What are South Africa’s best-paid professions? Doctors, lawyers, engineers, bankers, and wealth managers? To that list add high-end stripping.

This newspaper is nothing if not open-minded, which explains why a chance encounter in The Common Sense office with the Mavericks website, a strip club in Cape Town, (The Common Sense CEO was away for the week) raised eyebrows for more reasons than expected.

Advertised dancer earnings of between $7 000 and $9 000 a month (that is upwards of R120 000) put a successful stripper in similar monthly income territory to some specialist doctors and senior corporate executives. At the upper end, the advertised figures exceed what many experienced professionals in finance, engineering and actuarial work earn each month.

Consider how those numbers stack up against some other top-end South African earnings.

Doctors and senior medical specialists can earn close to R190 000 a month. Senior investment bankers can earn around R150 000 a month or more. Executive managers and directors can earn around R125 000 a month. Members of Parliament receive remuneration packages of roughly R110 000 a month. Senior chartered accountants and finance heads can earn around R150 000 a month.

So how much can a stripper actually make?

R120 000 a month is the advertised earning potential rather than independently verified take-home pay, but Mavericks is unusually open about how the job works.

Dancers work five nights a week and have two nights off. The club opens at 7pm and closes at 4am. Spread across an average month, five shifts a week means roughly 22 working nights. If Mavericks’s advertised monthly earnings were earned evenly, that would imply roughly R5 400 to R6 900 earned for every night a dancer goes to work.

The customer prices, again courtesy of Mavericks, help explain how those earnings are possible.

A table dance at Mavericks currently costs R600 and lasts two songs. An eight-minute lap dance costs R500. A 15-minute VIP Fantasy Dance costs R1 000.

Those are customer prices and should not be confused with what the dancer personally receives. Mavericks does not publicly disclose exactly how much of each transaction is paid to the dancer.

They do, however, show how quickly spending can accumulate.

Five R1 000 private dances would put R5 000 through the till. Ten R500 lap dances would do the same.

A busy night could involve a mixture of lap dances, table dances, private sessions, and customers spending money elsewhere in the club. The job therefore has as much in common with sales as it does with dancing.

Mavericks charges dancers a weekly levy of R4 300. The levy covers the right to dance at the club as well as accommodation. Over an average month, that comes to roughly R18 600. The club provides shared furnished apartments, with housekeeping, internet, and security included. Its recruitment material says dancers generally share rooms with two or three people.

Given that South Africa’s average formal non-agricultural salary sits at around R30 000 a month, the economics of a career in stripping is certainly eyebrow-raising.