Adding a few details to your Church Profile helps us serve you better! It makes using our tools smoother and helps ensure your salary reports are as accurate and helpful as possible!

Basic Details 📝

Church Name (required)

This is easy. What is the name of your church?

In the future, ChurchSalary will let you claim your church in the Gloo network. That will prevent churches from buying duplicate memberships and enable you to manage info about your church and your staff.

Denomination/Network (required) ⛪️

Start typing and we’ll help you find and select your denomination or church network from our pretty extensive list.

Address, City, State, ZIP (required) ✅

Rather than relying on ZIP codes, ChurchSalary 3.0 uses your church’s address to grab the most accurate income, cost, and labor information from the Census Bureau and other government agencies.

To do this, we need an actual physical address. No P.O. Boxes—because nobody lives and earns a living inside a Post Office.

Every address you add becomes a location you can reference throughout our apps to grab the best, most recent cost of living, income, home value, household size data points.

Demographics

ChurchSalary tracks two demographic data points.

Geographic Setting (required) 🌎

Is your church located in a large city, suburban, small town, or rural area? This helps us power the actual averages baked into every single salary report we provide to you.

Congregational Ethnicity (not required)

We have no agenda here—just an interest in the truth. At the moment, ethnicity appears to drive the average socioeconomic status of church members, which impacts giving levels, which impacts the church’s budget, which impacts pay levels.

We would like to continue to study this as a variable to help churches make wise decisions. If you select Other, we get it. Our goal is to help the church.

Cornerstone Metrics

Pay and staffing levels are driven by four cornerstone metrics. ChurchSalary has discovered a mathematical model that predicts how churches grow, hire staff, and pay.

To provide you with insights across our platform, we need the best, most accurate version of these four numbers for both your church as a whole and your locations/campuses (if you are a multisite church).

Multisite Churches

If you are a multisite church and don’t track these figures across campuses, don’t worry. Simply enter attendance numbers for each campus and we’ll make our best guess at total budget, payroll budget, and FTE staff numbers using attendance as a guide.

When you get a chance, do your best job of calculating these figures. It will benefit not only you but other churches as we continue to study how multisite employees get paid.

Operating or Total Budget (required) 💲

The total amount of money your church plans to spend in the current fiscal year on caring for your congregation. Do not include capital or fundraising projects, private schools/daycares, and funds for separate ministries in this total.

This is the single most important number when it comes to determining pay for church staff. Accuracy here will make your reports better in every way.

Attendance (required)👥

Active average attendance is defined by ChurchSalary as the number of people actively participating over the last 3-6 months (participation = giving and/or attendance).

Online attendance counts if you are (a) staffing to care for those people and (b) they are giving or participating in the life of your church. Online viewer stats are great, but our research indicates that they typically don’t drive staffing decisions and often reflect the impact of your online preaching ministry—not the actual size of your congregation.

Attendance is a reflection of who you are caring for spiritually, not who is watching you online.

Payroll Budget (not required)

Total amount of money allocated to pay for all staff expenses (including salaries, benefits, payroll taxes, and other miscellaneous expenses).

Your church sets aside money to pay for staff. Sometimes that gets divided into ministry categories. Sometimes it gets lumped into one line item in the budget.

However you account for these costs in your budget, take a second and calculate this number for your church. We hope to use it to evaluate salaries and benefits even more accurately in the future.

Staff Size (FTE) or FTE Staff (not required)

FTE (full-time equivalent) is the sum of all paid staff hours in a week, divided by 40.

For example, if a church employs 1 FT staff and 1 PT staff (who works an average of 32 hours per week) that adds up to 72 hours. When you divide that weekly total by 40, that works out to 1.8 full-time equivalent staff.

Using FTE instead of a headcount creates an even comparison between churches and captures the true "size cost" of your staff.

You can also calculate FTE for each employee on staff and add them together. Simply divide their weekly hours by 40.