Pension actuary
| Highest | $8,300 / mo · Switzerland |
|---|---|
| Experience | 2–4 yrs |
| Degree | Required |
| First paycheck | 3 to 4 years of bachelor's study (paycheck from month 1 as analyst) |
Pay in the destination countries
Monthly, in US dollars. Each country is an Imora admission package — open one for that route's fees, language requirement and deadline.
| Country | Monthly |
|---|---|
| SwitzerlandIELTS 6.5 · CHF 0.9–8k | $8,300max |
| Hong KongIELTS 6.0–6.5 · HK–200k | $7,200 |
| SingaporeIELTS 6.5 · SGD 18–35k | $7,200 |
| United KingdomIELTS 6.0–7.0 · £11–38k | $7,200 |
| United StatesTOEFL 80–100 · $10–70k | $7,050 |
| NorwayIELTS 6.0–6.5 · NOK 130–260k | $6,900 |
What does the day look like?
A pension actuary works in professional services consultancies such as Mercer, Aon, Willis Towers Watson, Gallagher, and Hymans Robertson, in corporate benefit divisions, or in public pension funds. The standard working week is 37.5 to 45 hours, Monday through Friday, with overtime during triennial scheme valuation cycles and financial year-ends. Shift work, on-call duties, and night shifts do not exist in this profession.
Mathematical and longevity modeling accounts for only 20% of your day: reviewing demographic profiles, calibrating mortality rates using the CMI library, and yield curve fitting. The largest share, 35%, is spent running deterministic and stochastic cash flow and liability models for Defined Benefit (DB) pension funds under IAS 19, US GAAP ASC 715, and FRS 102 standards. Another 25% goes to data hygiene: cleaning payroll records, fixing missing salaries, verifying spousal birth dates, and debugging data pipelines. The remaining 20% involves drafting actuarial valuation reports, preparing slide decks, explaining scheme deficits to non-technical trustee boards, and negotiating recovery contributions. Core tools include ProVal, Mo.net, FIS Prophet, Willis Towers Watson Radar, Moody's AXIS, GCorr, advanced Microsoft Excel (VBA, Power Query), SQL, Python, R, and administration platforms like Aquila Administrator and Profund.
Where does this lead?
Next step up
People arrive from
What do you make of this job?