Funny Money and Card Payouts: What Lands in Your Hand

Club scrip and card payments pay out below face, usually fifteen to thirty percent below once the club has taken its processing on both ends, and you should know your club's exact rate before you accept the first dance dollar. A customer who pays forty in funny money has not paid you forty. He has paid the club something over forty, and the club will pay you something under it at cash-out, and the gap between those two numbers is the club's second business. Price card and scrip higher than cash, ask for the tip in cash, and run the arithmetic once so that when a man holds out a stack of dance dollars you know what it is worth.

How funny money works

Many clubs sell their own currency, dance dollars or club bucks or whatever the printing says, to customers who pay by card. The customer pays a surcharge on the way in; the dancer takes a haircut on the way out. Reports from dancers and former managers put the numbers in a consistent range:

• A Times Square club, 2012: a dance dollar cost the customer twenty-three for a twenty-dollar dance, and the dancer redeemed it at sixteen, about seventy percent of face.
• A New York chain, 2009 to 2013: scrip sold at twenty-four, redeemed by the dancer at eighteen, seventy-five percent.
• A former club manager, writing about a mid-tier club: twenty percent surcharge to the customer and twenty percent off for the dancer, a thirty-three percent spread between what he paid and what she got.
• A 2019 report on cashless clubs: around ten percent charged to the customer and ten to fifteen percent taken from the dancer at redemption, with one club keeping close to thirty percent of every card-paid dance.
• A Florida club's own guide, 2024: five to ten percent card processing and a five to twenty dollar ATM surcharge on the customer side.

At the better end, a forty-dollar scrip dance pays you thirty-four. At the worse end, twenty-eight. Over a night of fifteen scrip dances that is between ninety and a hundred eighty dollars that went to the house instead of to you. The /calculators/scrip-haircut tool does the arithmetic for your club's rate.

Know the rate before you accept it

Ask the house mom or the host on your first shift: "What's the redemption on dance dollars, and when do they pay out?" Get both numbers. Some clubs pay scrip at the end of the shift; some hold it to the next pay cycle; some cap how much you can redeem per night. A customer-side guide to club spending notes that funny money is exchanged at a worse rate everywhere, and that is true, but the rate varies from a few percent to a third, and the difference decides whether a scrip customer is worth your time.

If you do not know the rate, you cannot price. If the club will not tell you, that is a red flag worth adding to the list in /advice/red-flags-in-a-clubs-contract-and-house-rules.

How much more should I charge on card or funny money?

Enough to cover the haircut and a little more, said flat and once. If your club takes fifteen percent on redemption, a forty-dollar cash dance should be fifty in scrip; if it takes twenty-five, sixty. Round up, because the customer paid a surcharge to buy the scrip and will not notice another five, and because the price has to be a clean number you can say without hesitating. "Forty cash, fifty on the card" is a sentence every bar in town says in some form, and nobody argues. A beginner guide recommends exactly this, raising the price slightly to cover card processing, and vets do it as a matter of course. /advice/pricing-without-flinching has the rest of the pricing rules.

For rooms, the same logic applies to the whole room, and the numbers are bigger. A three-hundred-dollar room paid in scrip at a twenty-five percent haircut pays you two twenty-five before the club's room cut. Quote rooms in cash, and if he is paying by card, quote the card price.

Tips: ask for cash

The tip is the one line that should be yours in full, and on card it is not. "The room's on the card, tip me in cash so it's mine" is understood by almost every customer and gets you a cash tip from most. If he has no cash, the ATM is usually twenty feet away and the walk is a chance to stack the next sale. /advice/asking-for-the-tip has the full ask.

When do I get paid for card sales?

Clubs that take cards directly, rather than through scrip, generally pay dancers out at the end of the shift minus processing, and some hold card money to a weekly or biweekly payout. Know which. A dancer who gets paid cash at the end of the night can pay her house fee, tip out, and leave; a dancer whose rooms were all on card may leave a big night with little cash in hand and a payout coming later, and may have paid her fees out of the cash she did have. Plan for it: keep a cash buffer for fees, and treat card money as money you will see later, not tonight.

Check the card payout line at cash-out the same way you check the dance count (/advice/counting-songs-and-checking-the-house). Card sales are the easiest thing for a busy host to mis-attribute, and the hardest to prove without your own record of which customer paid how and when.

Tax note

Card and scrip income is recorded income. The club has a record of it, and in some cases a 1099 will show it. Cash is self-reported. Both are taxable, and the set-aside rule is the same for both: twenty-five to thirty-five percent of net, put away from every shift, with a tax professional who knows cash businesses to settle the rest. /advice/taxes-for-dancers has it in full. Do not let the card haircut tempt you into thinking the cash side is the part that does not count.

Do this tonight

• Ask the house mom the scrip redemption rate and the card payout schedule before your first dance.
• Set a card price that covers the haircut and round it up to a clean number.
• Quote rooms in cash and say the card price only if he is paying by card.
• Ask for the tip in cash on every card-paid room.
• Note cash versus card on every line of your tally so cash-out can be checked.