Make the dances and teach them to the people performing them. Almost everyone does it after years of dancing first.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$55,310
Studio and small company
$34,090
Broadway, film, top companies
$138,630
The national median is $55,310 a year, and the bottom tenth are near $34,090. Read those numbers carefully: most of this work is paid by the project or by the hour, and full-time all-year choreography work is rare. The people earning the median usually stitch it together from three or four sources.
$25 to $45 an hour
Teaching and setting routines at a dance studio or a high school
Studio teaching pays the rent between projects for a large share of working choreographers. Competition season, from winter through spring, is the busy stretch.
$138,630 and up
Union stage work, television, commercial and touring jobs
Broadway and national tours are covered by the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, a labor union with negotiated minimum fees and royalties. Those contracts are the difference between a fee and a career, and they are hard to get.
You do not pay for a license. You pay for years of training.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
Nobody licenses choreographers, so the low end is dancing professionally and paying for a few summer intensives and workshops at $500 to $2,000 each while you build credits. The high end is a four year college dance degree at an in state public university at roughly $9,800 a year plus intensives every summer. The cheap door is much harder to walk through, because the training that gets you taken seriously usually started in childhood and cost a family thousands a year long before this calculation begins, and making new work means renting studio time at $20 to $60 an hour and paying the dancers.
File the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). A Pell Grant plus an in-state public university is the cheapest real route through a dance degree, and dance programs hand out talent scholarships on top.
Project fees
A flat fee to set a piece on a company or a show, paid once.
Royalties
On union stage contracts you keep getting paid while the show runs.
Teaching
Studio classes, college adjunct work, summer intensives. The steady part.
Grants and residencies
The National Endowment for the Arts funds dance projects, mostly through organizations rather than direct payments to individuals, so you usually apply with a company behind you.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
There is no license and no single route. There is only whether you can make work people want to perform.
Serious dance training
Years, starting young
Most choreographers started in a studio well before high school. Ballet technique underneath whatever style you love is the usual foundation.
High school
Keep training outside school. Start making short pieces on your friends now, badly, on purpose. That is how you learn.
College dance program or a company job
4 years, or none
A BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) in dance is the common route, and schools like Ohio State also offer graduate degrees. Plenty of people skip it and audition straight into a company instead.
Perform first, choreograph second
3 to 8 years
Very few people are hired to make dances before they have danced professionally. This is where the years go.
Build a body of work
Ongoing
Small commissions, student pieces, your own company, music videos. Video of finished work is your resume.
Dance and theater
Stage time, and a teacher who will let you set a piece.
Music
Counting, phrasing and reading a score make you far faster in rehearsal.
Anatomy or health science
You are responsible for keeping other people's bodies intact.
Business or media
Contracts, invoices, filming and editing your own work.
No state licenses choreographers and there is no exam. What replaces a license is other people's trust: the artistic director who commissions you, the dancers who will get in a room with you again. The one thing worth treating as formal is the union. The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society negotiates minimum fees and royalties for professional stage work in the United States, and membership comes with the contracts you sign, not with a diploma.
Things you don't need, but that help.
More than one style
The choreographer who can do ballet, hip hop and musical theater staging works far more weeks a year.
Filming and editing
Almost every hiring decision starts with someone watching your reel on a phone.
Rehearsal directing
Keeping somebody else's piece clean on tour is real paid work and it is how many people get inside a company.
Teaching credentials
A college dance department will hire you to teach, which is the closest thing to a salary in this field.
Injury prevention training
You will be the adult in the room deciding whether a tired dancer keeps going.
Grant writing
The money for new work in the United States mostly moves through applications.
A second income you do not hate
Teaching, physical therapy assisting, bartending. Most choreographers have one for years.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Morning alone in a studio with music, working out phrases on your own body and filming them on a phone. Afternoon rehearsal, three or four hours, teaching the material and fixing what does not read from the audience. Notes with the director or artistic staff. Evening spent cutting music, answering emails about the next contract, and planning tomorrow because rehearsal time is expensive and you are on the clock.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Choreography has been protected by United States copyright law since 1976, as long as it is written down or recorded. That is why a choreographer can be paid royalties every week a Broadway show runs.
The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society was founded in 1965 and negotiates contracts for Broadway, touring shows, off-Broadway and resident theaters across the country.
Dance/USA, founded in 1982, is the national service organization for professional dance. It runs job and audition listings and tracks where the funding in the field actually goes.
New dance work in the United States is usually funded by grants and donors rather than ticket sales. The National Endowment for the Arts awards go to organizations far more often than to individual artists, so choreographers learn to work with a company's development office.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise.