The real cost of a part-time church admin (the part nobody budgets)

You built the budget line the way everybody does: hourly rate times hours times weeks. $18 an hour, 25 hours a week, comes to about $1,950 a month. Then payroll runs $150 or $200 over that most months, and nobody in the meeting can point to why. Or the board asked why payroll keeps coming in over budget, and "the wage times the hours" was the only answer anyone had ready.

This post is the answer, and it fits inside our larger guide to what church staff actually costs. Every number below is broken out and sourced, so you can check it against your own church's numbers rather than take our word for it. Nothing here is a sales pitch dressed up as math. It is the math a church should have run before the job ever went up on a board.

What does a part-time church admin actually get paid?

Start with the wage. A common budget assumption for this role is $18 an hour: roughly the 25th-percentile wage the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports nationally for Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (Except Legal, Medical, and Executive), the closest published occupation match. The BLS OEWS national median for that occupation was $47,460 a year in May 2024. Church and small-nonprofit pay typically lands below that median, which is why $18 an hour is a defensible, conservative starting point rather than the median itself.

At 25 hours a week and 4.33 weeks a month, that works out to:

$18/hour × 25 hours × 4.33 weeks = $1,950 a month.

That is the number that goes on the budget line. It is also the number that stops being accurate the moment the church actually cuts a check. Rural and lower-cost-of-living regions may land closer to $16 an hour for this role; higher cost-of-living metros often push past $20. The methodology below holds regardless of which end of that range your church sits on. Swap in your own hourly figure and the rest of the math follows the same path.

What does payroll tax add?

Employer FICA is a fixed statutory rate: 6.2% for Social Security plus 1.45% for Medicare, or 7.65% of wages combined, up to the annual Social Security wage base ($184,500 for 2026, published by the Social Security Administration). This rate applies to non-clergy staff. Clergy have a different, self-employed tax status for Social Security and Medicare purposes; that split is its own topic and gets the full explanation in our church payroll tax guide rather than here.

A church administrator, ordained or not, is almost always classified as non-clergy for this purpose. The math:

$1,950 × 7.65% = $149 a month.

This is not optional and it does not depend on how the church structures the role. It is owed on every dollar of wage, every month, and it does not show up as a line item on the offer letter the applicant sees. It only shows up on the church's own books, which is exactly why it gets missed when someone builds a budget by looking at a job posting rather than a payroll register.

Does a part-time hire really get benefits?

Mostly no, and this is the one line item that runs lower for a part-time hire than a full-time one. Employees working under 30 hours a week generally fall outside the ACA's full-time definition, which means a church is not required to offer employer health coverage to this role. Most churches don't.

That does not bring the benefits line to zero, though. Workers' compensation coverage is mandatory in nearly every state regardless of hours, and the premium for a low-risk clerical classification is real, if small. Many churches also extend a modest stipend or a partial retirement match to long-serving part-time staff, even without a formal benefits package. Counted together, conservatively:

$40 a month. For the full breakdown of what is standard at each church size, full-time and part-time, see church employee benefits by size.

The number that is genuinely missing here, and it is worth saying plainly, is health coverage. A church budgeting this role at 25 hours a week is very rarely also budgeting a health insurance contribution for it, and that absence is a real tradeoff for the person doing the job, not just a savings for the church. It is one reason the role sees higher turnover than a comparable full-time position, which shows back up two sections down.

What does equipment and software actually cost, spread over a month?

Every role needs a device and a set of logins, and none of it is free just because the check only says $18 an hour.

• A laptop refreshed every four years, at roughly $800, amortizes to about $17 a month.
• Email and shared drive access (Google Workspace or equivalent), a ChMS seat, and a phone line or extension run roughly $38 a month combined.

Total, rounded: $55 a month. Notice this cost barely changes whether the role is 20 hours or 40. A laptop and a ChMS license cost close to the same regardless of the schedule attached to them, which matters later in this post, and matters even more in our companion piece on part-time versus full-time math, where fixed-per-employee costs like this one are the whole reason full-time does not simply cost double.

What does it cost when this person takes time off?

