nice salary, you will also travel the world and live and eat on deck for free!
Extra tip: By subrenting your apartment in the city while you are on deck as a professional dancer, you might be able to earn just a little more with this job.
Become a sport psychologist
This one will need some more effort and preparation. If you are a dancer that competes, you have the best requirements to become a sport psychologist. But even if you don’t, the pressure to perform is well-know by all dancers, no matter what style.
Sport psychologists can either work just for one sport team, like a high class football club. But you can also supervise different sports the same time. The variety in sports is huge.
In order to go from a professional dancer to a sport psychologist, the first thing you’ll need to do, is getting a bachelors degree in psychology. After you can decide, if you want to do a specifying master or if you want to do a training specially for sport psychologists.
Organize dance events
If you are like me and you really enjoy organizining stuff, organizing dance events for earning some extra cash is for you!
You don’t necessarily need your own dance studio for doing this. In fact, it’s better to not do this kind of side-husteling alone. Organizing events like kids summer camps, dance evenings and weekend workshops require a lot of work and time.
You can pair up with other dancers or a dance studio and share the work and money. If you are teaching as well, you might get many new students this way.
Sell your dance clothes
Naturally, over the years you collect a lot of dance clothes. But be honest, how many of them do you actually wear?
Make some space in your wardrobe and sell all of the items you are not wearing anymore.
You can sell your practice clothes and even show and competition outfits on marketplaces like ebay or vinted. But even better is joing special facebook groups for dance clothes and make some inserts. Even by posting some Instagram stories you might be able to sell your not worn dance clothes.
Produce dance music
What is the only thing, dancers urgently need for dancing? Right, it’s music.
You don’t need to be a great singer or play five instruments to produce dance music. It’s enough to have a nice music program like FLStudio on your computer and you can immediately start.
By creating a remix, differing the pace of the chart no.1 hit or even starting of the scratch, you can earn money on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and many more music platforms.
Rent your dance studio
This way of earning money will apply to you only if you are a professional dancer that is owning his own studio.
If you do, you might know that the maintanance of a studio is quite expensive. Try to fill out the gaps between the lessons or free evenings and weekends with renting your studio.
Wether it’s for a birthday party, a club event or even a wedding. Many people are looking for a nice big hall to celebrate.
Make some nice pictures of your hall, measure it out and write the information and the conditions of renting your hall on your website. Additionally, you can create inserts on real estate platforms or selling platforms like ebay.
Like always, the word of mouth will bring you a lot of new customers, so be sure to always have a good relation to your existing clients.
Sponsoring for professional dancers
Almost all professional athletes have sponsors, so why not us professional dancers?
Since dance is a way smaller sport than football, basketball or Formular 1, unfortunately it is not very likely that you will become a brand ambassador of Nike, Mercedes or Red Bull. I’m not saying though that’s impossible!
To get started you might want to reach out to smaller brands and local or regional businesses first. Especially companies in towns and smaller cities are very aware on getting recognized by the population and creating a positive and approachable image of themselves.
You as a local athlete could help them to create and groom this image. It’s a win win situation for both!
Advertiser and professional dancer
Advertising and sponsoring are quite similar. The difference of advertising is, that you will get payed only if you show off and present a brand.
Like with websites, free spots in the metro or the 15 minutes in the cinema, you can sell advertisement spots. Wether it’s a sew-on on your dance clothes, a poster in your dance school or a Reel on your Instagram page: you have lots of possibilities to earn money with advertising as a professional dancer.
Extra Tip: Make sure, that the topic of the ad lines up with dancing. Having posters of McDonalds in your dance school might not be the best idea. Not for you and not for the paying company.
So that’s it with the 20 ways how to make good money as a professional dancer. Which one did you already try and what do you want to try next?
If you have more ideas how to earn money as a dancer, let me know in the commets!
