Charity salaries vs inflation over the last 5 years
There’s been a lot of talk about inflation in recent weeks. And plenty of chatter about the upcoming public sector pay rise and whether the increase will be above the inflation rate.
In this post we thought we’d take a look at charity sector pay over the last five years to see how it compares.
Using a combination of our own data collection and archived job adverts from Third Sector, Charity Job, and The Guardian, we built up a picture of salaries for different job types in different locations.
It quickly became apparent that we’d bitten off way more than we could chew. So, we made the following decisions to make the task a little more manageable:
In an effort to simplify things, we narrowed it down to fundraising in London. But this was still too much, so we simplified it further to include just ‘officer’ and ‘manager’ level jobs, then just ‘manager’ jobs.
In an attempt to make things as comparable as possible, we only used roles advertised directly by charities. We used the upper end of the salary banding, (if one was advertised), and measured the mean of the middle 80% by year to ignore outliers.
We used the Bank of England inflation calculator for the maths.
Our efforts generated this:
In this example, the inflation-adjusted salary has been taken from the previous year. If you ignore the intervening years and calculate what the salary would be (if kept in line with inflation) until August of this year, you’d expect the mean to be £40,481 which is -2.75% under the inflation rate over the five years.
So, it seems charity sector pay (in this very specific example) consistently falls behind inflation. We’re not sure what happened in 2017 for there to be such a big jump. A cynic might say it was because it was an election year (more money was given to the third sector to boost the perception of the incumbent government). That would also explain the drop the following year and the boost in pay in the following 2019 election year. But that’s pure speculation.
It seems there was a drop in the mean salary during the pandemic, but not by a huge amount. And it’s rebounded somewhat in 2021.
Anyway, we’ve got more data than we know what to do with, so we’ll leave it there for now.
Feel free to drop your thoughts to tim@bamboofundraising.co.uk.