2025 Salary Survey: market overview

The 2025 Harris Hill Salary Survey is out now (get your copy here), reporting on charity and not-for-profit sector salaries over the last 12 months, with the latest rates and expert insight for each of our specialist areas.

This year we're also looking at how pay in the sector has evolved over the last 10 years, but first, here's what we had to say about the charity recruitment market in 2025.

What’s happening in the charity recruitment market?

Sometimes it takes an expert, well-trained eye to tease out the trends in the salary data, but with this year’s crop of charity jobs, two things hit you in the face at first glance, as if you’ve deeply insulted their mother’s honour or gone for a night out in Kent.

The first is the significantly lower-than-usual number of them, indicating a clear slowdown in hiring. That’s been reflected in the reduced activity on sector job boards, CharityJob recently reporting a 20% fall in job postings, following a 22% fall in the year before, figures that broadly align with our own experience.

Faced with challenging economic conditions, a significant wave of redundancies still rippling through the sector, and a highly uncertain outlook, it’s no surprise to find charities fairly reticent about recruiting.

That uncertainty is also behind the other striking feature of this year’s jobs: just how many have been offered on a temporary, interim or contract basis. However, closer inspection reveals that many of them are 12-month roles that are intended to be permanent, but funding beyond the first year is very much TBC.

It’s just one of the many contortions — sorry, creative strategies — that are having to be adopted to keep essential roles covered.

Evidence of another can be seen in the ever-increasing length of job descriptions. Hiring hasn’t reduced because there’s less work to be done – quite the opposite in fact, with 86% of charities reporting increased demand for their services, according to recent CAF research. This inevitably means more work for existing staff, adding extra duties to roles that many feel are already out of proportion to pay.

Recently we’ve even seen a marked rise in remits that are wildly unrealistic for one person, suggesting that for some organisations, the pressure to stretch resources ever further is severe enough to quash practical concerns like ‘could anyone actually do all this?’ and ‘will anyone be prepared to for £32,000?’

As we’ve noted before, the choice for many workers is increasingly between no job, or a job doing the work of multiple people, but how far can this go?

For as long as services are broadly unaffected (staff picking up the cost in terms of their time and wellbeing), we suspect it’s unlikely to change, but despite their limited leverage in the current market, some candidates are starting to push back, rejecting offers that fail to reflect the scale of the task they’d be taking on.

The pendulum swings back

With application numbers up by more than 50%, it’s a dramatic turnaround from the candidate-short market of just two years ago. Yet any time saved on searching is lost twice over to the now bigger task of managing candidates through the process and sorting the superstars from the standard balls of space gas.

If only there were a specialist agency who could help…

Meanwhile if you’re seeking a move...

...there’s no denying the extra competition you’re likely to face. However you’d be surprised how far up the pecking order you can jump by simply tailoring your application, polishing your CV, writing a strong supporting statement and preparing for interviews.

Many who landed their last job with relatively little effort make the mistake of expecting to do so again, so you can leapfrog a lot of them by avoiding corner-cutting and simply doing the basics well.

For more on the market, including this year's figures across each major department, see the full 2025 Salary Survey here, or for help with recruiting or your charity job search, just contact our specialists, call us on 020 7820 7300 or email info@harrishill.co.uk