What do nonprofit data jobs pay? Salaries and trends from 2024
Hannah Khwaja, Analysis and Impact Lead, Data Orchard
For around three years now, our Special Projects Associate, Ben Proctor has been collating a weekly list of data job opportunities in nonprofits. Ben distributes these through a newsletter you can have delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday.
We at Data Orchard are naturally curious people, and we often provide support to organisations recruiting in the nonprofit data space. So we’ve delved into Ben’s jobs data a few times now to see what it can tell us about the changing job market.
Here, we explore vacancies advertised between January and December 2024.
There were a total of 603 vacancies in our dataset, advertised by 365 organisations.
We’ve put a detailed description of the dataset and how we processed the data at the end.
The average salary for a data analyst is £37,300
As we’ve found in our previous analyses, Officers, Analysts and Managers were the most frequently advertised role types. Together, they accounted for 56% of all advertised positions.
The median advertised salary for an Officer was £31,000, for an Analyst £37,300, and for a Manager £42,000.
The lowest salaries were offered for Assistants (£25,400), Administrators (£25,500) and Executives (£29,100).
At the upper end of the range were Senior Managers (£55,000) and Heads of (£61,200), with Directors offered the highest salaries, on average, by some distance at £95,000.
Nonprofit data jobs - Average salary by job type. Showing only job types with at least five vacancies in the dataset
We also had a look at the interquartile range for each job role. Here’s a quick reminder of what the interquartile range shows us:
The lowest quartile is the salary where 25% of jobs would be paid less and 75% of people would be paid more.
The highest quartile is the salary where 25% of jobs would be paid more and 75% would be paid less.
Looking at the range from the lowest quartile to the highest quartile shows you the middle range of salaries. 25% of jobs are paid more and 25% are paid less, but 50% of jobs are within that range.
Nonprofit data jobs - Interquartile range of salary by job type. Showing only job types with at least five vacancies in the dataset
The widest interquartile range was seen for Director roles, from £72,700 to £100,000.
The narrowest ranges were mostly seen for lower-paid roles. For example, salaries offered for Assistant jobs varied by less than £5,000, from £25,000 to £29,700.
There was considerable overlap between the salary ranges of many roles, particularly Leads, Developers, Engineers, Managers and Scientists.
We visualised the full spread of the data, too. We can see that there are highly-paid outliers at both the lower end of the salary spectrum (such as Administrators and Assistants) and the upper end (Engineers and Directors).
Nonprofit data jobs - Dotplot of advertised salaries. Showing only job types with at least five vacancies in the dataset
Larger organisations tend to pay more than smaller
As previously, we found evidence that larger organisations are paying more than smaller ones.
On average, an Officer can expect to be paid £28,000 in a medium-sized organisation (annual income of £100,000 to £1m, as defined by NCVO), compared with £33,300 in a super-major organisation (annual income of more than £100m).
Similarly, a Manager can expect £40,000 in a medium-sized organisation, compared with £45,400 in a super-major organisation.
The difference was less substantial for Analysts, who could expect £35,000 in a medium-sized organisation and £37,000 in a super-major organisation.
Very few roles were advertised in micro or small organisations (annual income less than £100,000).
Nonprofit data jobs - Average salary by organisation size. Showing only organisation sizes with at least five vacancies in the dataset
There is no evidence of pay inflation over the past two years
The last time we analysed 12 months of data we looked at jobs advertised from June 2022 – 2023. We found evidence that salaries for the three most advertised roles (Officers, Analysts and Managers) increased over the course of the year.
This time, we decided to look at 24 months of data from January 2023 to December 2024 to explore trends over time.
Over the two years, we’ve seen median salaries vary by around £5,000 for Officers, Analysts and Managers, though there has been no clear upward trajectory.
Nonprofit data jobs - Average salary of most commonly advertised job types over time.
We saw a similar rate of apparent readvertisements in this year’s data, compared with our June 2022-23 analysis, at around 6%. 36 roles appeared in our dataset multiple times more than 30 days apart, suggesting possible difficulties in recruiting. In 15 cases (42%), the roles were readvertised with a higher salary (median increase: £2,335).
On-site and hybrid roles attract a premium compared to fully remote
We had location details for 594 roles. 29% of these required staff to be onsite, 20% were able to be worked remotely, and 51% were advertised as hybrid. This compares with ONS survey data from December 2024, where 40% of respondents said that they worked exclusively onsite, 18% remotely and 42% in a hybrid manner. Data roles in nonprofits therefore seem to be more likely to offer hybrid or remote working conditions, compared with the general job market (71% vs 60%).
