Here is how you can get and use good data to create a Compensation Study. Around the country, salaries and benefits are 54.7% of church budgets. This area deserves your best attention.

Let’s take care of three preliminaries

1. Get access to XPastor’s free Salary Forecaster with billions of dollars in budgets from hundreds of churches. Church sizes range from 35 to 10,000+. Find churches in your region of a similar size. See the relative salary differences between top management and staff.
2. Because of the time and complexity, many turn to Fletch for help. Church Boards often want an outside expert to give impartial advice. SPs, XPs and HR Directors see that it saves money and time for a recognized leader like Fletch to do the research. Churches should have an independent study when they have highly compensated employees—the IRS defines this as base salaries above $150,000.
3. See common questions as Fletch Answers Salary & Forecaster Questions.

You can raise the bar to professional levels with the following steps.

Create Fair Compensation

1. Create Metrics for Raises

• Consider the Cost of Living Adjustment
• Consider the cost of health insurance
• Create metrics for raises, such as experience, education, responsibility, team spirit, missional alignment and special considerations

2. Create Church Staff Categories

• Ministerially Exempt
• Managerially Exempt
• Administratively Exempt
• Non-Exempt

3. Get Salary Forecaster Pivot Tables

4. Get Salary Forecaster Comparisons

5. Create the Big Burrito of All Compensation

To preserve anonymity, this is a composite church

6. Create a Compensation Grid