Actuary Job Description

BLS sums the job up in one line: actuaries analyze the financial costs of risk and uncertainty. In practice that means turning messy claim histories, policyholder records and economic scenarios into a figure that someone will commit real money to: next year's premium, this quarter's reserve, the contribution a pension plan needs before its fiscal year closes.

Property and casualty

On the casualty side, the work splits between pricing and reserving. Pricing starts with a loss triangle and a rating plan. The actuary trends historical losses forward, fits generalized linear models to isolate the effect of territory, vehicle type, construction class or payroll, and arrives at an indicated rate change. Then comes the filing: an actuarial memorandum, supporting exhibits, and objection letters from a state reviewer who wants to know why the development factors moved. Reserving runs on a quarterly clock. The actuary projects ultimate losses by accident year with paid and incurred development, Bornhuetter-Ferguson and frequency-severity methods, selects a point estimate inside a reasonable range, and explains any gap between the indication and the number finance booked.

Life, annuity and health

Life actuaries think in decades of cash flows. They model mortality, lapses, premium persistency and interest rates, and feed those projections into product pricing, statutory reserves and GAAP reporting. Experience studies keep the assumptions honest: when actual deaths or surrenders drift away from the priced basis, the actuary has to flag it and put a cost on it. Health actuaries do similar work on a shorter horizon, forecasting claim costs by benefit category, setting premium rates for group and individual plans, and watching pharmacy and hospital utilization month by month.

Retirement

BLS describes pension and retirement benefits actuaries as the people who design, test and evaluate company pension plans. The annual valuation is the core deliverable: pick a discount rate, a salary scale and a mortality table, project the benefit promises, calculate the required contribution and present the funded status to the plan sponsor and trustees. Consulting actuaries in this practice carry a book of clients, each with its own plan document, data quirks and calendar.

The common thread

Across every practice area the actuary owns the assumptions. Software runs the projection, but a person has to explain why the trend factor is what it is and keep a work file that will hold up in an audit or a regulator's examination years later. That file now covers models as well as numbers: data lineage, version control and testing for any algorithm that touches underwriting or pricing. The strongest practitioners pair the math with plain speech. A chief financial officer does not need the credibility formula, only a clear answer to two questions: how wrong could this estimate be, and what happens to the company if it is?

BLS lists a bachelor's degree as the typical entry-level education for actuaries, followed by long-term on-the-job training. Typical majors include actuarial science, mathematics, statistics and economics, and BLS points to coursework in computer science, especially programming languages, along with the ability to build spreadsheets, databases and statistical analysis tools. A graduate degree is optional; passed exams are what move a career forward.

Two exam systems

The Society of Actuaries (SOA) awards the Associate (ASA) and Fellow (FSA) designations and serves life, health, retirement and general insurance actuaries. The Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) awards the Associate (ACAS) and Fellow (FCAS) designations for property and casualty work. Candidates typically pick the body that matches the practice area they want to work in.

SOA route. Candidates start with Exam P (probability) and Exam FM (financial mathematics). According to the SOA's curriculum FAQ, the current ASA pathway replaced Exams LTAM and STAM with Fundamentals of Actuarial Mathematics (FAM), followed by a choice of Advanced Long-Term Actuarial Mathematics (ALTAM) or Advanced Short-Term Actuarial Mathematics (ASTAM), and dropped Exam IFM in favor of Advanced Topics in Predictive Analytics (ATPA). Exam SRM, Exam PA, the VEE requirements and the APC seminar carried over unchanged. Above the ASA, the SOA rebuilt its FSA pathway: the first exams under the redesigned structure were given in November 2025, and candidates may now take exams from different practice areas and shape the route around their own circumstances.

CAS route. The CAS lists its ACAS requirements as Exams 1 and 2, MAS-I and MAS-II, the CAS DISCs, the Course on Professionalism, Exam 5, PCPA and Exam 6, with Exams 7, 8 and 9 among the FCAS requirements. The CAS Board has widened its exam-waiver policy for candidates who completed comparable requirements through other recognized actuarial organizations: eligibility now extends to all ACAS basic education requirements, up from a limit of requirements through MAS-II.

