How To Actually Find Pastor Salaries Without Falling For Clickbait
I spent about six hours last month tracking down exactly what Craig Groeschel makes because someone on a message board asked me directly. Most people who ask are surprised that this is publicly available information and that the paper trail is more complete than they expect. It just takes knowing where to look and what to look for. LifeChurch, the megachurch based in Edmond, Oklahoma, is a 501(c)(3) organization. That means it has to file IRS Form 990 every year, and those forms are public records. The document that matters most for salary questions is Schedule J, which breaks down compensation for the top five earners. You can find these on Guidestar now called Candid or directly on ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer. The data goes back years, so you can track changes over time. The numbers are usually higher than people expect. In recent filings, Groeschel's total compensation as senior pastor has consistently been in the range of $450,000 to $600,000 annually, depending on the year and how the church structures various benefits. This includes base salary, retirement contributions, housing allowances, and other perks that the church reports as part of his package. Housing allowances are particularly significant for clergy because they can be excluded from taxable income under specific IRS rules, which inflates the total reported compensation without meaning the pastor receives that amount as a direct paycheck.
Here is something most articles miss. What you see on Schedule J is not the same as what lands in his bank account. The church may pay for things directly rather than including them as reported compensation. Travel, conference fees, staff support, assistant pastors whose salaries might be bundled or allocated differently. The form captures most of it, but there are line items that require you to read the notes attached to the 990 to fully understand where money is going. I once spent forty-five minutes cross-referencing the main 990 with the attachments just to figure out whether a particular benefit was compensation or an operational expense. It was an operational expense. Most people assume it is compensation when it is not. The other thing worth understanding is that megachurch compensation structures are different from small church structures. A church with thousands of attendees operates more like a mid-size corporation. Groeschel has an executive team, departments, media production, pastoral staff, and administrative employees. His title and responsibilities are more complex than the typical solo pastor role, which the compensation committees and independent boards use to justify the pay scale. They hire outside consultants sometimes to benchmark against similar organizations. That process alone adds a layer of opacity because the consultant reports are not always filed publicly. If you want to do this research yourself, start with the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer and search for "LifeChurch." Download the most recent Form 990 and open Schedule J. Look at Part I for the top five compensated individuals. The form lists each person's title, the organizations paying them, and the breakdown of compensation types. Then check Part VI for related organization transactions and Part XII for other financial details. The form itself is dense and intentionally bureaucratic. That is a feature, not a bug. It forces anyone doing real research to actually read it instead of relying on headlines.
There are real limitations to this approach. The data is self-reported by the organization, which means errors or omissions are possible, though IRS scrutiny does limit how much flexibility exists. Some churches use umbrella organizations or separate 501(c)(3) entities to handle certain expenses, which can split compensation across multiple filings. I ran into this exact problem when I was compiling a report a few years ago and noticed a pastor's apparent salary was suspiciously low on the main church's 990. Digging deeper, I found that a significant portion of the compensation flowed through a separately incorporated media ministry that had its own filing. The workaround was to search for all entities affiliated with the church and aggregate the numbers manually. It took about three hours but gave a far more accurate picture than any single form. Another issue is timing. Form 990s are due by the fifteenth day of the fifth month after the organization's fiscal year ends. LifeChurch's fiscal year runs January through December, so filings are due May 15th. But there is often a delay. Organizations can request extensions, and even when filed on time, it takes a few weeks for the data to appear on public databases. If you are looking at the most current numbers, you might be seeing data from fourteen months ago. I learned this the hard way when I cited a 2022 salary figure in 2024 and got called out because the actual 2023 numbers came out in June and showed a meaningful increase. Always check the filing date and the tax year being reported. People often bring up the theological or ethical debate about whether pastors should make this much money. That is a valid conversation, but it is separate from the factual question of what the salary actually is. The numbers are what they are. What matters is transparency. The fact that these figures exist in public documents at all is a result of decades of nonprofit accountability reforms. Before the 1969 Tax Reform Act, there was no requirement for churches to disclose compensation in any systematic way. Now it is routine. Whether that routine disclosure is sufficient is another matter entirely, and one that oversight groups have been pushing on for years.
Get the Full Details
If you want to go further, there are third-party analyses that aggregate and compare pastor salaries across denominations and regions. Sites like ChurchSalary.com and various denominational compensation surveys publish data that can put LifeChurch's figures in context. Comparing a megachurch senior pastor to a small rural pastor without accounting for scope and responsibility is pointless, but comparing them to other megachurches of similar size and reach is useful. Groeschel's compensation tends to fall within the expected range for his tier of church. It is not an outlier. The bottom line is that the research is accessible. It requires patience and attention to detail more than any special skill. Read the actual forms. Don't trust the summary articles. Cross-reference multiple years. Check for affiliated entities. And remember that the number on Schedule J is the starting point for understanding, not the final word on how someone's compensation actually works in practice.
