Actuary vs Financial Analyst
Measured from each occupation's own live postings: related jobs with a real gap between them. Posted pay favors the actuary by about $30k at the midpoint. Salary bands, both switching directions, and the shared skills below, every number from live postings, refreshed nightly.
Actuary
Financial Analyst
600 open roles · financial analyst salary · careers for financial analysts
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
Actuary → Financial Analyst
Not scored: the pair shares too few skills in this direction to measure honestly. Run the instrument with your own skill set for a personal read.
Financial Analyst → Actuary
Credentialing exams (SOA/CAS) effectively required
Transition estimate: 12–24 mo + license.
The gap, from actuary postings: Underwriting, Risk Management, Python, Statistics.
Related comparisons
- Financial Controller vs Financial Analyst86% peak overlap
- Accountant vs Financial Analyst58% peak overlap
- Actuary vs Underwriter55% peak overlap
- Bookkeeper vs Financial Analyst51% peak overlap
- Actuary vs Economist42% peak overlap
- Auditor vs Financial Analyst41% 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 financial analyst?
Actuary, by about $30k a year at the midpoint. Going by postings that state pay, the posted middle band for an actuary runs $78k–$154k, and for a financial analyst it runs $60k–$112k. We only count postings that state a salary, so these are advertised figures rather than estimates.
Are actuary and financial analyst the same job?
They are related but not the same. The postings share a real core of skills and then diverge. The skills both sets of postings want are Financial Modeling, Data Analysis, Accounting, Forecasting, Excel.
Can a financial analyst become an actuary?
In this direction a typical financial analyst profile covers 50% of what actuary postings ask for. Keep in mind: credentialing exams (soa/cas) effectively required. Our estimate for the transition is 12–24 mo + license.
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.