GuideStar has released their annual Nonprofit Compensation Report. The report is based solely on IRS nonprofit tax data. This year’s edition reveals some of the sectors real gains in the area of compensation while also highlighting some continued deficits.
One statistic that GuideStar highlighted when announcing the publication of the 2016 report is the increase in the number of women leading the nation’s largest nonprofits. Even though there are gains by women in the number of leadership positions, the report seems to show that the sector’s gender pay gap has persisted. The report also shows overall nonprofit compensation growing at a slower rate than it did before the Great Recession.
“The nonprofit sector has moved toward greater gender equality in the past 10 years,” said Chuck McLean, senior research fellow at GuideStar and author of the 2016 Nonprofit Compensation Report. “More women headed nonprofits with budgets of $1 million or more. The difference was most dramatic at the largest nonprofits, where the proportion of female CEOs doubled, from 10 percent to 20 percent. Overall, however, female CEO representation still declined steadily as organization size increased. Women continue to represent the majority of CEOs at smaller organizations.”
According to the report, health and science nonprofits have the highest overall media salaries while arts, religion, and animal-related organizations possess the lowest. For the 10th straight year, Washington, D.C. ranked first for overall median CEO salary. The top five break down as follows:
- Washington, D.C. ($154,500)
- New York-New Jersey ($137,554)
- Boston ($133,586)
- San Francisco-Oakland ($111,116)
- Chicago ($107,202)
This year’s edition, the 16th in GuideStar’s annual series. It analyzes compensation paid to 135,512 persons at 96,242 tax-exempt organizations in fiscal year 2014. It presents data for 14 job categories by gender, organization size, mission, state, and metropolitan statistical area. The report meets IRS criteria for researching, establishing, and documenting reasonable compensation. Chuck McLean created the Nonprofit Compensation Report and has analyzed the data for and written all 16 editions.
