Actuaries

At $130,000 — $79,980 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Actuaries sits at the top of what BLS publishes. Read the gate before the figure: at this level there is always one, and it is usually measured in years.

With 26,670 employed as Actuaries, most metros have a working market: several employers, visible turnover, and the ability to change jobs without moving house.

Mathematical science work suits people who are willing to be the person who says the estimate is uncertain, and who can explain why to an audience that wanted a single number.

We carry no verified training length for Actuaries — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.

The quarters sit at $97,680 and $170,650 — 1.7x, or $6,080 a month apart. At that width the occupation contains genuinely different jobs, and which one you are being offered matters more than the title does.

The bottom quarter of this field earns $97,680 — $46.96 an hour, $47,660 above the $50,020 national midpoint. When even the worst-paid quarter of Actuaries is this far ahead, the barrier to entry is doing the work of keeping it there.

Avoid it if you need your conclusions accepted; a large part of this job is being overruled by someone who preferred a different number.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 26,670 people employed as Actuaries; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.

At 1.7x, the distribution for Actuaries is open enough that specialisation starts to pay. The distance from $97,680 to $170,650 is mostly what you can do that others in the same title cannot.

The middle half of this field earns between $97,680 and $170,650. That is $72,970 of range, with $130,000 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Between $97,680 and $170,650 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $130,000. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $40,650; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $72,970.

The climb from $130,000 to $170,650 is $40,650; the drop to $97,680 is $32,320. A little more room above the midpoint than below it is the normal shape for Actuaries and for most paid work, and it is the reason the median is the honest summary rather than the average.

Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $46.96 at the bottom quarter, $62.50 at the midpoint, $82.04 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.