You asked for benefits information. In fact, you’ve been asking since we launched ChurchSalary 2.0 back in 2018. Our biggest obstacle to releasing this feature sooner has been information. To tell you what churches are spending on benefits, we needed you to share more information.

Together, we delivered! The thousands of churches that are now actively sharing information about benefits spending through their Employee Profiles made it possible for us to quickly build and deliver two new benefits features.

If you would prefer to watch rather than read, we’ve covered a walkthrough and explanation of the new enhanced Benefits section below.

Regardless of your membership level, the bottom line is that the new enhanced Benefits Section inside of every single report app now contains average costs for benefits based on position and status (FT/PT) as well as a breakdown of the percentage of similar employees who receive each benefit.

With the release of ChurchSalary 3.1, on August 19, 2026, every member can now view the cost of benefits (using averages) inside of the enhanced Benefits section.

For Basic, Hybrid, and Precise Reports, in particular, the enhanced section is divided into two columns:

If an employee in our live database receives a benefit and we know how much that benefit costs, they are eligible to be included in an average calculation.

The bar chart is calibrated based on the most expensive benefit aside from Health Insurance (because it is always the highest). This ensures that the chart always provides useful information for low cost benefits such as Dental, Vision, Long-Term Care, and Disability.

No average cost is displayed for either Housing Allowance or Parsonage because while these are benefits, they are analyzed separately in other report sections. For example, you can find an average for Housing in the Localized Salary Recommendation section because for most pastors it is simply a portion of their Total Salary that is set aside for tax purposes.

The “Total” average is calculated based on all employees who report any benefit amounts, regardless of which ones they receive. As such, the total will reflect a mix of benefit packages.

Side Note: Benefits are only analyzed based on similar employees. Church budget and size are not included as filters for the cost of benefits because ChurchSalary’s research indicates that churches don’t get price breaks or pay extra for benefits because of their size. The technical way of saying this is that the cost of a benefits package and the size of the church are not correlated. Insurance companies simply don’t take the budget of your church into consideration, they only care about the cost of insuring an individual on a given plan.

We continue to include these benchmarks to help churches determine whether it makes sense to include a specific benefit in an employee’s total compensation package and to determine whether they are being more or less generous than the average church.

If you want to dig deeper, the new standalone Benefits app actually benchmarks employees relative to their peers. If only 50% of Senior Pastors receive life insurance, and your church pays for that benefit, are you spending more or less on your Senior Pastor than the rest of that 50%?

Rather than baking benefit costs into the salary figures inside every Report, we have decided to isolate them in an enhanced section and a standalone application. Isolating them gives you the most amount of control and insight possible. It also prevents employees with small benefits packages or with extremely large benefit packages from polluting every single figure inside of your salary reports.

A separate set of figures enables you to separately analyze salary and benefits and fine tune the overall total compensation package for each employee.

You can see this process modeled in the Salary Summary section at the bottom of every Employee Profile form.

The form automatically adds together the Annual Salary (Total) and all of the benefit costs in the Benefits section into two sub totals:

The formula is simple: Total Salary + Total Benefits = Total Compensation.

Thanks to the new Benefits app and the enhanced section, churches can now analyze salary and benefits to build better total compensation packages.