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How Much Should Your Church Pay Your Pastor?

A couple of years ago I wrote a post called, “How Much Should We Pay Our Pastor,” that went on to become a pretty popular post, primarily because most churches have no idea what a fair compensation package is for their pastor or any member of their church staff. Fortunately for Churches seeking to answer this question some new data has just been released this week!

The 2014 Large Church Salary Report conducted by Leadership Network in partnership with the Vanderbloemen Executive Search Firm has just been released to the public. The largest survey of its kind ever conducted, 727 churches of over 1,000 people in attendance from 42 states and Canada participated to provide more information and more specific information than ever before available. Follow this link to get your hands on a copy of the survey results! Here are a couple of facts that caught my eye along with the top 10 findings info-graphic below.

  • The larger the church the younger it is. In other words, churches in the 1,000-person range have on average been around for about 40 years. Churches in the 10,000-person range on average have been around about 25 years.
  • The younger the church, the more likely it is to be multisite.
  • 74% of large churches are growing.
  • One of the things I really liked about the way Leadership Network chose to show the information was that they showed the 25%, 50% (or median), and 75% instead of simply showing the average. These numbers offer better benchmarks because they minimize the influence of extremely high or low salaries.

Related Resources:

  1. Interested in a Custom Compensation Analysis by Vanderbloemen Search Firm
  2. Interested in a Compensation Study done for churches under 1,000?


Posted in Leadership, Staffing

2 Responses to “How Much Should Your Church Pay Your Pastor?”

  1. Steve Cooper September 20, 2014 at 2:24 am #

    Large churches seem to me to be an anomaly, unless visitor participation encourages clustering into small groups of 30 or less people, where maybe people can interact at something other than a superficial level. And, yes, some large churches do that well. I wonder however, what would happen if we had no salaries for professional church people. Could we still have a “church?” What do you think, Paul?

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