The CharityJob Salary Report 2026 — A Useful Tool, But Not the Whole Picture

CharityJob publishes a salary report every year and it is, genuinely, a useful document. Based on data from more than 55,000 roles posted on their platform in 2025, it gives charity leaders and boards a reasonable starting point for benchmarking salaries and understanding broad recruitment trends.

But there are things it gets wrong, things it misses entirely, and things it cannot tell you — and I think it is worth being honest about all three.

I say this as someone who has posted roles on CharityJob and Indeed, spent real money advertising on both platforms, and never once placed a candidate through either of them.

What the numbers actually show

Across my roles posted on job boards in 2025 and 2026, the combined numbers look like this. On Indeed: 18,048 impressions, 1,006 clicks, 162 applications, £444.84 spent. On CharityJob: five roles, nearly 12,000 views, 332 applications, £4,000 spent. Combined across both platforms: roughly 30,000 views, nearly 500 applications, and £4,444.84 in fees.

Zero of those applications led to a placement.

Every single appointment I have made has come from approaching people who were not actively looking — candidates in post, doing good work for another charity, not browsing job boards on a Tuesday morning. That is where the market actually lives. And it is a market that salary surveys based on job board data cannot see.

The recruiter-led market myth

CharityJob’s central finding is that the market is now recruiter-led. Fewer jobs posted, more applications per role, average 69 clicks per vacancy. Their conclusion: charities have more choice.

Set that alongside what Pro Bono Economics found in independent research published in 2024 and 2025. More than half of charities have vacancies. Four in five of those organisations are finding it difficult to recruit. Forty per cent of charities report struggling with recruitment, and 57% of vacancies are now defined as hard to fill. Among those charities with hard-to-fill vacancies, almost half have had to pause some operations.

How can both things be true? Because CharityJob is measuring volume, not quality. More clicks on Apply does not mean more suitable candidates. The skills and experience mismatch at specialist and senior levels — fundraising directors, finance leads, CEOs — is not visible in application data. You can have 102 applications for a Supporter Engagement Manager role and not one of them be the right person. I know because I have seen exactly that.

The recruiter-led narrative is accurate for volume-hiring at generalist mid-level roles. It is not accurate for the appointments that actually move organisations forward.

The salary growth figure needs context

A 3% median salary increase to £36,000 sounds like progress. CharityJob presents it as broadly positive. But the private sector grew wages by 5.4% and the public sector by 5.3% in the same period. Pro Bono Economics analysis has consistently found that realised wage growth in charities lags business by nearly two percentage points year on year. That gap has been compounding for several years.

The cumulative effect is a charity workforce falling progressively further behind in real purchasing power. That is the primary driver of the retention crisis that Pro Bono Economics identifies in its own research — a crisis that a job board salary survey, by its nature, cannot capture, because it measures what organisations offer at the point of hire, not what happens to staff in the eighteen months that follow.

The finding that deserves far more attention

In 2025, a third of entry-level and junior charity roles in London paid below the London Living Wage. Outside London, nearly a third of junior roles paid below the UK Living Wage. Both figures are higher than the previous year.

The Living Wage Foundation’s director described this as concerning. I would go further. A sector whose mission is frequently to address poverty and inequality is structurally underpaying a third of its most junior workforce. That is not a footnote — it is a crisis with direct consequences for diversity, for the pipeline of future talent, and for the sector’s ability to attract and retain people from the communities it exists to serve.

CharityJob flags this and moves on. It deserves to be the headline.

What job boards cannot tell you

The CharityJob report measures what happens on CharityJob. That sounds obvious but its implications are significant.

Research consistently suggests that at any given time, around 30% of the workforce is actively looking for a new role. The other 70% are not on job boards. They are not clicking Apply. They are not in the data. For a report based entirely on job board activity, that means the most experienced, most in-demand people in the sector are largely invisible.

It also means the report cannot speak to burnout and retention — the biggest structural challenge the sector faces. Research from Fair Collective and NCVO found that 85% of small charity leaders have experienced poor mental health due to their role, with 20% reporting severe impacts. Pro Bono Economics found one in four charities cite staff burnout as a cause of retention problems. These are the realities shaping the talent market. None of them appear in a salary report derived from job postings.

How to use the report well

The CharityJob Salary Report is a legitimate and useful tool. The salary data is real, the methodology is sound, and it is a reasonable guide to advertised salaries at the point of hire. CharityJob have been producing this for years and it has genuine value for charity leaders trying to benchmark pay.

The important thing is to understand what it can and cannot tell you. It measures what happens on one job board. It does not measure what happens in the wider talent market, in passive candidate conversations, or in the eighteen months after someone joins an organisation. Like any research tool, it reflects the lens through which it was built.

Use it as one input among several. Check it against the NCVO Civil Society Almanac, Pro Bono Economics research, and Harris Hill’s salary survey when their 2026 edition is published. And remember that the salary you advertise at is not the same as the salary that will attract — and keep — the right person.

The 70% problem

The most important number in charity recruitment is not in any salary report.

It is the proportion of the people you need to hire who are not looking. Seventy per cent of the market, give or take, is passive at any given time. They are good at their jobs, reasonably settled, and not browsing job boards. Reaching them requires a different approach entirely — direct outreach, genuine sector relationships, and the time and skill to have a conversation that starts with understanding what they value, not just whether they want a new job.

The organisations that get this right do not rely on job boards as their primary recruitment strategy. They use them as one channel among several, with realistic expectations of what they will return. They invest in search — proper market mapping, direct approaches, candidate conversations — for the roles that really matter.

A salary report cannot tell you how to do that. But understanding its limits is a good place to start.