Today the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP)released the results of its annual salary survey.The headline news is that finance managers and staff are receivinglarger raises today than at any time since the financialcrisis.

More than 3,300 finance professionals provided information ontheir base salaries as of January 1, 2014, as well as their totalcompensation (base salary plus any bonuses) during calendar year2013. Respondents represent every region of the United States andcompanies of all sizes. Exactly half come from organizations withover $1 billion in annual revenue, while 22 percent come fromcompanies with under $100 million in annual revenue.

Among all these respondents, the average raise in base salaryfrom January 1, 2013, to January 1, 2014, was 3.8 percent. This isup from 3.4 percent the previous year, and it's considerably higherthan at any other time since the crisis. For the first time inseveral years, finance staff saw a larger increase (4.1 percent)than did finance managers (4.0 percent) or finance executives (3.5percent). Executives were the only group to see a lower averagesalary increase last year than they received the year before (seeFigure 1, below). Among the 20 different job titles tracked in thesurvey, the two that saw the highest raises were financialreporting specialists (5 percent, on average) and financialanalysts (4.8 percent).