What the CEOs of 30 Well Known Charities Are Paid

The president and CEO of the American Red Cross, Clifford Holtz, was paid $950,468 in reportable compensation in the year to June 2025, his first in the job, and $989,075 including other benefits, according to the charity’s Form 990 filed in March 2026. Many pages answering that question still show his predecessor’s pay from 2022. Below are the current figures for 30 of the country’s best known charities, each read from its latest return, and the three household names that publish none at all.

Across the 30, the median chief executive’s total compensation is $933,136. 10 of them are paid $1m or more. The highest is Nancy Brown of the American Heart Association at $4,563,563; the lowest in the list is Cynthia H. Rahman of the March of Dimes at $353,561.

The 30, ranked

“Reportable pay” is column D of Part VII of the Form 990, salary, bonus and other taxable pay from the charity itself. “Total compensation” adds pay from related organizations, column E, and estimated other compensation such as retirement contributions and benefits, column F. The year is the charity’s fiscal year, so a June 2025 figure covers July 2024 to June 2025. Each figure links back, through the sources below, to the charity’s page on ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, which reproduces the filed return.

Three charities that publish no CEO pay at all

The Salvation Army. No Form 990 exists to read. The IRS designates the Salvation Army as a church, and churches are not required to file the return; ProPublica’s pages for its national corporation and its four US territories each carry that note and show only unrelated business income returns and federal single audits, neither of which reports officers’ pay. Any figure you have seen for a Salvation Army CEO salary did not come from a tax filing. ProPublica, Salvation Army National Corporation.

Catholic Charities USA. Designated by the IRS as a religious organization not required to file, and ProPublica shows no Form 990 in any year. ProPublica, Catholic Charities USA.

Compassion International. Filed Form 990s until the year to June 2019 and has filed none since, under the same church designation. Its last return reported $476,818 in total compensation for its president and CEO, now seven years old. ProPublica, Compassion International.

Two other large ministries in the list, Samaritan’s Purse and World Vision, carry the same church designation and file full returns anyway, which is why their figures are current. Filing is a choice for them, and a donor who wants to compare is entitled to notice who makes it.

What decides how much a charity CEO is paid

Not, mostly, the size of the charity. Feeding America spent $5,006,685,690 in its latest year, more than any other charity in the list, and paid its chief executive $1,214,028. United Way Worldwide spent $75,016,667, about 1.5% as much, and paid $929,417, more than three quarters of that. The share of spending that goes to the chief executive runs from 0.024% at Feeding America to 1.24% at United Way Worldwide.

Three things explain more than size does.

Federation national offices look small and are not. United Way Worldwide, YMCA of the USA, Goodwill Industries International and Big Brothers Big Sisters of America are national offices of federations whose local members file their own returns. Their budgets are a fraction of the movement’s, and their chief executives are paid as leaders of the movement, so the share of spending looks high. The local United Way, YMCA or Goodwill near you has its own CEO and its own Form 990.

The labour market the charity hires from. Health charities, the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society and St. Jude, compete for executives with hospital systems and medical research institutions, and pay accordingly. International relief and development organizations, Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and World Vision, pay their chief executives less than many domestic charities a fraction of their size.

One-off payments in a single year. A large total can include a retirement payout, deferred compensation vesting or a severance, which Schedule J of the Form 990 breaks out and Part VII does not. The Boys & Girls Clubs of America figure is a case in point: its chief executive’s reportable pay was $1,335,326 the year before the $2,246,334 shown here. Read a single year’s spike as a question, not a salary.

How this compares with ordinary charities

These 30 are the top of the market, and they are not typical. Across 256,539 charities filing the full Form 990, 79% of those spending under $250,000 pay their officers nothing at all, and among those that do pay, the median for all officers combined runs from $41,445 at the smallest organizations to $168,486 at $2m to $5m. The full distribution, by budget size, is in our nonprofit executive compensation report, and pay for every other role is in nonprofit salaries. Whether the title is CEO or executive director makes no legal difference, as executive director vs CEO explains.

Is it allowed, and who decides?

A charity may pay its chief executive whatever is reasonable for the job, and the board decides. What the law prohibits is an excess benefit: paying an insider more than the value of their services. The IRS can impose excise taxes on an executive who receives one and on the managers who approved it, under the rules known as intermediate sanctions. A board that relies on comparable pay data, approves the package without conflicted members voting, and documents its decision at the time gets a presumption that the pay is reasonable, which is why large charities’ pay is set by compensation committees using surveys of their peers.

None of that makes a figure right or wrong for a donor. It makes it public. Every charity that files a full Form 990 must list its officers, directors, trustees and key employees with their pay, and every one paying someone over $150,000 must complete Schedule J with the detail. How to read the return is in our Form 990 guide.

How to look up any charity’s CEO salary

1. Find the right organization. National offices, local affiliates and fundraising foundations file separately. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and ALSAC, its fundraising organization, are two returns with two chief executives, both in the table above.
2. Open its latest Form 990 on ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, or through the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search.
3. Read Part VII, Section A. Every officer and key employee is listed with three columns of compensation; add them for the total.
4. Check Schedule J for anyone paid over $150,000, to see how much was base salary, bonus, retirement or deferred.
5. Check the year. Returns are filed months after the year ends, so the latest figure is usually one to two years old, and a new chief executive may not appear yet.

If an organization has no Form 990 at all, check whether it is a church or religious organization, which is the commonest reason, as the three above show. The other types of exempt organization, and which ones file, are in types of nonprofits.

Method and limits

Figures were read on 7 October 2026 from ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer’s extraction of each organization’s most recent Form 990 with officer data, and the Red Cross, American Heart Association and Boys & Girls Clubs of America figures were re-read separately. Where a chief executive changed during the year, the departing or longer serving executive’s pay is shown and the change is noted. For the American Cancer Society, the most recent filing is a short period return with no compensation reported, so the latest full year, to December 2024, is used. Schedule J detail was not read, so totals may include one-time items. The list is 30 well known national charities, not the 30 largest by revenue, and it excludes hospitals and universities, whose executives are the highest paid in the sector and are a different labour market.