The following article is designed to give you an overview of these new categories and how they may help you benchmark pay for your staff.

In addition to these 7 new positions, we have also revised 17 out of our 18 existing legacy position categories and grouped all 25 roles into a series of departments.

Categorizing staff is hard because churches hire different kinds of staff as they grow in size. Historically, since 2018, ChurchSalary has relied on 18 tried and tested position categories to price staff.

However, over the last decade several new roles have emerged as a result of the shift toward multisite churches that have more organizational complexity. To accommodate this added complexity and specialization, ChurchSalary is adding several 7 new roles and updating the labels for our existing 18 positions.

This expansion is only possible with the help of our members who have shared a tsunami of new information on our 3.0 platform over the last 12 months.

With the release of ChurchSalary 3.1 on August 19, 2026, ChurchSalary has added the following 7 new position categories. All members can categorize staff and generate reports using these new positions (as data becomes available).

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Campus Pastor is now its own dedicated position category. Many multisite churches currently compensate Campus Pastors similarly to either:

Because of this, we are rolling out a dedicated position to make pricing Campus Pastors easier and more transparent.

Over time we anticipate that these two approaches will converge to create a distinct pay range for Campus Pastors. In the meantime, we encourage everyone to read our in-depth statistical analysis on How Multisite Churches Pay Campus Pastors.

Our research indicates that NextGen Pastors are paid like either an Associate Pastor or an Adult Ministry Pastor, depending on their level of responsibility.

Despite this, we are rolling out a dedicated position category for this role in the hopes that a distinct pay range for NextGen Pastors will emerge over time, much like the Campus Pastor position.

NextGen Pastors or Directors can oversee not only the Student / Youth Ministry but also College, Young Adults, Young Families, and in some cases also the Children’s Ministry. They are in charge of the “next generation.” In many cases this means that NextGen Pastors are in charge of dedicated Student / Youth Pastors and/or dedicated Children’s Pastors.

For years, members have been categorizing these types of employees using the part-time flavor of our Children’s Pastor or Director role.

While this was a legitimate way to price staff, the challenge is that many churches employ both a full-time Children’s Pastor and one or more part-time Coordinators who oversee Nursery, Preschool, or Elementary aged children.

To better capture the distinctions in pay between a Children’s Pastor or Director who oversees the entire ministry and a Coordinator role who oversees a subsection of the ministry, we are adding this new position.

Examples include:

Examples of job titles for this category include:

As ministries grow in complexity at large or multisite churches they are increasingly hiring dedicated Administrative Assistants who function outside of an “office” setting, providing weekly support for key tasks.

While churches have relied on the Administrative Assistant category in the past, we are adding a dedicated “Ministry Support” position to capture the nuances in pay and responsibility between these types of roles, especially at larger churches.

As another comparison point:

The question to ask is, “Who is the employee hired to assist: “the ministry” or “the minister?”

Stated another way, one role assists staff by performing administrative duties and the other role supports a specific ministry by performing administrative and planning tasks.

Examples of job title for the Ministry Support Staff or Coordinator category versus the Administrative Assistant category are:

As churches grow in size and complexity the number of administrative tasks scale beyond what an Executive Pastor and an Administrator / Office Manager can perform on their own.

In these situations, we have observed churches creating two types of Director roles.

Many of the churches that employ these employees also have an Executive Pastor who is in charge of the entire Admin department and one or more Administrator / Office Manager staff.

These new roles are primarily designed to meet the needs of larger churches where this kind of specialization is more common.

Before you use these new categories, ask yourself two key questions:

In the Admin Department, these two Director new roles slot in between the Executive Pastor or Director category and the Administrator / Office Manager category. If your church employs neither of these roles above or below, in terms of your org chart, the employee in question likely doesn’t fit into one of these roles.

While this is not prescriptive, an Admin Department at a church might evolve and grow in the following manner:

Examples of job title for the Operations and Finance / HR Director or Manager categories include:

As church calendars grow in complexity, and churches open up their building to be used by other groups, we are seeing a rise in “Event Coordinators.” This role may be in charge of coordinating the church calendar, planning or coordinating events, and ensuring that ministries are fairly sharing and leveraging church resources.

If you have a staff member who is in charge of a Coffee Shop or food service type of ministry, we encourage you to use this category.

Common job titles for this position category include:

Selecting the correct position helps generate more accurate compensation reports for your church while improving the quality of benchmarking data for the entire ChurchSalary community.

When deciding between positions, consider:

Matching employees based on responsibilities—not just job titles—will produce the most meaningful compensation comparisons.

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