Have nonprofit salaries kept up with the runaway inflation of recent years?
We got one answer last week with news that median pay for fundraisers grew 6.4 percent in 2022 — shy of the 8 percent increase in the cost of living last year. Now we have at least a partial answer for nonprofit executives as a group, thanks to results from Candid’s annual pay report.
Median compensation for top officials climbed 3.2 percent in 2021 to $129,000, up from $125,000 in 2020, according to Candid. Inflation, meanwhile, climbed 4.7 percent that year.
This ends a long run when pay ran ahead of inflation. From 2017 to 2021, median compensation was up 6 percent when adjusted for growth in the cost of living over the four years.
The Candid report covers pay for 14 categories of top nonprofit officials — CEOs and executive directors but also chief fundraising, finance, and technology officers and others — at more than 120,000 organizations, the most in the 23-year history of the survey. These numbers lag real time, of course. Candid assembles its report from tax filings, and 2021 is the latest year for which the Internal Revenue Service has made forms available.
Salaries are likely to have climbed significantly since 2021, thanks to upward pressure from inflation and a continuing hot job market, says Mary Plum, a senior consultant with the Development Guild, an executive search and consulting firm for nonprofits. Plum also says the increasing number of states and localities adopting pay transparency laws means job candidates are coming to the negotiating table armed with what they believe they’re worth on the market.
Pay has been going up in recent years, Plum says, but “I would say that in the past six months to a year, those jumps are even higher.”
Other findings from Candid’s report:
- Median executive compensation at the largest groups — those with annual revenues of more than $50 million — was $293,000. At the smallest organizations, whose revenues were under $250,000, median pay was $43,000.
- Executives in the Northeast earned the highest salaries — a median of $140,000. Those in the Midwest earned the least, a media of $111,000.
- Pay for women executives continued its decade-long creep upward. For every dollar men made, women made a median 67 cents in 2011 and 73 cents in 2021.
- Another trend that continued: Women represented the majority of CEOs at smaller organizations but less than one-third of CEOs at the largest groups.
