How to Set Salary Ranges at a Nonprofit

Data as of: workforce, BLS OEWS May 2025 (aged to Oct 2026); executive, Form 990 filings, data updated November 6, 2026. · Last updated October 23, 2026

To set salary ranges at a nonprofit, group your jobs into levels, price each job against market data for the same role, metro and sector, age that data to today, and set each range's midpoint at the market percentile your pay policy targets. Then build the minimum and maximum around the midpoint, place each employee by experience and performance, take the cost to the board with the budget, and refresh the ranges every year.

The eight steps below follow that order. None of them needs a pay figure from us to explain; each one shows where CauseComp Workforce does the work.

What are the parts of a salary range?

A salary range has three points. The minimum is the lowest pay for a fully qualified person in the job. The midpoint is the market rate the organization has chosen to pay for full proficiency. The maximum is the ceiling for the job.

Two measures describe the whole structure. Range spread (also called range width) is the maximum minus the minimum, divided by the minimum. Midpoint progression is the gap between the midpoints of two adjacent levels, expressed as a percentage of the lower midpoint.

One measure describes a person. A compa-ratio is an employee's pay divided by the midpoint of the range. A compa-ratio of 1.00 means the employee is paid at the midpoint.

How do we group our jobs into levels before pricing them? (Step 1)

Start with job architecture: a list of every job, grouped into families (finance, programs, development, operations) and into levels within each family. Levels let you price fifty jobs as a handful of decisions instead of fifty separate ones, and they keep two people doing comparable work in comparable ranges.

The federal government's General Schedule is a familiar public example of a level structure. It has 15 grades, and each grade has 10 steps, each worth about 3 percent of the employee's salary. A nonprofit rarely needs that many levels, but the logic is the same: the level, not the person, sets the range.

Level by the work, not the title. "Coordinator" means different jobs at different organizations. Write two or three lines on what each job decides, who it answers to and whether it supervises others, and level from that.

In CauseComp: every Workforce role is priced at one of five career levels: Entry, Developing, Career, Advanced and Expert. Career is defined as fully proficient and is the market reference point for the role. If a job manages a team, choose the manager or supervisor role rather than a senior level of the individual role. The workforce benchmark guide explains each level.

Where should our market data come from: role, metro or sector? (Step 2)

Price each job on three dimensions.

Role. Match on duties, not job title. Federal wage data is organized by occupation, and a good match is the occupation whose description fits what your person actually does.

Metro. Pay for the same occupation differs between places. The federal Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program (OEWS) publishes estimates for the nation, every state and roughly 530 metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. If you hire locally, price locally; if a role is remote and recruited nationally, a national figure may be the better reference.

Sector. Some jobs are hired almost entirely from other nonprofits, such as program and development roles. Others, such as accounting, IT and facilities, compete with every employer in town. For the second group, private-sector data belongs beside the nonprofit figure.

In CauseComp: Workforce covers 850+ roles across ~390 metros, with a nonprofit and private-sector toggle (the ownership basis of the private-sector figures is set out on the methodology page). You set the organization once, by sector, state, optional metro and revenue or headcount, then add up to 50 roles per run. Each role returns the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles of base salary. For leadership roles, the public /salaries/ pages show national Form 990 medians and state medians, for example for the Director of HR and the Director of Finance; national workforce benchmarks start at /salaries/workforce/. For a side-by-side of where else HR teams get this data, see nonprofit salary surveys and data sources compared.

Why does salary data need to be aged to the current period? (Step 3)

Every salary source describes the past. The OEWS estimates for May 2025, for example, are built from six semiannual survey panels collected over three years, from November 2022 through May 2025. Pay has moved since those responses were collected, and it will move again before your ranges take effect.

Aging closes that gap. The standard public measure is the Employment Cost Index (ECI), which the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes quarterly and which measures the change in employers' hourly labor cost over time. Age the data to the date your new ranges take effect, not to the date you run the numbers.

In CauseComp: Workforce wages are aged to the current period on the BLS Employment Cost Index, and every result shows its data vintage. Executive figures from Form 990 filings are served as filed, and you can choose to project them to a date you pick.

Where should the midpoint of a salary range sit? (Step 4)

The midpoint is the market rate at the percentile your pay policy targets. That target is a decision for leadership and the board, and it belongs in a written compensation philosophy.

The median is the common choice. In WorldatWork and Deloitte's 2019 salary structure survey, 96% of organizations tied their midpoints to the 50th percentile of the market, up from 90% in the survey's 2012 edition. WorldatWork's 2024-2025 Salary Budget Survey reports that 83% to 84% of organizations target the 50th percentile for non-executive base pay.

A nonprofit can choose differently for good reasons, such as paying above the median for a role that is hard to fill, or below it while offering other value. Write the reason down, and apply the same target to every job unless a stated reason says otherwise.

In CauseComp: each role shows the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles, so you can read the midpoint at whichever percentile your policy names.

