Financial reporting, taxation and the actuary's professional responsibilities make up 60-75% of CAS Exam 6-U.S., so most of your hours go to statutory accounting, the Annual Statement schedules, RBC, IRIS ratios and the Statement of Actuarial Opinion. It's one of the two upper-level exams on the Associate (ACAS) path, along with Exam 5, but passing it doesn't finish ACAS on its own. ACAS now also requires Property & Casualty Predictive Analytics (PCPA), which has an exam and a project. The exception is for candidates who had all the pre-2026 ACAS requirements, Exam 6 included, on their transcript before January 1, 2026. Overall it covers how U.S. property and casualty insurance is regulated, how an insurer reports its condition on the statutory Annual Statement, how solvency is measured, how insurers are taxed, and what the Appointed Actuary signs when the reserve opinion goes out.
Like Exam 5, it's a 4-hour exam. The CAS content outline lists seven item types you may see, from multiple choice and matching to spreadsheet tasks and constructed response, and it doesn't publish the mix. On a constructed-response item there are no choices to work backward from. I'd take Exam 5 first if you can, because Exam 6 assumes you know what a loss reserve is before it asks you to read one off Schedule P or give an opinion on it. Otherwise the two share almost no content: Exam 5 is ratemaking and reserving technique, and Exam 6 is regulation, reporting and professional responsibility. The CAS also runs nation-specific versions of Exam 6, and material for another version isn't a substitute.
FreeFellow has 705 original practice questions with step-by-step solutions, walkthroughs of 13 released sittings (345 questions from Fall 2013 through Fall 2019) with the published examiner's report sample answers and grader commentary, 24 lessons and a formula sheet. The full original question bank is free with an account, subject to usage limits. Worked solutions, written lessons, mixed practice, and your readiness score stay free. The practice questions on the free Exam 6-U.S. page are multiple-choice knowledge checks and exhibit drills built on the released sittings, and the walkthroughs are where you practice the written format.
What Exam 6-U.S. tests
The CAS Syllabus of Basic Education organizes the exam into four domains: U.S. laws and regulations (10-20%), government programs (5-15%), financial reporting, taxation and professional responsibilities (60-75%), and reinsurance accounting principles (5-10%). The regulation and government-program material does get tested, but on its own it won't get you through.
FreeFellow splits it into eight practice topics so you can drill in smaller pieces:
Scroll horizontally to view all columns.
| Topic | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Regulation foundations and the NAIC | McCarran-Ferguson, NAIC model laws, accreditation, rate regulation systems and rate standards |
| Solvency, specialty markets and emerging regulation | Financial examinations, ORSA, guaranty funds, risk retention groups, cyber and climate disclosure |
| Tort environment and government programs | Tort reform and no-fault, flood, the terrorism backstop, state funds, FAIR plans |
| Primary statements and statutory accounting | SSAPs, admitted assets, SAP vs GAAP, the balance sheet, changes in surplus |
| Annual Statement schedules and the IEE | Schedule P Parts 1 through 7, Schedules F and T, IEE Parts I, II and III |
| Solvency metrics: RBC and IRIS | R0 through R5, the covariance adjustment, the four action levels, the 13 IRIS ratios |
| The Appointed Actuary: SAO, AOS and professionalism | The five opinion types, scope vs relevant comments, the AOS, ASOPs 36, 41 and 43 |
| Insurer taxation and reinsurance accounting | Loss reserve discounting, the 20% revenue offset, proration, risk transfer testing |
If you can read a Schedule P triangle, compute an RBC action level and write a defensible SAO answer, you have the core.
Don't treat the Appointed Actuary block as soft material you can't study. The SAO, the Actuarial Opinion Summary and the professionalism material sit inside the 60-75% domain, and the requirements are listed out, so you can drill them like a checklist. If you drill RBC and skim ASOP 36, you give away points you could have had.
How to practice written answers
On the multiple-choice preliminaries you recognize the right answer, can often backsolve, and get all or nothing per question. On an Exam 6 constructed-response item you produce the answer from nothing, with no backsolving, and graders give partial credit for each scoreable element. So instead of speed and accuracy, you practice writing complete answers under time. Close the source, write the answer out, then compare. People who only read solutions find on exam day that they knew the material and couldn't get it down.
