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How do our salaries compare?

Review of Data on Church Salaries in Canada (June 1, 2023)

In my previous article I reviewed means and medians relating to various categories of church revenues and expenditures. I suggest you read it first if you need an understanding of what these two statistical measures represent.

Using another file downloaded from the Government of Canada’s Open Government Portal1, I examined information on salary levels tabulated from the annual T3010s2 that churches submitted in 2019. The table below summarizes certain salary information from Schedule 3 of the T3010. All charities, regardless of size, must complete this section. Accordingly, this data is drawn from 13,962 churches in Canada, including those with revenues less than $100,000 per year.

The form requires each charity to provide various employment information, including the classification of their highest ten salaries for full-time employees according to specified salary ranges. The table below summarizes the means and medians for this data.

The first item in the table is an interesting study in using a median to determine if maybe there are errors in the data. Ask ‘how could the mean and median be that far apart?’ It tells us to look for a problem. I did and they were easy to find. As an example, one church indicated that it has 36,091 people in full-time positions, while their total salary expenditure was $56,843. (So, on average, each employee earned $1.54 for the whole year?!?) What is happening here is that some people are adding salary figures in the form, instead of the number of employees, as requested. A review of the T3010 form shows that this has been a problem, as it clearly states “Do not enter a dollar amount.” Yet, a good number of forms are still filled out incorrectly in this manner. However, if you concentrate on the median figure, rather than the mean, these errors will not affect the data as a whole. (It does beg the question why the government does not weed out such serious data errors.)

What does the salary range information tell us? It appears to indicate the median number of full-time staff that a church has is four and they are evenly spread among the lowest four salary brackets. However, the data can’t be interpreted that way because each of the four medians are likely different churches, based on the median figure above which indicates full-time staff totalling only one. But it does inform us that none of the median/ middling churches had a salary of over $159,999.

I scanned through the data for the nine salary brackets and didn’t notice any errors such as the ones described above. Therefore, the mean figures are probably okay and, as expected, illustrate the effect that the mega-churches have on average salary ranges, as evident from them having individual staff possibly earning up to $299,999 each.

The number of part-time staff is corrupted in a manner similar to the figure for full-time staff. For example, one church reported 4 full-time staff and 83,786 part-time staff. Unlikely, in my mind. Therefore, trust the median figure of 2.

An overall conclusion can be drawn that most of the churches in Canada are small, both in term of full-time and part-time staff. Clearly, without a strong base of volunteers, these churches will have difficulty meeting their goals.

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1. Government of Canada, Open Government Portal,

https://search.open.canada.ca/en/od/?sort=score%20desc&page=1&search_text=

2. The government form number for the Registered Charities Information Return