The official numbers
Per the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, the median actuary earned $125,770 as of May 2024, with the 10th percentile above $75,000 and the 90th above $206,430. Projected employment growth of 22% from 2024 to 2034 is roughly seven times the all-occupation average, on a base of about 33,600 jobs.
Those numbers blend every career stage. The escalator is the more useful picture: entry-level analysts with one or two exams typically start in the $60,000 to $80,000 range, new associates (ASA) commonly reach six figures, and fellows (FSA) in senior or consulting roles occupy the top decile.
What moves the number
Exams passed dominate everything else early on: most employers pay explicit per-exam raises, plus study-hour support and exam fees. Industry matters next, with consulting generally paying above insurance carriers in exchange for billable-hour pressure, and health and property-casualty specializations trading places over market cycles. Geography adds the usual metro premium.
Later, the leverage shifts to specialization and management: chief actuaries, appointed actuaries signing statutory opinions, and consulting partners sit well beyond the published percentiles.
The cost side of the equation
The unusual feature of actuarial economics is how little the credential costs you personally once employed: employers typically cover exam fees and study time from the first analyst job onward. The real personal investment is front-loaded into passing Exams P and FM before hiring, where prep discipline is entirely on you and per-sitting pass rates near 50% punish thin preparation.
That makes the pre-employment exams the highest-return study hours of the entire career: they gate entry to a profession whose median exceeds twice the national wage.
Consulting versus carrier: the fork that defines the curve
Around associateship, most actuaries face the profession's defining trade: consulting firms pay visibly more at every level, in exchange for billable-hour targets, travel, and client-deadline pressure, while insurance carriers offer saner schedules, pensions in some cases, and slower but steadier progression. The gap widens with seniority, and consulting partners occupy much of the profession's top percentile.
Health, property-casualty, life, and pension specializations cycle in relative demand: recent years have favored health analytics and P&C catastrophe modeling, while pension work has contracted for decades but rewards its remaining specialists with scarcity pricing.
An emerging premium also attaches to actuaries who pair credentials with modern data engineering: those who can build the model and productionize it command compensation the traditional bands underestimate.
Where actuarial pay is heading
The 22% projected growth through 2034 in BLS data reflects demand drivers that are visibly durable: climate volatility repricing property risk, healthcare cost modeling, aging-population pension and long-term-care mathematics, and insurers racing to productionize predictive models under regulatory scrutiny that requires credentialed sign-off.
That last clause matters for salary security. Statutory reserve opinions and rate filings legally require qualified actuaries, which insulates the profession's core from automation in a way few quantitative careers can claim. Machine learning changes the actuary's toolkit; it does not remove the signature requirement.
The plausible headwind is geographic: remote-friendly actuarial work lets carriers hire in lower-cost metros, which may compress the coastal premium over time even as national medians climb. Candidates optimizing lifetime earnings increasingly weigh cost-of-living arbitrage alongside the traditional consulting-versus-carrier fork.
For students comparing quantitative careers, the cleanest framing is risk-adjusted trajectory: software pays more at the top but with far more variance, data science overlaps in skills but lacks a protected credential, and medicine out-earns it only after a decade of training debt. The actuarial path reaches a reliable low-six-figure median with employer-funded credentials and negligible unemployment, a profile few careers match.
A last practical note on negotiation: because exam progress is objective and portable, actuarial candidates changing employers mid-credential can price themselves precisely against published salary surveys for their exam count and specialization, which makes lowball offers unusually easy to identify and counter in this profession.