Today's miko typically serves as a shrine assistant supporting the kannushi, performing kagura, sacred ceremonial dance, at festivals and significant rituals, assisting with shrine administrative tasks including the sale of omamori, protective amulets, and omikuji, fortune-telling paper slips, and helping maintain the shrine grounds and conduct visitor-facing ceremonies such as purification rites for individual worshippers. The role is typically filled by unmarried young women, often university or high school students working part-time or seasonally, particularly during especially busy periods such as the New Year holiday, when shrines across Japan see enormous visitor numbers for hatsumode, the year's first shrine visit, rather than by women pursuing miko service as a lifelong religious vocation in the way a kannushi typically approaches shrine priesthood.
Some larger or historically significant shrines maintain smaller numbers of more permanent, professionally trained miko with deeper ceremonial responsibilities, including formal training in kagura dance forms specific to that shrine's own tradition, but the great majority of miko encountered at Shinto shrines today serve in the temporary, part-time capacity that has become the role's standard modern form, a considerable narrowing from the miko's historically more central and varied religious functions.