Actuary
- Level
- 7
- Typical duration
- 39 months (about 3.5 years)
- Max funding band
- £18,000
- End-point assessment
- 2 months
- Route
- Legal, finance and accounting
- Regulated by
- Institute and Faculty of Actuaries
Analysing data to predict the likelihood and potential financial risk of future events
About the role
This occupation is found in the public and private sectors. In the private sector, an actuary may work in insurance companies, such as life, health, or general insurance. They may work in financial consultancies, pensions, healthcare, investment, and the growing area of financial risk management. In the public sector, they are most often found in the Government Actuary Department (GAD), where they help the government plan and make decisions.
The broad purpose of the occupation is to use mathematical skills to measure the probability and risk of future events. An actuary also measures the financial impact on a business or individuals. Actuaries are both problem solvers and strategic thinkers, with a deep understanding of financial systems.
In their daily work, an actuary works as part of a team to analyse data. They build mathematical models to evaluate financial risks and communicate the results to non-specialists.
Insurance company actuaries typically work in areas such as pricing and product development, reserving, capital modelling, and risk management. Work for insurance consultancy firms may cover similar areas but tends to be more varied on a day-to-day basis.
Pensions consultants may advise private and public pension providers and trustees on key matters, including the funding levels of their pension schemes and the contributions required to meet future pensions. They may also help clients understand and manage the risks they face.
An increasing number of actuaries work in less typical fields, such as banking, investment management, corporate finance, or any area where financial modelling is deemed useful. Some actuaries work to quantify the risks of climate change and other environmental factors.
Actuaries are required to act in the public interest and must therefore maintain the highest standards of professional conduct and competency. They uphold professional standards of ethical behaviour and integrity at all times.
How it compares
At 39 months (about 3.5 years), it is about average length for a degree-level apprenticeship (the average across all 172 Level 6+ standards is 39 months).
The funding band — the maximum an employer's levy can contribute to training costs — is £18,000, below the £21,500 average for degree-level standards. Apprentices never pay tuition either way.
Typical job titles
- Actuary
- Capital actuary
- Financial actuary
- Insurance actuary
- Investment actuary
- Pensions actuary
- Pricing actuary
- Reserving actuary
- Risk actuary
- Climate actuary
- Climate change actuary
- Environmental, social, and governance actuary
- Sustainability actuary
Entry requirements
Whilst any entry requirements will be a matter for individual employers, typically an apprentice will be expected to have already achieved:
- a degree in a numerate subject such as Mathematics, Statistics, Economics, Engineering, Chemistry or Physics; or
- a degree in a non-numerate subject with a Grade B in A-level Mathematics or equivalent; or
- successful completion of a Level 4 Actuarial Technician Apprenticeship, or
- passes from Institute and Faculty of Actuaries exams CM1 and, or, CS1
Entry requirements are ultimately set by each employer — treat these as the baseline, not the bar.
What you come out with
- Institute and Faculty of Actuaries Associate Qualification — Level 7 (non-degree qualification)
- Professional recognition: Institute and Faculty of Actuaries — Chartered Actuary (Associate)
What you'll learn
The official standard defines 10 core duties, 34 knowledge areas, 17 skills, 7 behaviours. This is the actual assessed content of the apprenticeship — worth reading before an interview, because competency questions are usually written straight from these lists.
Core duties 10
- Take on actuarial work from stakeholders, gather an understanding of their needs, and explain the risks and benefits of the options available and next steps.
- Review and analyse documents and data to identify key facts and evidence, and form judgements on the quality of evidence and any gaps or contradictions.
- Perform actuarial calculations and build computer models using actuarial techniques.
- Apply actuarial techniques to solve problems.
- Prepare reports and other communications, including presenting visualisations of data and solutions to clients, colleagues, managers, and or stakeholders.
- Determine potential risks, measure the probability and the financial impact on stakeholders, and explore ways to reduce them.
- Monitor and develop processes and digital systems to ensure they are efficient and compliant with all relevant legal, regulatory, and professional requirements.
- Build and maintain professional relationships with colleagues and clients to enable delivery of actuarial tasks and objectives.
- Provide ethical professional actuarial advice to clients appropriate to their circumstances and objectives in compliance with the Actuaries Code.
- Maintain professional standards by undertaking continuous professional development activities and keeping abreast of developments in the wider actuarial landscape.
Knowledge 34
- Principles of time preference theory of interest and the time value of money, including standard actuarial compound interest rate functions.
- Principles of equation of value to evaluate financial problems in particular relating to loan schedules, bond prices, bond yields, and project appraisals.
- How to model uncertain future cashflows which may be contingent on mortality, morbidity, or survival.
- The future loss random variable and its application to the calculation of premiums and reserves for conventional life assurance and annuity contracts.
- Rational economic theory, including utility theory.
- The use of models in portfolio selection and asset pricing, including the term structure of interest rates and credit risk.
