W.A.C.E. Releases 2025 Staff Salary & Benefits Survey

W.A.C.E.’s annual Staff Salary & Benefits Survey is one tool designed to advance two of the three Imperatives in our current Strategic Plan. Specifically, Imperative 1 challenges us to provide Chambers with industry best practices. Imperative 2 commits W.A.C.E. to advancing the Chamber leadership pipeline.
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W.A.C.E. is committed to ensuring that the Chamber work is viewed as a profession and a career. One key to that positioning is to advocate for Chamber staff professionals being paid appropriately.
Based on the data collected from members, it appears that wages increased for many positions, although not all.   It appears that economic pressures, along with changing areas of focus in the work being done by Chambers led to impacts on wages with positions focused on economic development, workforce, or program management seeing increases while other more traditional roles were more likely to see no gain or even reductions over past years.

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Some of the key findings in the survey included:

• Strong majorities of mid-sized and large chambers provide a wide mix of health-care and technology related benefits.
• Chambers continue to appreciate the value of professional development, with nearly 80% of all respondents reporting that they budget for this as an employee investment.
• Chambers continue to look for additional staff benefits that will make Chamber work attractive.   Non-traditional “perks” mentioned included flexible work schedules, medical stipends, sabbaticals, travel benefits, and transit or vehicle allowances.
• Chambers reported that the top challenges they face both in hiring and retaining staff include competitive pay, the quality of the benefit packages they can offer, and the frequent need for staff to work outside of traditional office hours.

We express appreciation to the Chambers that responded to the salary & benefits survey, which was conducted in January and February of 2025. A total of 131 Chambers, or approximately 30% of our current membership, participated in sharing the data that is presented in this report.

W.A.C.E. is pleased to provide this information as a benefit to our members and are confident it will be helpful to local Chamber leaders as they work to build strong, effective, professional staff teams.   The survey can be downloaded from the W.A.C.E. Member Portal after logging into our website.
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Of note, W.A.C.E. also provides a separate CEO Salary service which provides custom salary comparison memos on request for chief staff officers and boards who are conducting new CEO searches. For details or to request a CEO salary memo, please contact Glenn Morris at glenn@ wacemail.com.