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Synagogue Service Leaders Market Index

Background

  • The Synagogue Service Leaders Market Index (“Index” for short) is a guide for communities on what has been paid between 2024-2026 for service cover. The Index is based on historical data: through hundreds of transactions between 2024 and 2026, communities have secured help from leyners, daveners, Rabbanim and others. 

  • The Index contains a Budge ng Guide (Part One) and historical prices paid between 2024 and 2026 (Part Two).

  • Secure Artificial Intelligence has been used to determine where the range of ordinary prices lie. The A.I has essentially ‘read the market’, taking into account features which might come into play such as:

    • Role: davener; leyner; educator; Rabbi (with a pastoral focus, doing ‘everything’ or primarily a sermon)

    • Experience level

    • Nature, scope, timing and length of the engagement o Distance between the contractor and the community hiring

    • Location of the community

  • In the absence of publicly available information from other sources and from the US, the Index is the closest thing to ‘market information’ that is available. 

  • We will not publish anything which identifies individuals or what they have been paid.

  • It transpires that there are three different phenomena in the data:

    • A genuine market (mainly leyning) where prices are surprisingly stable;

    • A market based on existing relationships (between communities and some chazanim and rabbis); o A subsidised market (particularly regional communities) where some providers appear deliberately to undercharge.

  • Note: historical regional fees may understate true costs because many providers appear to subsidise communities by not charging fully for travel me, preparation me or lost working hours. That is probably one of the most important findings emerging from the project. It cannot be relied upon, requested or expected.  

  • The prices are not US rules, recommendations, or binding on you to refer to or use.  o They are just an expression of prices agreed in a somewhat opaque market.​

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How to use the Index

  • The Budgeting Guide is not a hard-and-fast instructio on what to offer or accept as a price for service cover. It is a guide to how much communities should budget for what they need. Actual costs paid may also be influenced by very short notice; family accompanying the service leader; and also what the service leaders themselves want to be paid!

  • When hiring someone for ‘davening only’, community location creates less of an ‘uplift’ than for leyning. The reason is that travel appears to be a much larger proportion of the "cost" of a £120 leyning engagement than it is of a £400 baal tefillah engagement.

  • Where travel, accommodation, meals or hospitality form part of an arrangement, communities should consider the overall value of the package rather than the fee in isolation.        

  • Please email Ben Vos on bbvos@theus.org.uk with any questions.

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What the Synagogue Service Leaders Market is not

  • The Index is not moral, it is a reflection of the market. So just because leyning appears to have a ‘travel burden’ at about 50% of the cost, does not mean that people davening should or must also be expected to consider 50% of their cost as travel (so if you need someone to daven, they may not be prevailed upon to reduce their price on the basis of proximity). Rather, communities do regularly pay people to leyn and a good chunk of this appears to be increased by greater distance travelled, rather than proficiency; whereas, communities are less likely to pay people to daven but if they do, proficiency accounts for a greater increase in price.

  • Similarly, a re red Community Rabbi may cost £2,000 for a weekend spent with another community, on account of his experience and abilities. The travel element of this is minimal.

  • The Index does not show and does not account for, ancillary extras which usually do form a part of the costs of communities when hiring service cover. This is because formal ancillary costs such as hotels and petrol and informal costs such as members hosting a guest Rabbi, do not appear on the data used to create the Index.

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