For the last 30 years, ChurchSalary has provided trustworthy and accurate compensation guidance to churches in three different formats.
- Print → Compensation Handbooks (1992–2017)
- Digital → Salary Reports (2018–2025)
- Platform → ChurchSalary 3.0 (2025 …)
To honor this legacy of serving churches, our latest incarnation is called ChurchSalary 3.0.
1.0 | Printed Handbooks (1992–2017)
In the early 1990s, recognizing the crucial need for fair pay in ministry, we began with the National Church Compensation Survey. This led to the publication of the 1992 Church Compensation Report and at least 12 other volumes of what became known as the Compensation Handbook.
These print resources—initially published by editors at Leadership and Your Church (magazines owned by Christianity Today), and later published by editors at Church Law & Tax starting in 2006—quickly became a beloved and trusted standard for church leaders.
The Challenge: While foundational, these static handbooks were limited by their scope, infrequent cadence (at best, every other year), and reliance on a paper survey format. Church leaders needed a more dynamic solution.
2.0 | Digital Reports (2018–2025)
In 2018, the team behind Church Law & Tax launched ChurchSalary as a standalone business with the assistance of an ECFPL grant from the Lilly Endowment. This format change converted the printed tables of the Compensation Handbook into a customizable online salary report available on churchsalary.com.
ChurchSalary’s online salary reports were a game changer for leaders who wanted to find and leverage compensation insights tailored to their church and their geographic setting.
This shift dramatically improved the methodology behind the figures in our reports, enabling us to:
- Focus only on a nationwide cohort of “similar staff serving at similar churches” using the employee’s position, status (FT/PT), and the church’s budget and size.
- Analyze the impact of compensation factors such as location, education, experience, and geographic setting only a subset of employees within each nationwide cohort.
ChurchSalary 2.0 was a game changer for the church, allowing leaders to find and leverage precise compensation data. Unfortunately, it was constrained by the legacy of its print methodology which relied on:
- Preset Ranges: The use of preset categories for budget and attendance allowed ChurchSalary 2.0 to capture data quickly but severely limited the precision of our reports and analysis.
- External Survey Data: While over 120,000 reports were generated and saved on the 2.0 website, only 24,000 employee surveys were submitted by church leaders between 2018 and 2024. This 6x gap created a potluck problem—everyone wanted to eat but nobody brought food.
3.0 | Analysis Platform (2025–)
To overcome these challenges and deliver the precision, flexibility, and comprehensive analysis the church deserves, ChurchSalary partnered with world-class innovators. While we cast a vision for 3.0 and began planning in 2021, our ability to execute this vision was not possible until ChurchSalary became a Gloo Capital Partner in May 2024.
With the help of a world-class team of both Gloo and Midwestern engineers (another Gloo Capital Partner), ChurchSalary 3.0 was launched in August 2025.