Actuaries Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Actuaries offer sit among all 28,340 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 28,340 people in May 2024, 0.02% of every job BLS counted. New York is the largest employer at 3,090 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 25.4% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Connecticut, whose location quotient of 3.86 says this work is 3.86 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $206,430, which is 2.7 times the $75,240 at the 10th, a difference of $131,190 annually. Because the mean wage ($134,990) sits above the median ($125,770), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

The state spread for Actuaries runs from the $153,340 median in District of Columbia down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in New York (3,090 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Actuaries stands number 490 by employment and number 62 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Computer and Mathematical Occupations, the group median wage is $103,790 across 21 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 21% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.5% of the group's 5,192,870 jobs. In 15 of the 39 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $125,770, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 3,160 jobs, 11.2% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Indianapolis-Carmel-Greenwood, IN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $104,820 a year, against $158,540 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $10,481 a month before tax, $4,837 biweekly, $2,419 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($90,970) to the 75th ($164,860) is worth $73,890 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $138,347 would sit between the median ($125,770) and the 75th percentile ($164,860), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $90,970, is $34,800 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Computer and Mathematical Occupations

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Web Developers, Database Administrators, Database Architects, Computer and Information Research Scientists, Statisticians, Mathematical Science Occupations, All Other. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.