Methodology

How CauseComp builds its benchmarks

CauseComp runs two independent, data-driven engines from authoritative public sources — one for executive pay, one for the broader workforce. Both report a full percentile range (25th / 50th / 75th), so you see the market spread, not just a single number.

Executive Compensation 990

Data source

Officer, director, trustee, and key-employee pay reported on IRS Form 990 (Schedule J and Part VII, Section A), Form 990-EZ and Form 990-PF — the public filings U.S. nonprofits submit annually. This is real, disclosed compensation, not survey self-report.

The executive model uses Form 990 filings with fiscal years ending 2016 through 2025, plus a small number of early fiscal year 2026 filings; data updated October 31, 2026.

Drawn from 2.4 million+ cleaned compensation records from Form 990 filings; the benchmark model is built from those that report both positive compensation and positive organization revenue.

For the counts of filings, organizations and records behind these benchmarks, and what each step from filing to benchmark removes, see Data coverage.

Model

• A quantile-regression model, smooth in organization revenue, estimates the shape of the percentile curve (10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th) for a role and organization profile.
• Subscribers also see the compensation broken into components — base, bonus/incentive, other reportable pay, retirement & deferred compensation, and nontaxable benefits — alongside total. Component detail comes from Schedule J; peers filing only Part VII, 990-EZ or 990-PF report totals and show n/d for components.

Projected figures. When a benchmark is projected to a later date, each figure grows year by year at CauseComp's measured nonprofit pay growth: the median year-over-year change for the same executive in the same role at the same organization, from consecutive Form 990 filings. Base salary uses its own measured rate, from Schedule J; total compensation and other pay use the total pay rate. For years not yet measured, we use the Congressional Budget Office's Employment Cost Index forecast, adjusted by the median gap between our measured growth and that index over 2019–2025. We update it when CBO publishes a new forecast and when a new year of filings is measured. Because base salary and total compensation grow at different rates, projected pay elements may not add up to projected total compensation.

Minimum comparables

We hold a standard for how thin a cohort can be before we speak: we'd rather tell you we don't have enough comparables than invent a number. Where no comparable filings back a role at that size, CauseComp declines to serve a benchmark and instead suggests better-covered roles. From 1 filing upward a benchmark is served; below 10 it carries a visible low-confidence flag rather than being withheld — a thin cell is disclosed, not suppressed. The count behind that gate is filings for the role inside the revenue fence; it does not narrow by sector or state, and the composition line on every comparables set reports separately how many of the organizations listed are in your sector and your state.

§4958 comparables

For board documentation, CauseComp surfaces a §4958 comparables set: specific public 990 filings, drawn within a one-third to three-times revenue fence from each organization's own three most recent filing years, counting only organizations that have filed in the last five years. By default the organizations are chosen on their filings for the role requested; a customer can instead choose organizations selected on their Executive Director / CEO filings, each listed with its filing for the role requested where it has one. The set is ranked by sector and state, except on a state request with a subsector where fewer than one in five listed organizations are in that state: there, when it adds organizations in the state: Drawn first from organizations in the same NTEE subsector in the state, then the same subsector nationwide (up to half the set), then the closest related organizations, those in the state first. The benchmark itself is modeled from the full 990 corpus: the comparables set is drawn separately and does not produce the figure. It supports the comparability-data prong of the IRS §4958 rebuttable presumption of reasonableness for setting executive pay.

Published medians for individual roles, drawn from the same filings, are on the nonprofit salary benchmark pages. Those pages hold a stricter rule, not the same one: a cell publishes only with at least 20 filings. A published page is indexed and stands on its own, where a benchmark is served on request beside its own disclosure.

If you are new to these rules, our plain-English guides to §4958 and board pay governance cover the process this data supports. For the excise tax that sits alongside them, see how the expanded §4960 rules reach further than most boards expect.

Private-sector figures

Private-sector figures are pay data for the equivalent role, drawn from BLS wage data and, for larger organizations, public-company proxy filings, provided for reference.