Other credentials

• MAAA, Member of the American Academy of Actuaries, the membership designation of the U.S. profession's national body.
• Enrolled Actuary (EA), granted by the Joint Board for the Enrollment of Actuaries, for actuarial work on pension plans covered by ERISA.
• CERA, Chartered Enterprise Risk Analyst, which the SOA awards for enterprise risk management roles.

Skills that matter on the job

The working toolkit is Excel, SQL, and R or Python, plus whatever valuation or projection platform the employer licenses. Beyond tools, the job calls for judgment about credibility and data quality, careful documentation, and the ability to explain a reserve range to someone who has never seen a loss triangle. As a rough guide, the Associate designation takes several years of exams taken alongside full-time work, and Fellowship takes several more.

BLS counted 31,200 actuary jobs in 2025 and projects employment to grow 9 percent from 2025 to 2035, a pace it rates as much faster than the average for all occupations, for an employment change of 2,900 jobs. It expects about 1,500 openings a year on average over the decade, many of them created by the need to replace workers who move into other occupations or leave the labor force, such as to retire.

Headcount is only part of the picture. Three sets of rules dating from 2023 or later bear on actuarial work: state AI governance, Colorado's external data rule and new GAAP accounting for long-duration contracts.

AI governance at the state level

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners adopted its model bulletin on the Use of Artificial Intelligence Systems by Insurers on December 4, 2023. States adopt it individually. On the NAIC's implementation map, with status as of October 8, 2026, adoption dates ranged from February 1, 2024 (Alaska) to October 5, 2026 (North Dakota), and Puerto Rico, Mississippi and South Carolina were among the jurisdictions that adopted in 2026. The same map lists California, Colorado, New York and Texas separately, under insurance-specific regulation or guidance.

Colorado's external data rule

Colorado went further than a bulletin. SB21-169 set out to protect Colorado consumers from insurance practices that result in unfair discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, and the Division of Insurance implemented it through Regulation 10-1-1 (3 CCR 702-10), which took effect November 14, 2023. The amended version, effective October 15, 2025, covers insurers offering individual life insurance, private passenger auto insurance and health benefit plans that use external consumer data and information sources (ECDIS) and the algorithms and predictive models built on them. Among its requirements: a documented cross-functional governance group with representatives from functions including actuarial, data science and underwriting, and an up-to-date inventory, with version control, of every ECDIS, algorithm and predictive model in use. Annual reports are due December 1 for life insurers and July 1 for private passenger auto and health benefit plan insurers. In Amended Bulletin B-10.004, reissued June 10, 2026, the Division said it had not yet adopted rules establishing the required quantitative testing.

Long-duration accounting

On the life and annuity side, FASB's long-duration targeted improvements (ASU 2018-12, with dates set by ASU 2020-11) took effect for fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2022 for SEC filers that are not smaller reporting companies. At those insurers, LDTI reporting is now part of the valuation actuary's GAAP workload, alongside statutory reserves and pricing support.

What to watch

Three questions shape the next few years: whether more states adopt the NAIC bulletin, whether Colorado finalizes quantitative testing for its covered lines, and how quickly the redesigned exam pathways change the time it takes candidates to reach Fellowship.

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am applying for the Actuary position on your personal auto pricing team. I earned my ACAS this spring and have spent four years at a regional carrier, the last two as the analyst responsible for our private passenger auto rate reviews in three states.

In that role I rebuilt our rating plan model from a set of one-way analyses into a generalized linear model written in R, with the data pipeline moved from spreadsheets into SQL. The rebuild let our team answer department objection letters in days instead of weeks, because every exhibit could be regenerated from a single script. I also wrote the model documentation our compliance group now uses as its template: data sources, variable selection rationale, version history and the fairness checks we run before any new variable goes into a filing.

On the reserving side, I prepare the quarterly loss development exhibits for our auto physical damage and liability lines and present them to the reserving committee. That work taught me to explain a range, not just a point estimate, and to say plainly when a pattern in the data is noise.

Your team's work on telematics rating interests me most. I have built usage-based features in a sandbox project, and I would welcome the chance to help bring that kind of variable into a filing that a regulator can follow line by line.

I am sitting for Exam 7 next spring and plan to complete my FCAS on a steady schedule. Thank you for considering my application. I would be glad to walk you through a sample of my model documentation.

Sincerely, Jordan Avery