Nonprofit Executive Pay Rises, but Inflation and Gender Gap Issues Persist, Report Finds

Nonprofit executives are seeing their paychecks grow, but inflation is eating away at those gains — and the bite is even harder for women leaders, who continue to lag behind their male peers in both pay and representation at the highest levels.

That’s according to Candid’s newly released 2024 Nonprofit Compensation Report, now in its 24th edition, which analyzed data from the 2022 tax filings of over 128,000 tax-exempt organizations. By examining wages segmented by gender, geography, role type, organizational size, and focus area, the report aims to provide insights into competitive salary ranges for nonprofit executives at a time when hiring for top positions remains challenging, and organizations need to make a case for why those salaries are important.

The report also sheds light on persistent pay disparities based on gender and geography, with the goal of helping leaders tackle these inequities more effectively.

“This can be a tool for organizations to use to address pay disparity in the sector and commit to pay equity,” says Reina Mukai, data services manager at Candid and one of the report’s key contributors. Candid is a nonprofit that provides data and insights about the social sector.

From 2018 to 2022, median executive compensation gradually increased from $119,000 to $132,000, a rise of about 10.9 percent over five years. However, when adjusted for inflation — which reached dizzying heights in 2022 — this apparent growth represents stagnation or even decline in real terms. In inflation-adjusted dollars, nonprofit executives in 2018 earned around $142,000, suggesting that their purchasing power fell by 7 percent by 2022.

The report also paints a mixed picture of gender pay equity in nonprofits. While smaller organizations have made modest strides since 2012, the nonprofits with the deepest pockets have seen their gender pay gap expand. Female executives leading these major institutions have watched their relative earnings shrink from 82 percent to 77 percent of their male peers’ salaries from 2012 to 2022, underscoring the persistent challenges women face at the top.

Likewise, women lead the majority of small and midsize organizations, but in larger nonprofits with budgets over $50 million, women hold only about a third of CEO positions. “While progress is being made, there’s still a big gap in leadership roles at the large organizations,” Mukai says.

Although race was not measured in Candid’s reporting, executive pay disparities and opportunity gaps can be even starker for women of color, says Yolanda Johnson, president of Women of Color in Fundraising and Philanthropy, who began advocating against the gender pay gap years ago after another woman in the industry told Johnson that her salary was too low.

“The strides that have been made are because talented women of color have fought” for them alongside their allies, says Johnson, who emphasized that women ought to “keep an eye out for each other” and call out wage disparities when they see them.

“If you don’t advocate for yourself, unfortunately, there aren’t very many other people who are going to advocate for you,” she says. “It takes people standing their ground and saying, ‘This just doesn’t work.’ That’s what we’re encouraging women of color to do.”

Other key findings from the report:

• Nonprofits in the Northeast had the highest median executive compensation at $143,000, compared with $124,000 in the West, $120,000 in the South, and $114,000 in the Midwest.
• Among top executive positions, finance roles (e.g., CFO) saw the fastest growth in median compensation from 2018 to 2022, increasing by 14 percent.
• At organizations of all sizes, median CEO compensation rose gradually from $94,000 in 2018 to $105,000 in 2022, not adjusting for inflation. In organizations with budgets over $50 million, CEO compensation in 2022 ranged from about $237,000 (10th percentile) to over $1.5 million (90th percentile).
• Development and technology leadership roles frequently commanded higher salaries than other non-CEO executive positions, especially in larger organizations.
• Science and technology research institutes had the highest median executive compensation among all nonprofit types, while religious organizations consistently paid some of the lowest executive salaries.