The board wants a number. Here's one you can defend.

There is a particular silence in a budget meeting when the volunteer program comes up. Every other line has a figure next to it. Marketing has a spend and a cost per acquisition. The program team has a caseload. Volunteering has an anecdote about how wonderful everyone is, and then the conversation moves on.

That silence is expensive, and it is usually self-inflicted. The number exists. Almost nobody calculates it.

The arithmetic

Three steps. You can do this before your coffee goes cold.

One: total the hours. Last twelve months, every volunteer, every shift. If your records are incomplete, estimate low and say you estimated low. An understated number you can defend beats a precise one you can’t reconstruct.

Two: multiply by the published rate. For US work, that is $36.14 per hour for calendar year 2025, published by Independent Sector in partnership with the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland, released in April 2026. State rates are also published, running from $17.99 in Puerto Rico to $54.77 in the District of Columbia.

Three: put it next to what the program costs to run. Coordinator time, recognition, training, background checks, refreshments, the software nobody uses. That second figure is the one that turns the first from a nice fact into an argument.

What this looks like with real hours

At BCC Event, the teams I worked with coordinated somewhere around 280,000 volunteer hours a year. Run the arithmetic:

280,000 hours × $36.14/hour ≈ $10.1 million

Ten million dollars of salary equivalent. That is not a rounding error on anyone’s budget, and it changes what kind of conversation you get to have. A program that “does a lot of good work” competes for scraps of attention. A program that represents ten million dollars of labor gets asked how it can be protected.

Your number will be smaller. It does not matter. A program running 4,000 hours a year is worth about $145,000 in salary equivalent, which is very likely more than the program costs and more than several funded roles in the same building.

When you never tracked the hours

This is where most people stall, so it is worth handling properly rather than pretending everyone has clean records.

If you have a sign-in sheet, use it and stop reading this section. If you don’t, reconstruct from what does exist. Shift patterns are the usual way in: if the Saturday shop was open 48 weekends with two people on each, that is a defensible 384 hours before you count anything else. Event registers, rota emails and the treasurer’s mileage claims all carry hours inside them.

Three rules make a reconstruction credible.

Round down at every step. If you think it was two or three people, use two. A number that errs low survives challenge; a generous one invites a line-by-line audit you will lose.

Write down the assumption next to the number. “48 weekends, two volunteers, four hours” is auditable. “Approximately 400 hours” is not, and in six months you will not remember how you got there.

Exclude anything you are unsure of, and say you excluded it. Committee time, trustees, the people who bake for the fundraiser, the person who does your accounts for nothing. Leaving them out and mentioning that you left them out is far stronger than including them and being asked to justify it.

A reconstruction done this way is not a lesser version of a tracked figure. It is a floor, which is exactly what you want the first time you put a number in front of a finance committee. Then start counting properly this year, so next year’s version is a measurement rather than an estimate.

Now the part most people skip

The figure has real limits, and you are better off naming them yourself than having a finance director find them.

It is a replacement wage, not an impact measure. It answers “what would this labor cost at market rates,” not “what good did it do.” Independent Sector says so plainly: the state-level variation, they note, reflects differences in the cost of living rather than differences in the value volunteers bring. A volunteer hour in Mississippi is not worth less than one in Washington, DC. The wages around it are.

The method is a national average for generic labor. It comes from Bureau of Labor Statistics average hourly earnings for production and non-supervisory workers on private non-farm payrolls, with an uplift for fringe benefits. If your volunteers are doing skilled professional work — legal review, accounting, software, clinical hours — the national average understates them considerably. If they are doing work you would genuinely never have paid anyone to do, it overstates.

And it is an estimate of a cost avoided, not revenue. Nobody is going to hand you $10.1 million. Say “salary equivalent” and you will never be accused of implying otherwise.

Stating those three caveats out loud costs you nothing and buys you the room. The number survives contact with a skeptic; the person who quotes it without the caveats does not.

Understating is the bigger risk, not overstating

There is a strong instinct in this sector toward modesty about numbers, and it has done real damage.

When the Urban Institute surveyed charities on nine volunteer management practices, measuring the outcomes and impact of volunteers was the least adopted of all of them. Only 14 percent practiced it to a large degree. Nearly two decades later, practitioner data tells the same story: in the 2023 Volunteer Management Progress Report from Tobi Johnson & Associates, which gathered 1,247 responses across 36 countries, 43 percent of organizations tracked the dollar value of volunteer hours and under a third tracked their annual retention rate.

Meanwhile, work done by Deloitte for Reimagining Service found that organizations with more than fifty volunteers and a genuinely effective volunteer management model performed more effectively on almost every measure of leadership, management, adaptability and culture — and reached comparable effectiveness at roughly half the median budget of peers who didn’t use volunteers that way. The finding I keep coming back to from that work is the gap: about 75 percent of organizations said volunteers were critical to their mission, and only 11 percent had both the volume and the management model.

Being unmeasured is how a program that saves an organization its own budget several times over ends up defended with adjectives.

The second number, which is better than the first

Once you have the dollar figure, do not stop there, because on its own it is a blunt instrument that flatters big programs and tells you nothing about whether yours is improving.

Two more that are worth the effort:

Hours by role type. Split your total into the categories of work volunteers actually did. This exposes something the aggregate hides: whether your program is one hundred people doing disposable tasks or twenty people doing consequential ones. Those two programs can produce an identical dollar figure and have completely different futures.

Return per dollar invested. Divide the salary-equivalent value by what the program costs to run. This is the number a board understands instinctively, because it is the shape of every other number they look at. It also has the healthy property of getting worse when you waste volunteers’ time, which the raw hour count never does.

Putting it in front of people

One slide. Three lines.

Last year our volunteers gave X hours. At the published 2025 value of volunteer time, that is $Y in salary equivalent. The program cost $Z to run.

Then stop talking. Somebody in the room will do the division out loud, and it lands much harder when they do it than when you do.