Church staffing & salary planning

See your whole staff — and what it really costs — in one place.

StaffClarity turns your org chart into a living staffing and salary plan. Map your team, model raises and new roles, and walk into your next board meeting with the numbers already done.

Free for up to 5 paid staff — volunteers are always free. No credit card.
Built by a pastor, for churches.
Staffing plan updates as you plan
ELT
Lead Pastor
Senior leadership
$88,000
40h/wk
Branch total: $241,000
Support staff
Executive Assistant
$48,000
Supports Lead Pastor
Worship Director
Worship & Creative
$55,000
40h/wk
Branch total: $92,400
Kids Director
Family Ministries
$50,000
40h/wk
Branch total: $84,500
Total personnel budget $465,000
Allocated $417,900
Remaining $47,100
The real problem

Church staffing was never meant to live in a spreadsheet.

If you've ever planned your team and salaries in Excel, you already know how this goes.

  • The file called Budget_FINAL_v7.xlsx — and you're honestly not sure it's the final one.
  • A formula breaks, a cell turns into #REF!, and a number's been quietly wrong for who-knows-how-long.
  • The org chart lives in one file and the salaries in another, and the two never quite agree.
  • The night before the board meeting, stitching it all into something you can actually present.
  • No clean way to ask "what if we gave raises?" or "what would this new role cost?" without breaking the whole thing.

It's not you. There's just never been a tool built for how churches actually plan their staff and pay — so everyone defaults to the spreadsheet. StaffClarity is that tool.

the same plan, in StaffClarity ↓
Staffing plan · always in sync
Total personnel$465,000
Remaining$47,100
Built for clergy, not adapted

Clergy pay is different. Your tools should know that.

StaffClarity is built around the rules that make church compensation unique — not bolted on after.

Housing allowance

Designated, tracked, and treated correctly: excluded where it should be, counted where it must be.

SECA & dual-status

Ministers aren't regular W-2 math. We compute what your pastor actually costs — no employer FICA where it doesn't belong.

Benefits & true cost

Salary is just the start. See every role fully loaded, so the budget you present is the budget you'll spend.

Lead Pastor Clergy
$65,000 salary incl. $25,000 housing
Employer payroll tax
Total church cost
Office Administrator Staff
$65,000 salary non-clergy
Employer payroll tax
Total church cost
Same $65,000 salary — the church's real cost differs by , because clergy pay no employer FICA. Figures computed live by the same engine the app runs on.
See it work — try the free True Cost calculator →

Every number in the app runs on the same engine.

Educational, not tax advice.

Everything in one view

Your whole staff — and what each one truly costs — in one view.

Most tools give you a static diagram or a pile of salary numbers. StaffClarity brings your structure, your people, and the real cost of every role together — clergy and staff alike — so you can plan, not just record.

See what every staff member truly costs

Salary, payroll taxes, housing allowance, and benefits — the real, fully-loaded cost of each role, in one view. And it handles clergy correctly: housing allowance, SECA, and the dual-status math no spreadsheet template gets right.

Build and restructure your org chart

Drag and drop your whole team into place — leaders, staff, and volunteers. Model a "what if" restructure or a new hire side by side and watch the chart move with you before you commit. Reorganize as freely as your church changes. Free templates & examples →

A board packet in one click

Walk into your board meeting with a professional, print-ready compensation review — org chart, role costs, and salary summary — generated in a single click. The hard part, already done.

Lead Pastor
Senior leadership
Worship Director
Worship & creative
Kids Director
Family ministries
Youth Pastor
New role
Add a role, restructure a branch, model a new hire — your chart moves with you.
And every salary is quietly sanity-checked against market ranges for your church's size and location — benchmarks drawn from BLS, BEA, and national church compensation data. Built in, not bolted on.
Why nothing else fit

Your church software wasn't built for this. Neither was a blank spreadsheet.

Planning church staff and compensation falls into a gap that no existing tool was made to fill.

Generic tools

Org-chart & spreadsheet apps

Great at boxes and cells — but they know nothing about church roles, ministries, or how pay and budget fit together.

Church software

Planning Center, Breeze & co.

Excellent for giving, events, and people. But they were never built to plan staff compensation and a personnel budget.

Purpose-built

StaffClarity

The tool made for church staff, salary, and budget planning — your org chart and your numbers, finally in one place.

If you've gone looking for something like this and come up empty, you weren't missing it — it didn't exist. So we built it.

Pricing

No church ever pays more than $799 a year.

And volunteers are always free. You start free, pay only for your paid staff as the church grows, and the price is capped — so it never runs away from you.

Up to 5 paid staff Full features Free
6–20 paid staff$149/yr
21–35 paid staff$299/yr
36–50 paid staff$449/yr
51–75 paid staff$599/yr
76+ paid staff Price cap$799/yr

Seats are paid staff only. Volunteers and open or vacant roles are always free — no matter how large your church gets. Billed annually.

Try it for 30 days. If it's not helpful, email us for a full refund — no questions, no hoops.

See our refund policy.

Cancel anytime, right from the app — you keep access through the year you've paid for.

From the founder

I'm a lead pastor. Every year I sat down to plan our staffing and salaries, and every year I ended up fighting the same spreadsheet — version after version, formulas breaking, the org chart and the budget never matching, all of it due the night before a board meeting.

I went looking for something built for churches and couldn't find it. So I built StaffClarity — the tool I wished I'd had. If staffing season has ever stolen your sleep, I think it'll help.

— Cole Zick, Lead Pastor, Risen King Church

Built by a pastor, for pastors. If there's a feature you need, tell us — I read every email and the roadmap is shaped by churches like yours.

Tell us what you need →
Get started

See your whole staff — and what it really costs.

Free for up to 5 paid staff — volunteers are always free. No credit card to start.

Start free