Someone still has to answer the phone, run the check-in system, and keep the calendar moving while this role is out. The realistic pattern: roughly 25 hours a year of that coverage falls to another staffer at time-and-a-half, plus an occasional temp or overtime cost during a longer absence. At $27 an hour (1.5× the $18 base rate):

25 hours × $27 = $675 a year, plus a modest buffer for multi-day absences, landing at roughly $65 a month. This is a single line item, not a survey figure. It moves with how generously the church covers time off, but it is never zero. A church that simply lets tasks pile up during an absence is not avoiding this cost. It is deferring it, and it usually reappears the following week as a longer to-do list and a frustrated staff member catching up on someone else's job on top of their own.

What does turnover actually cost, spread across the time someone stays?

This is the line almost no church budget has a row for, and it is one of the two biggest gaps in the math.

SHRM's research on employee replacement costs puts the range at roughly 50% to 200% of annual salary, depending on the role's level and specialization. An entry-to-mid-level administrative role sits toward the low end of that range. Using 51% of this role's annual wage ($1,950 × 12 = $23,400):

$23,400 × 51% = $11,900 to replace, one time.

No church replaces this role every year. The most defensible tenure figure available, since no church-specific or role-specific survey exists, is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' overall median employee tenure: 3.9 years across all occupations (Employee Tenure in 2024 survey). Rounded to 48 months and spread across that window:

$11,900 ÷ 48 months = $285 a month.

The dollar figure also does not capture everything that leaves when this role turns over. A church administrator holds the vendor relationships, the unwritten process for how the giving report actually gets reconciled, and the institutional memory of which key opens which door. None of that transfers cleanly in a two-week handoff, and none of it shows up in a turnover-cost formula. The $285 a month is the floor of what turnover actually costs, not the ceiling.

What does the search itself cost?

Writing the posting, screening resumes, and running interviews takes real hours from whoever leads the process, usually the executive pastor or an office manager. No invoice arrives for that time, but it is not free.

A conservative estimate: 25 hours of that person's time at $50 an hour, a reasonable blended rate for senior staff time, comes to $1,250 for one search cycle. That 25 hours covers writing and posting the listing, an initial resume screen, first-round interviews with two or three candidates, a second-round conversation with the finalist, and reference checks. Anyone who has run a real search knows 25 hours is on the lean side, not the padded one. Spread across the same 48-month tenure window used for turnover above:

$1,250 ÷ 48 months = $26 a month.

Twenty-six dollars a month sounds small next to the other line items, and in isolation it is. What it represents is not small: a real block of a senior staff member's time, pulled away from ministry, budget, or people, to do something a job posting makes look free.

Put it all together: the real monthly cost

Fully loaded monthly cost, 25-hour part-time church administrator

Line item	Monthly cost
Base wage ($18/hr × 25 hrs × 4.33 wks)	$1,950
Employer payroll tax (FICA, 7.65%)	$149
Benefits sliver (workers' comp, partial stipend)	$40
Equipment & software, amortized	$55
Covering time off (PTO)	$65
Turnover, amortized over tenure	$285
Cost of the search, amortized	$26
Total, fully loaded	$2,570

Base wage: BLS OEWS, Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (43-6014), May 2024. Payroll tax: statutory federal rate, SSA 2026 wage base. Turnover: SHRM replacement-cost research, low end of range. Tenure: BLS Employee Tenure in 2024. Benefits, equipment, PTO coverage, and search cost are this post's own conservative estimates, not survey data.

So what does this mean for how you staff?

Once the real number is $2,570 instead of $1,950, the comparison a church should be running changes. That number is closer to what a full-time hire looks like on paper than most boards realize (a full-time church administrator runs roughly $4,800 a month fully loaded once the same categories are counted; the full breakdown is in what it actually costs to hire one employee). It also raises a fair question about whether 25 hours was ever the real size of the job. For the market-rate side of that question, see church administrator salary benchmarks.

Two decisions usually follow from running this math honestly. The first is whether the role is actually a 25-hour job, or a 35-to-40-hour job wearing a part-time label because that number felt safer when the position was created. The second is whether the next dollar spent on this role should go toward more hours of a local hire, or toward a different way of filling the same job description entirely. Neither decision gets easier by staying with the $1,950 number. It only gets easier by starting from the $2,570 one.

CoLabor Staffing places full-time Christian co-laborers with churches and Christian-owned businesses. Whatever a church decides here, it should decide with the real number, not the wage line.

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