How much salary should I pay my nonprofit staff?
A nonprofit salary guide for Canada and the United States.
At Keela, we love the nonprofit sector.
And we especially love seeing nonprofits grow. When your team starts taking on more donations, increasing your capacity, and enabling you to create a bigger community impact, you will likely run into a few growth challenges like:
- Do we hire more people?
- How much should we pay them?
- What do those job descriptions look like for these new roles?
- What kind of purchases can we afford when our nonprofit grows?
These are positive problems to have, and it just means that you are growing and growing well.
And since nonprofit burnout is a very real thing — just ask thought leaders like Beth Kanter — it’s important to start looking at the things that matter most to the organization: treating your employees with sustainability in mind. That includes a competitive salary.
We know that landing on an acceptable salary range is difficult, especially with the limited resources we have in the sector. But the best place to start is by looking at what others in the same market are paying. This will give you a good idea of the range to start playing around with.
We decided to find the answer to one question: How much does nonprofit staff get paid in Canada and the US?
This is of particular interest to us, because we are in the business of building nonprofit capacity. So we will be tracking this information year over year, to present you with ongoing findings and trends.
What do nonprofit salaries and compensation look like in the United States and Canada?
For the answer, we looked to publicly sourced data from Payscale. Here, we found 29,164 respondents from various sets of data who responded with salary inquiries for various positions within the nonprofit sector. We decided to look at a few of the most popular positions:
- Program Coordinator
- Program Manager
- Fund Development Manager
- Executive Director
- CEO
We looked specifically at the median (number found right in the middle of a data set) salary, without looking at bonuses or any extra income (as these varied quite a bit). And then we looked specifically at Canada and US in CAD and USD, respectively.
Here is the data and some of the interesting findings:
