What the 990 already tells you about pay.
Every exempt organization files compensation data into the public record each year. Most benchmarking ignores it in favor of thin surveys. We did the opposite.
Every year, every tax-exempt organization of any size files a Form 990. On it, in plain view, is what the organization paid its highest-compensated people. Names, titles, and dollars, submitted to the IRS and published to anyone who cares to look.
That is an enormous, current, public dataset about how the nonprofit sector actually pays its leaders. And most compensation benchmarking barely touches it.
The survey habit.
The usual way a board sets executive pay is to buy a salary survey. Surveys are convenient, but they are thin. They depend on who chose to respond, they lag by a year or more, and they often blur the distinctions that matter most: organization size, region, subsector, and role. You end up defending a number against a comparison group you cannot fully see.
The 990 has the opposite shape. It is comprehensive rather than sampled, public rather than proprietary, and specific down to the individual filing. The work is not in finding the data. The work is in turning thousands of filings into a clean, comparable peer set, and then into something a board can actually use.
What we built instead.
ExemptPay starts from the public record and does that work. It benchmarks every leader your 990 makes public against real peers drawn from the same source, and it returns a board-ready report: percentile detail, language your minutes can use, and a checklist that maps to the rules the IRS actually enforces. Independent of management, and auditable line by line, because anyone can go back to the filings.
Defensible pay should not rest on a survey nobody can inspect. It should rest on the record everyone can.
