Executive Summary
The candidate market rewards technical breadth—but seniority still dominates pay.
Technical expectations are broad. Excel appeared in 57.4% of postings, SQL in 43.1%, Python in 33.0% and R in 25.6%.
Compensation climbed sharply by level. Median disclosed pay ranged from $55,063 for internships to $225,000 for vice-president roles.
Flexible work was common, not universal. Hybrid was the most frequently identified arrangement at 36.5% of all postings; 17.5% were remote.
Employer offers were uneven. Retirement and health benefits appeared in roughly six in ten postings, while explicit actuarial study support appeared in 16.0%.
3,669
unique postings analyzed
741
employers represented
$142,500
median disclosed salary
70%
with validated salary data
01 · Market shape
P&C led hiring, while most openings remained individual-contributor roles.
P&C accounted for the largest practice-area share, followed by health and life. Together, those three areas represented 87.5% of the postings in the H1 dataset.
Postings by practice area
The mix points candidates toward the three largest employment pools, while retirement remained a smaller specialist market.
Postings by seniority
Individual-contributor roles made up 58.2% of postings. Manager and director hiring was nearly even at about 13% each.
02 · Skills
SQL and Python sit beside Excel in the core actuarial toolkit.
Excel remained the most frequently mentioned tool, but data-querying and programming skills were widespread. The strongest candidate profile combines actuarial judgment with the ability to work directly with data.
Programming languages
SQL appeared most often, with Python ahead of R. Percentages reflect explicit mentions or clear requirements in postings.
Workplace and analytics tools
Excel was named in 57.4% of all postings; Power BI and Tableau led specialist visualization tools.
Actuarial and quantitative methods
Experience studies and predictive modelling had the broadest reach. These tags can overlap: one posting may require several methods.
03 · Compensation
The median disclosed salary was $142,500, with level explaining the clearest divide.
Across 2,570 postings with validated disclosed pay, the middle half ranged from $109,578 to $180,500. Salary estimates are excluded throughout.
Salary by seniority
The progression from individual contributor to management and executive responsibility was much larger than the differences between major practice areas.
Intern
n=90
$55,063($47,320–$69,420)
Individual contributor
n=1,447
$118,805($96,735–$146,300)
Manager
n=351
$162,500($143,220–$190,000)
Senior manager
n=167
$192,500($149,150–$267,650)
Director
n=345
$190,000($171,750–$216,250)
VP
n=130
$225,000($195,500–$261,875)
Median salary by practice area
Life postings had the highest unadjusted median. These comparisons do not control for seniority, geography or employer mix, so they should not be interpreted as causal practice-area premiums.
Life
n=701
$156,010($122,500–$200,000)
Retirement
n=89
$150,000($116,500–$190,704)
P&C
n=882
$143,000($110,000–$180,000)
Health
n=762
$127,700($105,000–$166,862)
04 · Employer offer
Hybrid led work arrangements; retirement and health benefits led the offer.
Flexibility appeared in several forms, but one in five postings did not specify a work arrangement. Benefit figures indicate what employers advertised, not benefits received by every employee.
Work arrangement
Hybrid was the largest identified category. Fully remote roles represented 17.5% of all postings.
Most advertised benefits
Core financial and health benefits appeared far more often than differentiators such as explicit parental leave or enhanced vacation.
16.0%
advertised actuarial study support
3.1%
explicitly offered visa sponsorship
73.1%
did not specify a sponsorship position
05 · Qualifications
Credentials mattered, but leadership expectations extended well beyond people management.
Employers frequently sought project ownership even where formal team management was not required. Explicit exam-count requirements were much less common than broader student or credential expectations.
56.6%
required or clearly expected project leadership
22.9%
required people-management responsibility
Explicit designation requirements
Requirements may overlap where an employer accepted more than one credential.
What job seekers should do
Build a profile that travels across practice areas.
- 1. Pair Excel with SQL. Excel remains foundational, but SQL is the clearest additional technical signal across the market.
- 2. Show ownership, not only execution. More than half of postings expected project leadership, well above formal people-management demand.
- 3. Compare the whole offer. Salary, study support, work arrangement and sponsorship disclosure varied meaningfully between postings.
Next edition
Questions worth tracking next
This first edition establishes a cross-sectional benchmark. Later editions can add defensible market movement once source coverage is stable across comparison periods.
- Are SQL, Python and predictive-modelling requirements becoming more common within like-for-like source cohorts?
- Do apparent salary differences by skill persist after controlling for seniority, location and practice area?
- Is remote availability changing within comparable employers and roles?
- Which advertised benefits are becoming meaningful differentiators for actuarial candidates?
Methodology
How to read this report
The analysis is designed to support candidate decisions without overstating what a jobs-posting dataset can prove.
Population and period
The dataset contains 3,669 unique postings classified as US actuarial roles and first captured by Acturhire from January 1 through June 30, 2026. Duplicate posting URLs were removed.
Salary
Salary findings use only postings marked as disclosing compensation with a numeric annualized USD base salary. The midpoint is used where a range was provided. Modeled estimates are excluded. 91 records outside the validation band of $20,000–$750,000 were excluded, and segmented results require at least 20 salary observations.
Structured enrichment
Acturhire uses structured extraction to classify practice area, seniority, skills, qualifications, work arrangement and advertised benefits from posting text. Tags indicate an explicit mention or a clearly supported classification and are not candidate self-reports.
Important limitation
Collection sources expanded during H1, particularly in May. For that reason, this edition does not interpret monthly posting counts or compare H1 with earlier periods. It describes the composition of postings captured, not every US actuarial vacancy or causal changes in the labor market.
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