- The use of models in insurance to calculate the probability of ruin and estimate claims.
- The construction and evaluation of common forward and option contracts, as well as theoretical models for derivatives and option pricing, in particular the theory and application of binomial and Black-Scholes models.
- Basic properties and uses of commonly used probability distributions, and the statistical properties of data generated by randomly sampling from a known distribution.
- The use of statistics to make inferences about the process underlying a data set.
- Regression theory and its applications, including generalised linear models.
- The fundamental concepts of Bayesian statistics.
- Statistical distributions suitable for modelling the variables and risks that arise in insurance contracts.
- Time series analysis methods and stochastic processes, including Markov chains and Markov jump processes.
- Description, estimation, and use of statistical survival models for the time until an event occurs.
- Elementary principles of machine learning.
- Corporate governance and regulation, including the different objectives and stakeholders that companies may seek to satisfy.
- Different types of corporations, how they are structured and financed, and factors which should be considered when deciding on their structure.
- The construction and interpretation of company accounts.
- Economic concepts and models, their use in business, and recent economic and financial history.
- Microeconomics, including models of consumer choice and the theory of the firm, and how these affect business decisions under different conditions.
- Macroeconomics, including aggregate economic variables and concepts that relate them to government policy, business decision-making, and financial market variables.
- The business environment in which they will work and the wider actuarial landscape.
- Approaches to tackling business-related problems, including strategic thinking, business decision-making, and the evaluation of investment projects in a corporate setting.
- The basic legal principles relevant to actuarial work and their practical implications.
- Approaches to applying underlying actuarial principles to a range of problems and issues in commercial and business environments.
- Approaches to identifying, classifying, measuring, and managing risk in a range of commercial situations, including the use of the Actuarial Control Cycle for risk management.
- Approaches to the application of mathematical and statistical techniques to a range of problems and issues in commercial and business environments.
- Approaches to the application of business finance and economics concepts to a range of problems and issues in commercial and business environments, including the valuation of liabilities.
- Problem-solving in financial services, focusing on problems and issues in financial services, with application to wider domains and industries.
- The principal terms used in financial services, investments, asset management, and risk management.
- The various external forces on an organisation and their impact, including climate change and other environmental issues.
- The role of professional and ethical standards in an actuary's work.
- The role of peer review in professional work.
Skills 17
- Apply actuarial principles to real-world examples of interest rates, discounting, and evaluation of present values of cash flows.
- Apply the principles of the equation of value to evaluate financial problems, particularly relating to loan schedules, bond prices, bond yields, and project appraisals.
- Project cash flows to profit-test life insurance contracts, and apply projected cash flow techniques to pricing and reserving.
- Apply a range of financial risk measurement tools to evaluate investment opportunities in the context of utility functions.
- Apply actuarial modelling to real data sets using Excel.
- Apply mathematical and statistical methods to real data sets using R programming.
- Produce simple visualisations and statistics from a data set.
- Interpret company accounts.
- Apply the Actuarial Control Cycle for an organisation.
- Apply the critical steps to check and model data, and analyse the actuarial methods used and the outputs generated.
- Document actuarial work, and create and maintain an audit trail.
- Communicate to stakeholders, such as colleagues, the approach, results, and conclusions of actuarial modelling.
- Provide written communications of a technical nature to a non-technical audience, using effective structure, appropriate language, clear explanations, and incorporating effective communication tools.
- Identify relevant information and appropriate content to ensure a communication meets its objectives.
- Present the results of actuarial work to informed but non-technical audiences.
- Analyse and prioritise stakeholder needs when designing actuarial solutions.
- Apply the concepts of professionalism, awareness of the Actuaries’ Code, and business ethics to a range of different situations.
Behaviours 7
- Takes responsibility for personal and professional development, and meets the Associate-level Personal and Professional Development requirements of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.
- Acts honestly and with integrity.
- Carries out work competently and with care.
- Remains impartial, ensures that professional judgement is not compromised, and cannot reasonably be seen to be compromised by bias, conflict of interest, or the undue influence of others.
- Complies with all relevant legal, regulatory, and professional requirements.
- Acts ethically, speaking up if they believe, or have reasonable cause to believe, that a course of action is unethical or unlawful.
- Works collaboratively with others.
Live vacancies
No live vacancies for this course as of 2026-07-24 — new adverts appear on Find an apprenticeship daily, and many degree apprenticeship employers recruit on their own careers sites instead.
Universities registered to deliver it
No university is currently on the provider register for this standard — delivery is by specialist training providers. The full provider list is on Find apprenticeship training.
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Official sources
- Official standard page (Skills England)
- Registered training providers (Find apprenticeship training)
Occupational summary, duties, knowledge, skills and behaviours reproduced from the ST0502 apprenticeship standard (last updated 2026-02-25) — contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Always check the official page before applying: standards get revised.