Looking at weird jobs and their incomes is becoming a past-time of mine as of late. Professional mourners is a weird job – and I wonder how much they make. In this post, we’ll talk about how much professional mourners make and whether or not this weird job is worth doing.

Weird Jobs: Professional Mourner – What Is It?

In short, if you’ve seen funeral crashers, a professional mourner crashes weddings.

They get hired out by families or funeral homes to ‘act’ and mourn for the deceased.

Essentially a professional mourner (AKA a moirologist) pretends to know the deceased and helps the grieving process in the funeral by:

1. Mourning alongside family.
2. Learning about the deceased as to encourage conversation flow/memories of the deceased.

Supposedly, this helps the funeral have a more potent mourning process.

Another reasoning I have for the existence of this job industry is this: if nobody grieves at your funeral, it’s bad. Ergo, the converse is good. A family hiring out a professional mourner could just be interpreted as a sign of respect – one more body to mourn the dead as a gesture of respect.

Weird Jobs Income: How Much Do Professional Mourners Make?

This varies wildly, according to the internet.

Job Monkey says you can make $30-$120 per funeral. But another website says you can make $35-$200 per hour. Yet another website says you can make about 300 yuan (or $42) for about 30 minutes of mourning.

The latter seems quite specific, so we can use that as a baseline. But the funeral proceedings in China are probably a bit different than ones in the US. For example, Eastern funeral proceedings last quite a long time, and groups of people take turns grieving. Whereas Western funerals generally involves some gathering/service/burial that lasts for a few hours.

So depending on how many “rounds” one grieves, the latter link could have a person earn $40-$120 per funeral (i.e. 1-3 rounds of 30min grieving).

Skill Feasibility Of Becoming A Professional Mourner

Here are some of the skills that you need to be a professional mourner according to this blog article.

The 2016 testimonial above talks about:

• Method acting and learning new skills. As an example, he/she had to learn archery so that they can prove an affiliation with a deceased archery teacher.
• Knowing how to handle different clientele and families, each with very specific and very high demands.
• Having the social acumen to be able to navigate real mourners who are often suspicious of you.

Skill-wise, if you’re a world-class actor and can perform in high-stress situations, this job can be feasible for you.

Does The Weird Job Of Being A Professional Mourner Make Enough Income?

Say you’ve got the acting skills. Is it even financially feasible to be a professional mourner? Or should you consider other weird jobs instead?

One thing I wasn’t able to find in my research is how do you even get a job as a moirologist?

It seems like it differs from country to country.

• For the UK, it seems like you can just get paid 45 euros an hour (pre-Brexit lol) via a public website called ‘rentamourner’. The site doesn’t work if you’re not in the UK unfortunately. But it’s like the Airbnb of professional mourning.
• Other countries seem to hire professional mourners through funeral homes. So if you want a job as a moirologist – you’ll probably need to chat to funeral homes and audition for the role like a paid actor.

Going from the above rate of say $40 for 30 minutes of mourning, you could feasibly show up to 5 funerals, at 1 hour each (socialize for 30 minutes and perform for 30 minutes). That nets $200/day. This is like being paid in a UK gig for 4 hours of mourning per day. At least the order of magnitude makes sense.

If we’re talking about a per-hour rate, it’s a very large range. At $30-$120/funeral, you might attend 2 funerals a day, so your income ranges from $60 to $240/day.

On the other hand, if you go with the metric of $35-$500/hr, then that’s quite different. Just working for 8 hours a day would net you $280 to $4000/day. Though it’s unlikely that there’s a lot of clientele that’ll be willing to pay $4000/day, even if you’re an excellent moirologist (i.e. the ultra-rich clientele market would be too small, maybe).

So let’s go with the mid-range of $40/hr, or $120/funeral. You’re netting roughly $200-$250/day in general. Assuming a 262-day work year, you’ll earn:

• $52,400 annually at $200/day.
• $65,500 annually at $250/day.
• $209,600 annually if you get paid $100/hr, at 8 hours a day. I’ll assume this is the top end.

But that’s a LOT of mourning! It’s also quite unlikely you’ll have a full 262-day work year as I feel like getting a gig here is quite volatile and inconsistent. So maybe you can cut those numbers in half:

• $26,200 annually at $200/day.
• $32,750 annually at $250/day.
• $104,800 annually at $100/hr at 8 hours a day.

This assumes that you’d be able to maintain a schedule vacancy of 50% or less. Other words: you work at least 50% of a standard 262-day work year, with 8 hours work per day.

Should You Become A Professional Mourner?

As you can see, if you’re top tier and charge $100/hr, you can make 6 figures with this so it’s quite feasible. But if you’re just a regular actor/actress, you might be looking at something that’s near minimum wage.

As an example, I overheard a conversation of a waiter in a NYC Chinatown restaurant where they were negotiating hourly rates: they get paid $30/hr. And it’s a small restaurant.

Compare the job stability of a waiter at $30/hr (about $240/day, or $65K annual) vs. the job instability of a moirologist where you might be paid between $32K-$65K year. Your pay’s roughly the same, to half of a waiter in NYC chinatown.

So it seems like here if we’re talking comparing being a professional mourner to a baseline gig like being a waiter, you’re better off being the latter. The exception being of course if you can command $100+/hr in which case you should most definitely be a professional mourner.

If any professional mourners are reading this, I’d love to know what you make. Seems like the internet talks about wildly varying prices so it’s hard to get a read on the median income.