Comparable nonprofit salary data are available online

The Internal Revenue Service has undertaken an enforcement effort to identify and halt abuses by tax-exempt organizations that pay excessive compensation and benefits to their officers and other insiders. Nonprofit boards are striving, therefore, to set executive compensation at levels comparable to salaries at similar organizations.

The Hawai‘i Alliance of Nonprofit Organizations is now exploring how to gather salary data from nonprofit organizations for them to be able to use as a basis for Hawai‘i nonprofit compensation programs. In the meantime, without detailed, actual local nonprofit salary numbers to draw from, HANO responds to requests for salary data by referring to national nonprofit salary data and available statistics on how our state compares to the national average. With these two tools it is possible to extrapolate benchmarks for a compensation program.

The Wall Street Journal has a chart of national average nonprofit salaries for nine jobs at four organization sizes. Unfortunately, the organization size starts at $500K to $1 million, larger than many HANO member organizations.

WSJ also has a calculator to compare local salary ranges to national ranges for a list of typical positions. Select the type of job and the area code or metro area and the calculator will provide comparable data. The Journal includes a substantial number of nonprofit positions on this calculator.