How wide should a nonprofit salary range be? (Step 5)

Wide enough to hold a new hire who meets the job's requirements and a long-serving expert in the same job, and no wider. WorldatWork and Deloitte's 2019 survey of salary structure practices describes typical range spreads by structure type:

• Traditional structures: range spreads of 20% to 40%.
• Market-based structures: range spreads of 30% to 80%.
• Broadbands: range spreads of 80% to 200%, with no defined midpoints.

Among organizations using market-based structures in that survey, the average narrowest range was 45.7% and the average widest was 65.3%. In the 2012 edition of the same survey, larger organizations tended to have wider ranges and smaller organizations narrower ones. SHRM's 2008 teaching case on pay structures makes the related point that a wider range presumes more room for pay growth within the job, which is why senior and managerial levels usually carry wider ranges than entry-level ones.

Set the spread first, then compute the ends from the midpoint. A range with a 50% spread, for example, has a minimum at 80% of the midpoint and a maximum at 120% of it.

In CauseComp: the distance between the 25th and 75th percentiles shows how widely the market itself pays a role. That market spread is information, not your range; your range spread is a policy choice. The Excel export puts every role's percentiles into a workbook, where you can apply your spreads to compute minimums and maximums for the whole structure at once.

For how widely the market pays each role family, see our research on how wide a nonprofit pay range runs from entry to expert; it measures market width, not what experience adds.

How do we place employees within the range? (Step 6)

Place each person by how far they are from full proficiency. Someone new to the work starts toward the minimum; someone fully proficient sits near the midpoint; someone with long experience and strong results can sit above it.

Two measures keep placement consistent. The compa-ratio (pay divided by midpoint) shows where each person sits against the market rate. Position in range, (pay minus minimum) divided by (maximum minus minimum), shows how far through the range each person has moved: 0% at the minimum, 50% at the midpoint, 100% at the maximum.

Then check for compression: pay differences too small to be fair, between a supervisor and the people they supervise, or between a new hire and an experienced employee in the same job. A new range structure often reveals it for the first time.

In CauseComp: the five career levels give you a market reference below and above the Career level, which helps when you decide where a less experienced or more experienced person should sit.

What do the board and the budget need to approve? (Step 7)

Before anything goes to the board, cost it. List every employee whose pay falls below the new minimum and the amount needed to bring each one to it, and decide whether that happens at once or over a set period. Note anyone above the new maximum and how their pay will be handled.

Bring the board three things: the compensation philosophy and the market percentile it targets, the range structure and the data behind it, and the cost to the budget. Record the decision and the data sources in the minutes.

Executive pay follows a stricter process. For officers and key employees, the federal intermediate sanctions rules and the rebuttable presumption of reasonableness set out how a board approves and documents executive pay decisions, and the Executive benchmark builds the matched comparables that process uses.

Data like this supports, but does not by itself establish, a board's rebuttable presumption of reasonableness under IRC §4958 (intermediate sanctions), which also requires advance approval by an independent board body and contemporaneous documentation. CauseComp provides comparability data for informational purposes and does not provide legal or tax advice.

How often should salary ranges be updated? (Step 8)

Once a year is the norm. In WorldatWork's 2023 study of compensation structure practices, 73% of organizations adjust their ranges annually. Tie the refresh to your budget cycle so the cost of the new ranges is in the budget the board approves.

The federal data moves on its own schedule: OEWS estimates are published once a year, and the Employment Cost Index every quarter. Between refreshes, move the ranges, not just individual salaries; ranges that stand still while pay moves end up with everyone above the midpoint. For executives, our research on what continuing nonprofit executives were paid year over year sets the raises in Form 990 filings beside the Employment Cost Index.

In CauseComp: the data is refreshed quarterly, bringing in new IRS filings and federal survey releases as they are published. The methodology page shows the current vintage of each source.

How does CauseComp fit into this process?

CauseComp covers the market-data half of the work: steps 2 through 5, and the reference points for step 6. Workforce prices 850+ roles at five career levels across ~390 metros, with a nonprofit and private-sector toggle, 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles for every role, and an Excel export for your budget model. The Executive product prices leadership roles from Form 990 filings for the board's part of step 7. Both are included in the Professional plan, described on the for organizations page.

Try Professional free for 7 daysTry Professional free for 7 days, then $448 on day 7 ($349 Board Report plus $99 first month) and $99/month after.

Looking for a report rather than one role's figure? Read the 2026 Nonprofit Compensation Report, CauseComp's analysis of IRS Form 990 compensation filings.

Questions HR directors ask about nonprofit salary ranges

Sources

• IRC §4958 (taxes on excess benefit transactions)
• IRS: Intermediate sanctions
• IRS: Instructions for Form 990
• BLS: Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS)
• BLS: Employment Cost Index (ECI)
• BLS: OEWS technical notes, May 2025
• OPM: General Schedule
• WorldatWork and Deloitte: 2019 Survey of Salary Structure Policies and Practices
• WorldatWork: Survey of Salary Structure Policies and Practices, 2012
• WorldatWork: 2024-2025 Salary Budget Survey
• WorldatWork: Salary Structure Policies and Practices (2023 study)
• SHRM: Designing a Pay Structure, case study and instructor's manual (2008)