Actuary vs Data Scientist
Measured from each occupation's own live postings: related jobs with a real gap between them. Posted pay favors the data scientist by about $5k at the midpoint. Salary bands, both switching directions, and the shared skills below — every number from live postings, refreshed nightly.
Actuary
Data Scientist
60 open roles · data scientist salary · careers for data scientists
The overlap, measured
Skills that appear in both occupations’ posting demand. This is the shared core; everything else on each side is the difference.
Switching, both directions
The asymmetry is the finding: data scientist → actuary reads 53% ready; the reverse only 16%. Skill overlap is not symmetric, and the direction you travel matters.
Actuary → Data Scientist
The gap, from data scientist postings: Machine Learning, SQL, LLMs / Generative AI, A/B Testing.
Data Scientist → Actuary
Credentialing exams (SOA/CAS) effectively required
Transition estimate: 12–24 mo + license.
The gap, from actuary postings: Financial Modeling, Risk Management, Accounting.
Related comparisons
- Data Analyst vs Data Scientist65% peak overlap
- Data Scientist vs Machine Learning Engineer61% peak overlap
- Data Scientist vs Research Scientist60% peak overlap
- Actuary vs Financial Analyst49% peak overlap
- Data Scientist vs Solutions Architect48% peak overlap
- Data Engineer vs Data Scientist47% peak overlap
Which one do your skills favor?
Run the instrument with your own skill set and both readiness numbers recompute for you. Free, no account.
Quick answers
Which pays more, actuary or data scientist?
Posted mid-bands from each occupation's own corpus: Actuary $92k–$145k, Data Scientist $84k–$163k. At the midpoint that favors the data scientist by about $5k a year. Only postings that state pay are counted.
Are actuary and data scientist the same job?
Related but distinct: postings share a real core and then diverge. Skills both sets of postings ask for: Data Analysis, Forecasting, Statistics, Python.
Can a actuary become a data scientist?
Skill readiness is 16 percent: that share of what data scientist postings demand, a typical actuary profile already covers.
Can a data scientist become a actuary?
Skill readiness is 53 percent in this direction. Note the credential gate: credentialing exams (soa/cas) effectively required. Estimated transition: 12–24 mo + license. The asymmetry is the finding: data scientist to actuary is the easier direction (53% vs 16%).
Method: each occupation’s salary band is the posted 25th–75th percentile from its own corpus; readiness is coverage of the destination’s posting-skill weight; shared skills are read from the overlap waterfall. Pairs sharing too few skills are not scored in that direction. Refreshed with the nightly scrape.