Research
Scope of the Arizona Nonprofit Sector
Nonprofit wages
How does pay in the nonprofit sector compare to that in the for-profit world? Do people working jobs that provide benefits to society sacrifice pay for their service? The answers to these questions are complex since the nonprofit sector itself is complex.
In our analysis of Census Bureau data, relative pay and worker counts were summed across the nonprofit subsectors, showing that 29,782 of the 75,068 workers (40 percent) in core nonprofits earned less than their peers in the for-profit sector. This left 60 percent earning the same or more. When nonprofit workers across all four subsectors are combined, we see that 29 percent are paid less than their for-profit peers, 33 percent are paid more, and 38 percent have pay that is statistically the same.
For a deeper dive, read our research papers on wages across sectors and comparative pay across occupation groups.