by Conrad Daley FSA, MAAA

I work as a healthcare consulting actuary specializing in pricing marketplace plans for large insurance clients. Not too long ago I was doing the laundry for the college track and field team earning $7.50 per hour and getting free t-shirts as perks of the job.

My goal is to provide transparency for the salary progression of the actuarial field, so people have a clear idea on the career outlook.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) actuaries are one of the fastest growing occupations with a 2024 median pay of $125,770.

I currently make $160,000 base pay with the opportunity to earn a bonus anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 depending on how many billable hours I bill for my clients throughout the year. Other actuaries at my level typically make a 12%-15% bonus on their base salary.

To become an actuary, you’ll need a bachelor’s degree, a math related field is great but not required and then pass a series of exams that may take 7-10 years to complete.

These exams are provided by either the Society of Actuaries (SOA) or the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS), organizations that give actuaries the credibility to do their work. The SOA specializes in life, health, pensions, and retirement while the CAS specializes in property & casualty (auto, home, etc).

Once you have a full-time job, the company will typically pay you to study during the work day, pay for your study materials, and give you a raise for each exam you pass (5% on average).

Actuaries primarily work with data and build models to solve complex problems that involve a large amount of risk. For example, a pricing actuary will need to determine the price of health insurance premiums for an upcoming year by modeling key inputs (cost, trends, enrollment, etc) that are unknown.

I attended Brigham Young University (BYU) from 2015 – 2018 to get a bachelor’s in actuarial science. I secured an internship in April 2017 at Select Health, a local health plan in Utah, that had an actuarial department of around 10 actuaries at the time.

This was a paid internship where I earned $15 per hour, working 40 hours per week in the summer, and remotely 20 hours per week in the school year. Skills I learned on the job included writing SQL to access the data, building excel models to analyze the data, and communicating my findings to my manager.

After a one-year internship I was offered the full-time position as an actuarial analyst, my salary was $62,400 per year or $30 per hour with full benefits including a 401k contribution match and paid-time-off.

I was assigned to the pricing team where I would do the technical work, pulling claims and analyzing data, for the buildup of premiums on the marketplace.

From 2018 to 2021, I would continue to pass exams to obtain the designation of Associate of the Society of Actuaries (ASA) that came with a large salary increase and an annual bonus of 5% of your base salary. I was earning $98,800 base salary and a $4,940 bonus.

From 2022 to 2023, I would pass the final advanced exams on the health track to obtain the highest designation of Fellow of the Society of Actuaries(FSA). I was earning $141,086 per year with a 10% bonus of $14,109.

I started to receive calls from recruiters, due to your name published by the SOA that you’re now a FSA, that I could further increase my income by switching to consulting and earn a higher bonus. My base salary would only increase if I started managing other actuaries, which was not possible at Select Health at that time.

I made the switch to consulting by starting in 2024 where I would negotiate a $10,000 signing bonus. The consulting firm has their own organization structure for promotions to manage larger projects and analysts and I started at the bottom.

For consulting, the bonus is determined by your total billable hours over threshold in a year, for me this was 1400 hours in 2025. All the billable hours over threshold become part of your bonus and are paid at a higher rate.

Overall, this a good career path for many people and you can have a secure path to make $150,000+ with little to no student loan debt. See the table below for the dates of my actuarial journey.