Press release
Compensation survey now covers 40 roles
The third annual Association Staff Compensation Survey expands to 40 roles, up from 38 in 2025 and 36 in 2024.
NANA's research team has released the 2026 Association Staff Compensation Survey, its third annual edition, expanding coverage to 40 roles.
Three years of growth
The survey covered 36 roles at its 2024 launch and grew to 38 in 2025. The 2026 edition adds four new roles, reflecting positions research director Inês Carvalho-Reyes said kept coming up in member feedback but weren't yet covered: digital program managers, chapter relations staff, and dedicated grant-compliance roles among them.
"Every year we add the roles associations tell us they can't currently benchmark against anything. This year that meant digital and grants staff, positions that didn't have a clean comparison a few years ago."
— Inês Carvalho-Reyes, Director of Research
Carvalho-Reyes said the survey team draws its list of candidate roles from two sources: direct member feedback collected through the year, and gaps her team notices when fielding compensation questions from chapter roundtables. A role only makes the cut once enough responding associations report having it on staff to produce a statistically usable range.
What the survey covers
Base salary ranges by role, organization size, and region
Bonus and incentive structures where they exist
Benefits benchmarks, including retirement contributions and remote-work stipends
The survey now draws on responses from associations across all six chapters, spanning organizations with two-person staffs to those with dozens of employees.
How associations use the data
Carvalho-Reyes said the most common use of the survey isn't setting a single salary figure but building a full compensation band for a role during budget season, then testing where a current or prospective hire falls within it. Chapter roundtables have increasingly built the survey into onboarding for new executive directors, walking new hires through how to read the ranges before their first budget cycle.
The survey does not publish individual organization responses or identify participating associations by name; all figures are reported as aggregated ranges by role, size band, and region, consistent with how the 2024 and 2025 editions were published.
Regional and size differences
Compensation ranges continue to vary more by organization size than by region, Carvalho-Reyes said, with the gap between a two-person shop's executive director and a forty-staff federation's executive director wider than the gap between the same role in, say, Denver and Washington. That pattern has held across all three editions of the survey, which she said gives associations more confidence using the national ranges even outside the largest metro areas.
A companion to the dues and renewal data
The compensation survey now sits alongside the State of Associations report and the Member Renewal Benchmarks as one of three recurring data products NANA's research team fields each year. Carvalho-Reyes said associations increasingly use all three together during budget season: renewal and membership figures to project revenue, and the compensation survey to plan staff costs against it. She said the research team is exploring a fourth annual survey focused specifically on non-dues revenue benchmarks.
About NANA
NANA is the professional society for association executives, boards, and staff, providing research, peer community, and advocacy for the people who run the organizations that hold civic life together.