Until 2020 the CAS published an examiner's report after each sitting, with the questions, sample answers that earned full or nearly full credit, and commentary on common mistakes. It decided in summer 2020 to stop producing them. The old reports are still the most useful study documents for this exam, and FreeFellow's 345 walkthroughs reproduce them with attribution so you can compare your attempt with a strong answer. They show what a strong answer looked like, not the minimum needed to pass, and the papers predate the current outline.
Pay attention to the verb. "List" wants items, not sentences, "briefly describe" wants an item plus a clause saying why, "fully discuss" wants an argument, and "calculate" wants the work shown, because the work earns partial credit even when the number is wrong. Budget minutes per point rather than per question: divide the sitting's minutes by the paper's total points, and if you're still polishing a five-point question at double that rate, you're taking time from a question you'll never reach.
Exam 6 does test calculations (RBC, IRIS ratios, IEE allocations, the tax computation, development off Schedule P), but the CAS outline puts 40-50% of items at the Remember level, so a lot of the work is structured recall and explanation: name the four action levels, describe what the regulator does at each, explain why the NAIC requires it. So build lists, rehearse them, and attach the reason to every item, because bare lists rarely earn full credit on a describe question.
Study time and a 16-week schedule
How long it takes depends mostly on how much statutory reporting you've done. If you work in P&C financial reporting or valuation and the Annual Statement crosses your desk, you start well ahead. If your P&C experience is outside reporting (pricing, reserving, analytics), you'll need more time, and if you've never worked with statutory reporting, budget the most. The 16-week plan below assumes some P&C background, so add weeks if statutory accounting is new to you. Past the halfway point an hour spent writing answers is worth more than an hour rereading.
If you're doing 16 weeks, this is roughly how I'd split them:
- Weeks 1 to 4: regulation, solvency oversight and government programs, from McCarran-Ferguson and the NAIC through guaranty funds, flood, terrorism, FAIR plans and the tort environment. It's light on math and heavy on vocabulary, so start building your lists here.
- Weeks 5 to 8: statutory accounting and the Annual Statement, the largest block. SSAPs and admitted assets, SAP vs GAAP, the primary statements, then Schedules P, F and T and the IEE. Pull numbers off a real statement page instead of reading about one.
- Weeks 9 to 10: RBC and IRIS, including the trend test and the usual ranges for the 13 IRIS ratios. This is the most calculation-heavy stretch.
- Weeks 11 to 12: the Appointed Actuary. Opinion types, scope and relevant comments, materiality, the AOS, the Actuarial Report, the ASOPs and the Code. Write full answers from day one, since this material is graded on wording.
- Weeks 13 to 14: taxation and reinsurance accounting, including prospective vs retroactive treatment and the provision for reinsurance.
- Weeks 15 to 16: work the walkthroughs as timed sittings after dropping anything the current outline no longer covers, then log every lost point by cause: you didn't know it, you knew it and wrote it badly, or you ran out of time. Fix the middle cause first, since it's the cheapest to recover.
The questions, walkthroughs and lessons are free, and so is the Exam 6-U.S. formula sheet, a print-ready PDF with RBC covariance and action-level thresholds, IRIS definitions and usual ranges, IEE allocation relationships, and the tax and reinsurance mechanics. You can also turn a released past paper into a practice sitting for free: drop any question the current outline doesn't cover, set a clock, write full answers, then compare them with the sample answers. Treat it as historical practice, since those papers predate the current format and outline.
For $39 a month or $79 a quarter per track, Fellow adds an original mock sitting of 24 questions worth 70.5 points over 4 hours, weighted to the CAS domain ranges, along with flashcards, topic analytics, a study plan and AI grading of your written answers (five attempts a day). The $199 annual plan is Fellow Plus, which adds Common traps. Fellow Plus removes Fellow's 5-attempt daily allowance on exams with AI grading. Grading rate and usage limits still apply. Prices are in USD, and each subscription covers one credential track. Check pricing for your track and country.
The Exam 5 study guide covers the ratemaking and reserving half of the pair, and the MAS-II study guide covers Modern Actuarial Statistics II. If you're still choosing a path, see SOA vs CAS and the best free actuarial prep resources.
FreeFellow is not affiliated with the Casualty Actuarial Society. CAS does not endorse, promote, review, or warrant the accuracy or quality of FreeFellow products or services.