Actuary jobs: skills, pay and how to get hired

What an actuary does

An actuary measures financial risk that lies in the future. In insurance that means setting the price of a policy, estimating the reserves for claims still to be paid, and working out the capital an insurer must hold so it can pay even in a bad year. In pensions it means valuing what a scheme has promised its members and what the employer must pay in. The tools are data, statistics and cashflow models, and the result is always a number with assumptions behind it.

The role sits next to three others. The risk manager looks at all the risks of a firm together and often uses the actuary's capital figures; the data scientist builds predictive models, sometimes on the same claims data; the financial analyst plans and explains the business's results. German ads say Aktuar or Versicherungsmathematiker. The steps from actuarial analyst to chief actuary are in the career paths of this role.

The actuarial bodies set exams and titles, each for its own country: the DAV for Germany (the German actuarial association), the SOA and the CAS in the US, the IFoA in the UK, the Swiss SAV in Switzerland and the IAI in India. Each body has its own syllabus and route to fellowship, and many employers support students through it. This page describes the job and is not professional advice.

The skills the ads ask for

We read a sample of the ads every day and count the skills they name. On a computer, hover a skill in the text to see its share; on a phone, the table has the same figures.

The core leads: actuarial modelsBuild and run the cashflow models behind prices, reserves and capital, and know what each assumption does to the result. of cashflows, the rules for insurers' capitalKnow the capital and reporting rules for insurers where you work, and how your numbers feed them. (Solvency II in the EU), reservingEstimate what claims will still cost, including those not yet reported, and defend the estimate. for claims and pricingTurn claims, expenses and lapses into a price that covers the risk, and test it against the market. of new business, with IFRS 17Follow how insurance contracts are measured in the accounts and explain movements in the margins to finance. for the accounts and statisticsChoose and test models for mortality, lapses or claims, and know the uncertainty around them. underneath all of it. Risk managementUnderstand how insurance, market and operational risks combine, and where your numbers feed the risk view. links the actuary's numbers to the rest of the firm.

The tools are named side by side and none is a must everywhere: actuarial modelling toolsRun and change models in the actuarial modelling tool your team uses, and check its output. such as FIS Prophet or AXIS for life cashflows, PythonClean and analyse data, automate runs and build small models with clear, tested scripts., RFit statistical models and produce reproducible analysis, common in pricing and reserving teams. and SQLPull the policy and claims data you need from the company's databases, and check it adds up. for data and analysis, and ExcelBuild clear, checked workbooks for smaller calculations and for the summaries others read. for checks and summaries. Some pricing and claims teams add machine learningKnow where modern models help with pricing or claims data, and how to validate and explain them.. Explaining resultsExplain a result, its assumptions and its uncertainty in plain words to people who are not actuaries. is in nearly every ad, EnglishThe language of most actuarial standards, models and international teams. in most and GermanAsked for in most German ads, where reports for management and the supervisor are often in German. in German-speaking countries.

Where the jobs are, country by country

Each country below has its own figures: which cities have the most jobs in our list, whether the number is going up or down, how often ads offer remote or hybrid work, the titles used in the country, and pay ranges from published research, in the local currency.

A year in the work of an actuary

1. Data: policy, claims and market data are pulled, cleaned and reconciled to the accounts before any model runs.
2. Assumptions: mortality, lapses, expenses and claims trends are set from the company's own experience and from industry tables, and reviewed every year.
3. Models: prices, reserves and capital are run through the cashflow models, and the results are checked against last year and against simple estimates.
4. Review: a second actuary reviews the work, and the head of the function signs it off.
5. Report: the results go to management, the board, the auditors and the supervisor, with the assumptions and their uncertainty in plain words.

Around the yearly cycle come the projects: a new product to price, a reinsurance deal to judge, a model to rebuild or a new accounting standard to bring in. The work is careful and deadline-driven, and the strongest actuaries are the ones others trust to explain it.

Your CV for an actuary job

An actuary's CV is read twice: by hiring software that matches the ad's words, and by a chief actuary who wants to see which models you ran, which results you owned and how you explained them. Give both: the keywords and the evidence.

Use the keywords the ads use

• Name the work as the ad does: "pricing", "reserving", "capital modelling", "IFRS 17", "actuarial modelling", and the tools you used. The skills table above shows which keywords the ads use most.
• Say which business: life, health, pensions, or property and casualty, and which countries' rules.
• Give your exam progress plainly: the exams passed and those in progress, with the body and the month you expect the next result.
• Describe results the way your team measured them, such as a faster valuation run or an assumption review finished on time, without confidential figures.

Prove each skill

An actuarial line proves itself with a model, a decision it supported and a deadline it met: a reserve review signed off, a price that went to market, a capital run that took less time.

Keep confidential figures out: no reserves, prices or capital numbers of your employer.

How we read our data

• The jobs: the actuary jobs in our job search (actuaries, actuarial analysts and the German titles Aktuar and Versicherungsmathematiker), matched by their titles the way the search matches them; risk manager and data scientist jobs are counted on their own pages. Our list is not the whole market, so we give shares and rankings, never counts.
• The skills: every day we read a sample of these ads and count the skills in them with a fixed word list. Only the counts are kept, never the text of an ad.
• Pay: from published salary research, each source named with its date, as a range from entry level to senior. Our ads are not used for it.
• Dates: every figure is worked out again each day and shows the day it was worked out.

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