The Cost of Living Analysis application expands on the simple county-level Cost of Living Index figure included in every salary report. It is designed specifically to help church leaders characterize their community and localize nationwide pay data and make fair, informed compensation decisions for their ministry context.

Using the Cost of Living Analysis application to gain a broader and deeper understanding of local economic data, then apply that knowledge to refine the nationwide salary ranges in your salary reports.

Accurately comparing pay from one community to another is one of the most challenging parts of understanding church compensation. Every ministry setting is unique, and pay levels are influenced by several key factors that go far beyond geography.

In most cases, church compensation is shaped by three closely connected elements:

ChurchSalary combines these factors and performs a search for “similar employees at similar churches” using:

To measure pay at the local level, ChurchSalary must first control for these factors. That divides employees nationwide into between 360 and 3,600 cohorts (because 18 x 2 x 10 x 10 = 3,600). For example, one cohort is “Full-time Senior Pastor at a $1M–$2M Church.”

Adding a filter based on location, subdivides these 360 to 3,600 cohorts, into millions of different subcategories. For example, “Full-Time Senior Pastors at a $1M–$2M Church in Indianapolis, IN.”

If we set a goal of at least 7 employees for every one of the 20,000 cities in the United States, ChurchSalary would need between 7.2 million and 72 million employees to calculate a local average for every city in the country! The United States does not have 7 million churches, let alone 7 million church employees.

The Cost of Living Analysis application gathers local economic and demographic data from multiple sources—powered by ChurchSalary’s Location API—so you can see how your church’s location affects compensation in your ministry context.

Enter your church’s address to instantly generate a detailed local economic profile across four geographic levels.

For rural churches or those not within a defined metro area, the system automatically uses fallback options such as:

At the core of the Cost of Living Analysis application is the Local Income & Cost Analysis tool. Instead of relying on a single “best guess,” our local income and cost analysis uses machine learning and cluster analysis to uncover clear, consistent patterns across up to 17 different economic indicators.

These indicators include:

ChurchSalary’s foundational research, which directly measured senior and solo pastor pay across 46 metro areas, confirmed that these common thresholds reliably mirror true local compensation patterns.

The Cost of Living Analysis application helps church leaders align their pay strategy with their ministry’s compensation philosophy. To do this, the tool asks two guiding questions:

Discuss the data on this page with other church leaders and make a decision that best suits your church’s staffing agency. Create a strategy or philosophy that will inform how you localize nationwide salary data.

To ensure that local churches are not able to easily poach your staff, you may need be more aggressive with adjusting based on location. Embracing this philosophy may lead you to adopt the second or third common threshold in the Local & Income Cost Analysis section or to focus on county or place-level metrics.

To ensure that your church is adjusting pay enough that employees can afford to live and thrive in your local community, you may decide to adopt the first common threshold in the Local & Income Cost Analysis section or to focus on metro-level metrics.

The answer to this question may inform which geographical level you lean on when adjusting salaries based on location, evaluating housing allowance/parsonage costs, and gauging whether staff are paid a living wage.