The first section of every ChurchSalary report features a blue distribution graph that visualizes the range of salaries for similar employees serving at similar churches nationwide.

Employees in ChurchSalary's database are initially filtered from a pool of nationwide respondents based on your selected criteria: position, employment status (full-time or part-time), church budget, and church size (which is optional).

Location is used as a filter or as a component of the Salary Comparison, Localized Salary Recommendation, Cost of Living Comparison, and Comparable Jobs sections.

The video below walks you through the blue distribution chart as well as the first section, the Nationwide Salary Summary, in more depth.

These numbers are designed to help you perform the first of three basic salary review steps. Set the range, Tune the range and place within the range - each of these steps is described below!

The first section of every ChurchSalary report — the Nationwide Salary Summary — helps you set a salary range. This analysis of the nationwide market is designed to help you establish a top, bottom, and middle for your salary range.

The blue distribution chart in this section shows you salary data for similar employees nationwide. Unless there is something really special or subpar about the employee you are evaluating, compensation will likely fall in this middle 50% range—below the 75th percentile and above the 25th. The midpoint, here the median, is your basic reference point. The average employee will have a salary fairly close to this number.

After you’ve set the range and have established some basic boundaries, you need to refine your analysis. This will likely involve tuning the range for your specific church and your community.

To help you do this, ChurchSalary creates a fingerprint of your ZIP code based on four variables:

1. Region,

2. Cost of living,

3. Population density,

4. Median household income.

We use these variables to find the closest possible matches in our database. This allows us to localize salary data for each of the most common positions.

This second step is basically an adjustment—a way of tuning nationwide numbers to account for a higher or lower cost of living (and higher wage competition) in your town. To assist with this adjustment, ChurchSalary uses a fingerprint of your community to find the closest possible candidates serving in similar communities. Our powerful calculator crunches up to two million variables to produce a Localized Salary Recommendation just for you. It looks like this:

After you’ve set the range and tuned it, you need to place employees within the range.

Everyone has different levels of experience and education, and some people are better at their job than others. All of these factors will influence where a candidate’s falls among their peers and within a salary range.

The Salary Comparison section contains a set of tables with averages based on compensation factors such as education, experience, ordination, and geographical setting. These numbers provide you with a snapshot of how compensation differs based on these criteria for similar employees at similar churches across the country.

Your church must decide how to account for these compensation factors at your church. Whatever you decide, document your process and be consistent. But you will need to decide whether you are going to attach a dollar value to each factor or you are going to develop a formula to weigh them.

Bear in mind, other factors such as job performance and responsibilities—which only you know—are going to determine where a given employee is placed within the range.

You can find more insights to help you place an employee within the range in the Employment Profile section. These demographics can help you get a handle on, for example, how many senior pastors have master’s degrees.

Additionally, the last section features salary ranges for Comparable Jobs in your economic region or metropolitan statistical area (MSA). This is a measure of what this type of employee could earn in the secular marketplace without leaving your community.