Curious if your salary as a nonprofit communications director is in line with what others are making? There’s a huge range depending on the size of your nonprofit and where you live.

Check out the salary data for U.S. nonprofit communications directors in the 2019 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report.

We asked for salary data from communications directors/managers and looked at that data by the overall organizational budget and by the cost of living where the nonprofit is located.

Here’s how to read this chart . . .

The national median salary overall is $60,000 (upper left corner). If you are interested in salaries by organization size only, follow the data down the first column. For example, if you work at a nonprofit with an organizational annual budget of $20 million, the median salary is $75,000. If you work at an organization with an annual budget under $1 million, the median salary is $50,000.

If you only care about cost of living differences, read the data across the first row for the national medians. In very expensive places to live, the median is $79,000. In affordable parts of the country, the median is $50,100.

If you want to combine these two factors, find your combination in the grid. Towards the upper left, you’ll see that communications directors at the largest nonprofits in the most expensive areas of the country make a median salary of $125,000. They make more than three times what communications directors at the smallest organizations in the most affordable areas of the country do, at $36,650.


Get your full copy of the 2019 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report for additional details and much more data. It’s free!

Published On: February 19, 2019|Categories: Communications Team Management, Relationships, and Boundaries|