State of Ministry · Interactive

The compensation lab

Pick any two things and compare what they pay. Every figure here comes from ministry leaders — and every cell too thin to trust says so instead of guessing.

01 · Build a comparison

Compare pay across any two dimensions

Choose what to break out and what to compare it against. Cells with fewer than 12 paid respondents are suppressed — a number drawn from eight people isn't a finding.

02 · Geography

Where the money is

Each tile is a state, sized equally so small states stay readable. Only states with at least 15 respondents show a figure. The panel starts on the national picture — click a tile to compare that state against it, and click the same tile again to return.

This is not a scientific survey. Respondents opted in, so these figures describe the ministry leaders who answered — not the country. Read state comparisons as directional, never as a benchmark: with 17–20 paid respondents in a smaller state, a $5,000 difference from the national average can appear or vanish on a handful of responses. Differences big enough that a state's own margin of error can support them are shown in colour; the rest stay grey. Only — of 51 states clear that bar.
About the gender pay gap layer. Splitting by state and gender and paid status is demanding: it is reportable in — jurisdictions, and where the numbers are too thin the gender block is left off that state entirely rather than shown as a guess. A gap is only ever calculated when both men and women clear the threshold in that state. Read this layer as texture, not as evidence: not one of those state gaps — nor the regional or national salary gap — is large enough to clear its own margin of error. The gender difference that does survive that test is not salary but access, and it is — times its margin of error: see Who Gets Paid.
03 · Gender by region

The comparison the data can actually support

Pooling to four regions gives each gender — paid respondents — and even then no salary difference clears two standard errors. The access gap beneath each pair does. That contrast is the finding, not a shortcoming of the sample: see Who Gets Paid.

04 · Distribution

The shape of ministry pay

Pick a group to see how its pay is distributed across bands — not just the average, which can hide a lot.

How these numbers work

Volunteers are never counted as $0. The survey asks compensation as a band, with “I am a volunteer” as one option. Averaging unpaid volunteers into a pay figure would manufacture gaps that are really differences in who gets paid at all. Every average here uses paid respondents only; unpaid rates are reported separately.

Averages are estimates. Because pay is banded, we assign each band its midpoint ($100,000+ is treated as $115,000) and average those. This is a reasonable approximation, not payroll data. Median bands are also shown, which are more robust for banded responses.

Suppression is enforced in the data, not the display. Cells under 12 paid respondents (15 for states) carry no figure at all, so no amount of clicking can surface a number built on a handful of people.

These are unadjusted comparisons. No controls for church size, tenure, role, or hours. Church size alone moves average pay from roughly to , so most apparent gaps between groups partly reflect which churches they work in.

Open the full data explorer →

Read the story behind the numbers
Who Gets Paid→

The gender gap in ministry isn't mainly about salary. It's about who is offered a salary in the first place.