Fundraisers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Fundraisers worker at that point in the distribution, so $85,280 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

With 105,930 jobs nationally, Fundraisers make up 0.07% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: New York alone holds 11,380 of those jobs, the top three states hold 26.3%, and the deepest concentration sits in District of Columbia (location quotient 5.46, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $63,760 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($106,960) is 2.5 times the 10th percentile ($43,200), a gap of $63,760 a year. The mean of $73,130 sitting above the median of $66,490 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is California at $80,810; the jobs leader is New York:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Fundraisers stands number 262 by employment and number 314 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Business and Financial Operations Occupations, the group median wage is $78,420 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 15% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.0% of the group's 10,351,430 jobs. In 17 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $66,490, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 8,950 jobs, 8.4% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Pittsburgh, PA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $64,370 a year, against $99,010 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Fundraisers paycheck, gross, is $2,557 every two weeks on an annual $66,490, which is $5,541 a month and $1,279 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($52,590) to the 75th ($85,280) is worth $32,690 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $73,139 would sit between the median ($66,490) and the 75th percentile ($85,280), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $52,590, is $13,900 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations

Sibling occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations: Property Appraisers and Assessors, Financial Risk Specialists, Tax Examiners and Collectors, and Revenue Agents, Budget Analysts, Credit Counselors, Agents and Business Managers of Artists, Performers, and Athletes. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.