Beyond the Volunteer Myth: Recognizing the Economic Power of Nonprofit Staff

A new analysis from Candid reveals a paradox at the heart of the American nonprofit ecosystem: the people delivering essential services to millions of households make up the third-largest workforce in the country, yet most of us walk past them without noticing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2022, nonprofit employees accounted for 12.8 million jobs — roughly 9.9 percent of all private-sector positions — placing the sector behind only retail and manufacturing in sheer scale. For the readers I serve across New York City's nonprofit landscape, this is not an abstract statistic; it is a daily reality that shapes how we fund, staff, and advocate for the organizations our communities depend on.

The profile behind the paycheck

What strikes me when I sit with these numbers is how thoroughly they contradict the assumptions many donors and elected officials carry into budget conversations. The nonprofit sector spends nearly $2 trillion annually, with more than $826 billion flowing into salaries, benefits, and payroll taxes — money that, in turn, generates local sales and property tax revenue across every borough. And yet the public imagination persists in picturing charitable work as something carried out by volunteers on evenings and weekends. While volunteers are indispensable — 75.7 million of them contribute time, and AmeriCorps estimates their work equals roughly 2.5 million full-time employees — the average volunteer puts in just 66 hours a year, and that labor is valued at less than 20 percent of what paid nonprofit staff earn. The arithmetic simply does not support a charity-without-staff model, and Candid's analysis makes that case with rare clarity.

Why invisibility translates to underfunding

Here is where the conversation turns uncomfortable, and where I find myself urging executive directors and board members to pay particular attention. When donors assume an organization runs on goodwill alone, they become markedly less willing to underwrite the salaries of full-time staff — the very people who keep programs open, manage compliance, and sustain relationships with the communities served. The credentialing data compounds this concern. In 2022, 32.7 percent of nonprofit employees held a master's degree or higher, 21.3 percent had some college or an associate's, and 31.9 percent carried a bachelor's, while 34.6 percent held a professional certification or license, compared with 24 percent of workers overall. These are not amateurs filling gaps between other jobs; they are highly qualified practitioners whose expertise is being structurally undervalued by the very funders whose confidence the sector depends on.

A practical roadmap for our sector

So what does a profile-raising strategy look like in practice? I would encourage any NYC nonprofit leader reading this to begin by translating those national figures into local impact — how many of your staff live in the neighborhoods you serve, what their specialized credentials contribute, and what payroll taxes flow back into city coffers. Pair that internal documentation with explicit, repeated public communication that names your staff as professionals, not volunteers. Bring the Candid data into conversations with your elected officials, asking them to recognize the sector as the workforce infrastructure it actually is, and when grant applications ask about overhead, remember that staff salaries are not overhead — they are the delivery system for your mission. Visibility, in other words, begins with how we describe ourselves, and with how loudly we are willing to correct the myth.