by Conrad Daley FSA, MAAA

I currently work at a global consulting firm in a Seattle Health office. I work primarily on Commercial Pricing for big insurance clients with plans on the marketplace. The health insurance marketplace is where individuals can purchase healthcare plans from different insurance carriers during open enrollment.

I’m a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries (FSA) and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries (MAAA). As a Fellow, I’ve passed ten actuary exams over the course of 6 years after obtaining my bachelor’s in actuarial science. As a Member of the AAA, I keep my continuing education current to show credibility in my everyday work for my clients.

Insight on the bonuses I’ve received while pursing SOA credentials and bad experience with consulting.

DW Simpson is an actuarial and analytics recruiting firm that connects job seekers and employers. They also produce a Salary Survey that shows market trends on compensation and due to its accurate and timely data, it’s considered the industry standard.

The survey is broken out by track and designation. A track is a specialized education path. Some examples are health, life, pensions, property & casualty (home and auto). A designation is a professional certification earned by passing exams from the SOA or CAS.

The two types of designations include ASA and FSA for the Society of Actuaries (SOA) and ACAS and FCAS for the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS). Since these designations are completed after a bachelor’s degree I like to think of the ASA as a pseudo master’s degree and the FSA as a pseudo-doctorate degree in actuarial science.

The Salary Survey graphics show the compensation by base salary, bonus, and total compensation over years of experience. Each dot represents a survey response and linear regression lines are fitted to the data. This is a best fit estimate of the compensation you can expect to earn by years of experience.

I’m a health actuary with an FSA and 8 years of experience. According to the graphic my base salary is in green, bonus is in blue, and total compensation is in orange.

Most of the green data points for 8 years of experience are between $140,000 and $200,000. I currently make $160,000. Most of the blue data points for 8 years of experience are between $0 and $40,000. I had a $0 bonus for 2026.

In the top right of the graphic there are linear regression formulas that fit a best of fit line to the data points. For my base salary, this is 2860.4(8) +157405 = $180,288. For my bonus, this is 1447(8) + 17870 = $29,446.

My current base salary compensation and bonus are both lower than what the Salary Survey linear regression lines are showing. However, I’m within the range of the data points previously shown.

I first started as an actuarial intern at Select Health and slowly worked my way up by passing exams. I did not earn a bonus until after I passed 6 exams (this may be different now that SOA changes requirements) and obtained my ASA.

I obtained my ASA in December 2021 and earned a 5% bonus of my base salary. My base salary in 2021 was $98,800 and I earned a bonus of $4,940.

To earn a higher bonus, I continued to pass advanced level FSA exams and obtained my FSA in March 2023. Now I was able to earn a 10% bonus on my base salary. My base salary in 2023 was $141,086 and I earned a bonus of $14,109.

At this point, to earn a higher bonus you would need to have a manager position and you would earn a 12% bonus with a opportunity to share with the profits of the company if they did well financially. My position was Actuarial Associate – Senior and there was not an opportunity to move up within Select Health to manager positions at that time.

After obtaining my FSA in March 2023, I started to receive phone calls from recruiters like DW Simpson to place me in positions with other companies due to your name being published by the Society of Actuaries (I’m number 38 in March 2023 Fellows).

I normally would ignore these calls but one recruiter told me I could increase my total compensation by switching to consulting where the bonus would be much higher than 10%. There would also be more opportunity to manage other analysts and improve my leadership skills.

Overall, I thought this would be a win-win. I would have to take less on my base salary but I was promised I would get large bonus based on the number of billable hours I would have during my first year.

Getting a bonus at a consulting firm is different than just a percentage of your base salary. In consulting, you earn money by billing the client (typically a large insurance company). To get a bonus at the consulting firm, you have to bill over 1400 hours in a year from December to November.

1400 hours doesn’t seem that bad when you first look at it. A year has 52 weeks with 104 weekend days (52 x 2). There are about 11 public holidays and employees normally take 14 days off for PTO. This would be 365 – 104 – 11 – 14 = 236 workdays in a year. 1400 / 236 = 6 average billable hours per day would be less than a standard 8-hour workday.

All the additional hours over 1400 get billed at a higher rate and become your bonus. I like to think of this as delayed overtime. At the consulting firm you can elect to have a mid-year bonus and end-of-year bonus so you can get you’re overtime paid twice per year if you’re billable hours are trending to be over 1400.

I started at the consulting firm in September 2024. The bonus calculation takes your hours from December to November so I would have a full year to get over the 1400 hours threshold. Due to being new to the company I would have a ramp up period to get familiar with projects.

The consulting firm will send you a bonus calculation each month so you can see where your bonus would be if you were paid today. As a commercial pricing actuary our busiest time is in the first half of the year and I was doing well with my billable hours.

By June 2025 I had 875 hours and accrued a $10,398 bonus and if I kept up the same rate I would have 1,750 hours and a bonus of nearly $30,000 by the end of the year. I elected to receive a mid-year bonus payment of $7,129 which is roughly 75% of the accrued bonus up until that point.

Work slowed down after the busy season and my billable hours dropped significantly in October and November. The nearly $30,000 bonus I was expected to receive dropped to $0 as my total billable hours for the year were totaled 1,262 hours.

Now this doesn’t mean I wasn’t working full-time during that period; this means that I didn’t have client specific work at every hour of the day. Also considering required training time, mandatory office meetings, mandatory physical office visits and travel time (3 trips total, typically 2 travel days each), administrative tasks, sick days, additional PTO days eats into your total billable hours.

The real kicker on top of not getting a bonus after expecting a much larger bonus is that I’ll have to repay the mid-year payment of $7,129 out of my 2026 bonus. Had I stayed at my former company I would have received a bonus of nearly $15,000 for 2025 and 2026.

In the consulting world, the firm is transferring risk to the employee instead of the guaranteed bonus at the end of the year. It’s up to the employee to plan for the right number of hours to hit your hours threshold.

Since the bonus is accrued on an annual basis, you’re “delayed overtime” ultimately doesn't get paid if you have slower time at work (even for 1 month). Also, you’re expected to find your own client work which puts the risk on the employee if the company over hires and there isn’t enough client work to go around.

It’s also difficult to commit to more client work as there is a minimum required hours to promise a client. Typically, a minimum is 300 hours, and busy times can often overlap creating additional stress with multiple managers and deadlines happening at the same time.

The culture of consulting leans more towards you live to work instead of working to live. The managers within the consulting firm typically work the longest hours and the company celebrates this with promotions.