Looking at the most commonly advertised roles in our dataset, we can see that Analyst and Manager roles were on average paid in the region of £2,000 - £3,000 more per annum for hybrid or on-site roles, compared with remote positions. This might reflect a bias where hybrid or on-site roles are more likely to be based in London and attract London Weighting. In contrast, Officers were paid similarly for remote and hybrid roles and slightly less for on-site roles.
Nonprofit data jobs - Advertised working location for the most commonly advertised job types
Nonprofits offer lower salaries for more senior roles
We often hear people say that nonprofits can’t offer the same salaries as other sectors, so, as in our previous analyses, we wanted to investigate whether this was true. We compared our nonprofit vacancies from 2024 to the average pay for data roles advertised on the jobs board Indeed.com
Nonprofit data jobs - Salaries compared to the wider market. Showing only job types with average salaries on Indeed.com
In line with our previous analysis, we found that nonprofits advertised senior positions such as Head Of, Senior Manager, Engineer, Scientist and Senior Analyst at rates substantially below the average from Indeed.com. However, they pay slightly more than average for lower-level positions including Administrator, Coordinator, Analyst and Manager.
This is only one comparison, and we don’t know too much about any biases there might be in the types of organisations advertising on Indeed.com. However, this does add some weight to the idea that nonprofits are offering lower salaries for key data roles than are available in other sectors.
Variation in salary between Subsectors is limited
We were interested to see whether some nonprofit subsectors paid more than others.
We looked at the median salary for organisations in different subsectors across the most recruited roles (Officer, Analyst and Manager), including environment, health, housing, international development, research, and social services (including family services, services for older and disabled people, temporary shelters, refugee assistance, and welfare support).
Nonprofit data jobs - Salaries in different subsectors. Showing only nonprofit subsectors with at least five vacancies in the dataset
Officer roles showed the greatest variation in average salary across different subsectors. The highest salary for Officer-level positions was offered by housing organisations at £36,900. This was almost £10,000 more than the lowest-paying sector, social services, at £27,100.
Analyst roles were offered similar salaries across sectors, although social services still provided the lowest pay at £35,000. The highest offering was £40,000 in the environment sector.
Salaries offered for Manager roles were similar across the international development, research and social services sectors at £43-44,000. Housing organisations offered slightly more (£46,600) and health organisations even more still (£50,000). The lowest salaries for managers were offered by the environment sector (£41,000).
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About the dataset
Ben scans a range of job listings on a roughly weekly basis looking for what he considers to be data vacancies.
He captures a very small amount of data about each vacancy. The job title, the URL of the listing, the salary (including the range if appropriate), the name of the recruiting organisation and whether it is a site-based, hybrid or remote position. Although Ben does share roles that do not advertise the salary, these were not included in our dataset.
Many posts advertise a salary plus benefits and Ben doesn’t capture these benefits in any way. It is possible that some candidates would accept a lower salary for some other sort of benefit.
Salary figures include London Weighting where this is offered and reflect FTE salary for part time posts. Ben does not distinguish between permanent and temporary roles.
Posts are advertised with salaries shown in different ways. A post may have a single salary figure, advertised ‘up to £X’ or advertised within a range. This is not the same as the range of salaries shown above. For each post we take the maximum advertised salary. The range of salaries shown in this post is the range of maximum salaries advertised.
This choice has been the subject of lively debate within the team. We have considered using the mid-point of the range of salary bands (where these are given) instead of the top of the ranges. Typically, someone would expect to start a new post at the bottom of the salary range so showing the top of the range might lead to inflated salary expectations. That said, we do not know what point in the salary range any individual starts their role. People must, logically, progress along the salary range when they are in post. A manager wanting to use this data for benchmarking or budgeting will want to understand the top of the salary range. And we don’t have salary bands for some posts. Overall, we have settled on using the maximum advertised salary. The data should be interpreted in this regard.
The figures are based on advertised vacancies. We can’t tell from this dataset whether organisations were able to recruit to these posts. We also can’t tell if candidates were able to negotiate higher salaries than advertised or where in an advertised scale a successful candidate was initially paid.
We matched organisation names against public records such as the various charities regulators or companies houses. This allowed us to identify organisation size in terms of income (in the majority of cases) and categorise organisations into nonprofit subsectors based on their activities.
You can find datasets from this and previous analyses on our GitHub here.
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