If you earn under £40K you’re underpaid

As a manager in a data role in a nonprofit that is.

This is part two of a several part series analysing four years of data vacancy data in nonprofits. Part one gives an overview and explains a bit more about the dataset.

Managers

Let's look at the Manager job family.

This family includes quite a diverse set of roles. Broadly if it looks to me like it has some level of seniority but isn’t a “senior analyst” or if it looks like it involves line management but isn’t a head-of or director role I stick it in here.

How much managers get paid

Manager roles had median salaries of £45,700 in 2026. Up from £42,000 in 2022.

Let's look at the spread of advertised salaries. Here's the spread between lower quartile and upper quartile.

If your salary is between the dots then you're in the same range as 50% of managers. If your salary is lower than the lower dot you're in the range where only 25% of managers get paid this little. If your salary is higher than the high dot, you're in the range where only 25% of managers get paid this much.

Or to put it another way. If your role is in this manager family and you earn under £40K you’re not well paid. Whereas if your salary is about £52,000 you are doing very well. Though it’s worth bearing in mind that these roles include London weighting where that is relevant so if you are based outside London you might want to knock a few thousand quid off that benchmark.

I find it really helpful to look at the spread of all salaries. These charts have a dot for each vacancy. I’ve annotated a few so you can see what sort of roles we’re talking about here.

I’ve drawn one chart for each calendar year. There’s some evidence of wage inflation in this dataset so bear that in mind as you go back in time.

2026

2025

2024

2023

2022

Working styles

The majority of Manager roles are hybrid positions. On-site positions are the next common but 19% of roles are Remote (this includes roles where Remote is an option). That's pretty much the same split as data jobs overall.

What can you do with this?

If you work in a data role that might be considered a manager in a data role in a nonprofit I hope this will give you a sense of how your salary compares to the benchmark. If you have an HR or executive role in a non-profit then hopefully this will help you think about the costs of recruitment and retention.

The other thing I have always hoped this newsletter will achieve is demonstrate to data professionals outside the nonprofit sector that there are viable, interesting (and socially impactful) roles in nonprofits. But this might also give you a reality check about the financial rewards of moving into the sector.