Asking what a church of fifty or a hundred members pays its pastor is the right instinct and the wrong measure. Membership rolls are the least reliable number a church has: they include people who moved away years ago and exclude regular attenders who never joined. Two churches of a hundred members can differ by a factor of three in what they can sustain. What actually predicts the pastor's compensation is the budget, and the budget follows attendance and giving.
Why membership is the wrong denominator
A membership roll accumulates and rarely shrinks. Attendance and giving are measured continuously and reflect the church as it is now. When somebody asks what a hundred-member church pays, the useful translation is what a church with this attendance and this annual giving can sustain, and those two numbers are usually already known.
What to use instead, in order of usefulness
Annual general-fund giving first, because it is the constraint. Average weekly attendance second, because it predicts giving and is comparable between churches. The number of paid staff third, because a solo pastor and a senior pastor with three staff are different roles at the same church size. Membership last, if at all.
Working it from the budget rather than from a table
Total the year's income, subtract the building, insurance, utilities and ministry costs, decide the reserve, and what remains is what the church has for people. Split that between the pastor and any other staff and you have a defensible figure derived from your own church rather than from a survey of churches you have never seen. The worksheet on this site does exactly that sum.
How to sanity-check the answer
Two checks. What share of income is going on people, which the worksheet returns, and whether the board is comfortable with it in front of the congregation. And whether the pastor's whole cost, not the salary, was the number decided. Most compensation disagreements in churches turn out to be about which of those two numbers each side was holding.
Questions people ask about pastor salary by church size
What does a 100 member church pay its pastor?
It depends on giving, not on the roll. A church with a hundred members might have forty in attendance or a hundred and forty, and the budget follows attendance and giving. Work it from your own income and costs.
Is there a rule of thumb for pastor pay by church size?
Published ones exist and they are rough, because they cannot know your building costs, your region or whether you provide a parsonage. Use one to sanity-check a figure you worked, never to replace it.
What if the budget cannot sustain a full-time pastor?
That is a real and common answer, and it is better found in the budget than discovered mid-year. The options are a part-time or bivocational arrangement, a shared appointment, or raising giving deliberately, and all three are easier to discuss with the arithmetic on the table.
Should other staff be benchmarked the same way?
Yes, and more easily, because lay roles compare to ordinary local employment. It is only the pastor's package, with its housing and self-employment treatment, that has no ordinary equivalent.