Salary data for high impact charities
Salary benchmarks based on job advertisements from the last 6 months.
I’ve put together a salary data exploration tool for high impact charities, using publicly available data sourced from the Probably Good and 80,000 Hours job boards.
To use it, you can explore the data using the filters. If you click the “Job listings” tab, you can see any roles feeding into your filters. You can also set the currency as you please. I’ve set location filters for EU/UK/US, plus a few specific hub cities (the Bay Area, DC, and London). Currently, it includes all full-time, permanent or long-term roles posted on Probably Good and 80,000 Hours from November 2025 to May 2026.
These aren’t true salary benchmarks, and should be treated somewhat lightly due to a variety of issues:
The data it uses are the publicly advertised salary ranges of jobs, not what people in these roles are actually paid.
The seniority and skill filters are based on Probably Good’s and 80,000 Hours’ labeling of the data, and haven’t been double checked.
The cause area categories, especially “EA Meta” and “Other” are coarse and imperfect. I’m sure some organizations would disagree with how they are categorized.
The location filters roughly match where the job would be hired, but this might miss some detail — many roles likely have variable salaries based on location, and organizations might have stronger location preferences than is implied by a job ad.
I probably should have included more animal welfare data, such as from Animal Advocacy Careers.
Some roles have multiple functions or seniority tags, so the number of jobs sampled at each seniority will add up to a greater total than the total roles sampled. There is probably something not ideal about this, but I kept it to avoid manually labelling data.
I might update this in the future, but I’m not sure yet if it’ll become a live project. If it does become one, I might improve on the issues above, and change to a rolling benchmark of the last 6 months of postings.
Regardless, for anyone designing salary systems or setting salaries for their organization, I hope this is a useful tool. Check it out here.
So what do these data say about salaries in high impact charities? Here are some breakdowns by cause area, skillset, and location to explore.
Thank you for doing this work! There's constant demand for this kind of thing in the nonprofit sector and very few (affordable) sources for it. Inspiring! Thank you!
Really insightful, thank you! Without meaning to sound critical, I note that another reason to take this lightly is the possibility that roles hired for through these job boards systematically deviate from overall salary averages. My mental model of this hiring space assumes a disproportionate amount of high-paying, senior roles won't be advertised like this. The load-bearing hypothetical looks something like "Hey, Jane Smith used to be the CTO at Nonsuch, Inc., and I heard she's absolutely cracked. How much does she make now? If we beat that, do you think we can poach her?"
Very open to the author or other readers validating or challenging this model!