Church leaders everywhere wrestle with this question from time to time.
Many never settle on a single approach and thus rehash it everytime it comes up unnecessarily.
The question – “How much do we pay a Guest Speaker/Pastor or Worship Leader”?
The Tension:
Being as generous as possible based upon scripture (1 Timothy 5: 17-18), with wise stewardship to balance this instruction within the church’s budget or resources.
The Solution:
Base the compensation of guests upon the current salary of your Pastor or Worship Pastor, as this is the best fit for your size church and budget, most likely. Whether you include benefits in the calculation depends if the guest is paying for their own benefits or not. We’ll look at this later.
The Method:
Convert the pay to a Baseline Pay per Day. For example, in the table below, the Pastor’s annual pay is $75,000 (including housing), divide that by 260 work days = Baseline Pay per Day.
Take this baseline and adjust up/down based upon a set of criteria that makes sense to your leadership – examples could be talent, draw, how sought after they are, etc.
Some things you can do to be more generous…(in addition to the base line):
Round up to nearest $100 or $250 increment. Say the base line is $577 per day as in the table below – round up to $600, or $750.
In addition to the adjusted baseline, pay for their travel, food and accommodations as deemed appropriate.
Now, some guests have their own fee structure and that’s fine. At least the Baseline Pay per Day gives you a tool to assess the reasonability of their fee structure against your church size/budget. Hear me, I’m not saying they HAVE to fit in your range, you’re smarter than me on that – but there’s a tension to balance nevertheless.
By having a Pay per Day range established as matter of policy, you won’t have to rehash it every time.
Lastly, you can always take a love offering and add that to the predetermined amount or in place of if it’s higher.
Just pay in check, never cash to avoid issues with bookkeeping and the IRS.
Let’s look at the table below:
In this example, the annual salary is $75,000 and the benefits are $25,000. There are 260 standard work days in a year to arrive at the Per Day amount. Now, if it’s a speaker, there’s a preparation day and the day of. In the case of a guest Worship Leader, often times there’s a rehearsal day/time before the day of. The first column assumes the guest is paying their own benefits (insurance, retirement etc), the 2nd column excludes this. (They’re employed by another church for example).
SSO = Social Security Offset – for Social Security purposes, the IRS treats all ordained ministers as self-employed and thus are paying the SE Tax. I’m assuming your church offers SSO to its ordained pastors, if so, consider including it when calculating the Baseline Pay per Day.
