The 2023 King County Nonprofit Wage & Benefits Survey Report reflects the compensation and benefits practices in effect on February – June 2023, as reported by 235 nonprofit organizations in King County, Washington. You can access the 501 Compensation Tracker to directly compare compensation data from multiple job titles.
One organization often has a different title than another organization for the same job. We recommend using the job description to match jobs rather than the job title alone. In the report you will find descriptions for each reported job to help you do this matching.
When making your compensation or benefits decisions, in addition to the survey data, consider:
- Your compensation philosophy
- How that philosophy relates to your organization’s mission
- The internal value of your positions to that mission
- Relevant laws and equity-focused practices (In Washington, be sure you comply with the Equal Pay and Opportunities Act, overtime threshold, and the prohibition on providing compensatory time.)
Download the Wage & Benefits Survey Report
Here are some highlights from the report:
- The 235 participating King County nonprofit organizations employ more than 20,000 individuals. Once jobs were excluded to provide confidentiality protections, 14,000 individual salaries were categorized into 175 job titles that are displayed in this report.
- 74% of participating nonprofits define a full-time work week as 40 hours per week; 8% use 35 hours, and 6% use 37.5 hours. The remaining 12% are predominantly small nonprofits with a less structured policy.
- 64% of employees at participating organizations work full-time.
- During the previous twelve months, annual voluntary turnover rates were 20% for full-time employees and 22% for part-time employees.
- 60% provide full-time employees with specific, separate numbers of paid days off for vacation, holiday, and sick leave. Surveyed nonprofits offer an average of 10.9 paid holidays and 11.1 paid sick days per year.
- 32% have a PTO (Paid-Time-Off) program giving employees a set number of days off they can take for any purpose.
- 85% of surveyed nonprofits offer some type of medical insurance to full-time employees. Of those that offer health insurance, 63% offer coverage to part-time employees that maintain a minimum number of hours per week (on average, 23 hours per week).
- 74% of surveyed organizations provide some type of retirement benefits, generally access to a 401(k) or a 403(b), to their full-time employees. Both the employer and the employee contribute to retirement 85% of the time. In 9% of participating nonprofits, only the employee contributes, and in 6%, only the employer contributes.
- Many participating nonprofits use more than one method to grant salary increases: Cost of living - 53%, across-the-board increases - 40%, merit/performance - 37%, external labor market factors - 32%, internal job equity factors - 28%, and length of service - 20%. 89% of participating organizations expect to have salary increase budgets in their current fiscal year, with a median increase budget of 4%.
Subscribe to email updates to receive notifications about the Putting People First project. You can still access the 2021 report if you would like to directly compare and contrast the results from both iterations of the survey. Be aware that we cannot draw statistically reliable conclusions on trends from comparing the two reports because different organizations participated in each survey.