• Each executive role is matched to one equivalent occupation in the BLS Standard Occupational Classification. The Executive Director / CEO and the President use Chief Executives. Other officers use the occupation for their function, for example Financial Managers for the chief financial officer.
• Chief executive figures rise smoothly with organization revenue. For smaller organizations they follow how chief executive pay changes with employer size in BLS data. For larger organizations they draw increasingly on the cash pay public companies report for their chief executives in proxy filings.
• Other officer figures come from the BLS wages for their own occupation, set at officer level. For larger organizations they also reflect how officer pay compares with chief executive pay in public-company proxy filings. They are never above the chief executive figure for the same revenue and state.
• For a state, chief executive and other officer figures use one adjustment for that state, measured from BLS wages for all management occupations. For the largest organizations, figures move to a national basis, because executive pay at that size is set in a national market.
• Clinical and specialty roles use the Workforce private-sector figures for their occupation.
• Private-sector figures for director roles are in Workforce.
• Some roles, such as Provost, Head of School and Artistic Director, have no private-sector equivalent occupation and show no private-sector figures.
M7
• Each result shows base salary, a modeled annual incentive and total cash: base plus annual incentive; excludes equity and long-term incentives. The 10th and 90th percentiles follow the Workforce method described below.
• Private-sector figures are cash pay, a different measure from the compensation reported on Form 990. They are not part of the §4958 comparables set or the board report.

Broad-Based & Workforce BLS OEWS · O*NET

Data source

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program — the official national wage survey — covering 850+ roles mapped to standard SOC occupation codes, using the most recent BLS OEWS release.

Calibration chain

• Starts from the official national median for the occupation, then layers geographic (state and metro-level, ~390 MSAs) and industry (NAICS) calibration, all computed against a consistent national reference base.
• Industry calibration runs in both directions. It is credibility-weighted by measured employment in each industry, and the data decides the direction: sectors whose employers genuinely pay above the all-industry level (for example education, health, and philanthropy) adjust upward, while sectors that pay below it (for example human services and the arts) adjust downward. There is no blanket "nonprofit discount."
• Headcount sets the employer-size adjustment; when no headcount is given, organization revenue sets it.
• Wages are aged to the current period using the BLS Employment Cost Index (ECI).
• Incentive and benefits loads are derived from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) and O*NET composite scalars, producing total-cash and total-compensation figures.
• A Nonprofit / Private-sector toggle switches the reference population and industry mix. Private-sector figures reflect BLS OEWS market wage data across all ownership types, with private-ownership-specific estimates where BLS publishes them.
• Career levels (Entry, Developing, Career, Advanced, Expert) are positions within each role's calibrated pay distribution: Entry is centered on the 20th percentile, Developing the 35th, Career the median, Advanced the 70th and Expert the 85th. Each level's range spans 10 percentile points either side of its center. The positions were set by testing against commercial salary surveys that level jobs the same way.
• Where a level's 10th or 90th percentile would fall beyond the published wage data, it is estimated from the level's other percentiles with a log-normal curve, the standard shape for wage distributions, so the 10th percentile is always below the 25th and the 90th is always above the 75th. Where BLS publishes the same value for two neighboring percentiles, the outer one is estimated the same way. Each estimate is held within the range of spreads that published wages show for similar occupations, and the 25th percentile, median and 75th percentile are not changed by this step, except where they rest on a value BLS publishes for two neighboring percentiles. The method was tested against published wage percentiles held out of the fit, and one small occupation family fell slightly outside the tested error range.
• The incentive is the typical (median) award for a worker who receives one: the ECEC average for the role's occupation group, converted to a median with published survey ratios, then adjusted for the role's O*NET work context and its career level. Industry sets base pay but not the size of the typical incentive, because published surveys show similar target incentives across industries.
• CauseComp regularly integrates new data and updates its models to match. Last updated October 17, 2026.

Coverage standard

Where BLS does not publish a reliable wage for an occupation, CauseComp does not benchmark it — the role returns a clear "not benchmarked" explanation rather than a nearest-relative guess. Legacy occupation titles are aliased to their current SOC successors, so a served figure always reflects an occupation BLS actually measures.

Role context

Where O*NET publishes a description of the occupation, each role's results show it, so you can compare the job behind the title with the one you are pricing.

Reading the numbers

• P25 / Median / P75 describe where pay falls across comparable organizations — a market range, not a recommendation.
• Every benchmark shows its data vintage and confidence so you know how current and how well-sampled it is.
• We refresh the data quarterly, bringing in new IRS filings and federal survey releases as they are published. The data was last refreshed in November 2026.
• Estimates adjust for budget size, sector and geography, but not for filing year: filings are used as filed, and you can project the figures to a date you choose. Form 990s are filed after the fiscal year closes and published later, so the most recent filings are usually one to two years old. We use them as filed, show the filing year on every row, and let you project figures to a date you choose.
• Every board report carries a methodology appendix and every Excel export a Methodology sheet, and we publish our own analyses of the Form 990 corpus from the same data. Our 2026 nonprofit compensation report sets out what the filings show across sectors and budget sizes.
• Figures are for informational purposes and don't constitute legal, tax, or compensation advice.