Which is harder, SOA or CAS?

They're about the same. Both have per-attempt pass rates in the 45 to 55% range on the early exams (P, FM, FAM, MAS-I, MAS-II), and both take 200 to 400 hours per exam at fellowship level. People tend to see CAS Exams 5 to 9 as harder because they're all written-answer with a lot of essay-style work, while the SOA exams mix multiple-choice and written.

Can I work as an actuary without finishing all the exams?

Yes. Most actuarial jobs start before you've passed any exams. Some employers want P and FM by the time you're hired and some by your first anniversary, and you keep taking exams while you work. The credential matters for the long run, but the job starts much earlier.

Do I need a math degree to be an actuary?

No. The exams test what they test. A math degree helps on the early exams (P, FM, FAM) because the calculus and probability will be familiar, but the path to the credential is the exams, not the degree. FSAs and FCASs come from English, computer science, economics and engineering backgrounds.

Can I do both SOA and CAS?

Technically yes, but in practice no. Once you're past FM, you've picked a track. People who hold both designations are rare and usually earned them over decades.

How does actuarial credentialing compare to CFA in difficulty?

The actuarial path is longer (5 to 10 years to Fellow against 2 to 4 years to the CFA charter) and needs more sustained quantitative depth. Per-attempt pass rates land in a similar band on both, roughly 40% to 55%. The CFA covers more ground, while actuarial exams go deeper in a narrower area, and the two credentials mean different things in different industries.

Will the SOA or CAS exam process change in the next few years?

Both societies update their curriculum and exam structure from time to time. The SOA's last big overhaul (2018) introduced FAM, SRM, ATPA, ALTAM and ASTAM, and the CAS adjusts MAS-I and MAS-II content regularly. Check the current syllabus on soa.org and casact.org before you build a study plan, and be careful with materials more than 2 years old.

SOA vs CAS 2026: Life/Health vs P&C + Free Quiz to Decide

Pick SOA if you want to work in life insurance, health insurance, pension consulting or retirement plans. Pick CAS if you want property and casualty work (auto, homeowners, commercial lines, reinsurance). Exams P and FM are jointly administered by both societies, so you don't have to decide until after them. Both paths lead to a fellowship (FSA for SOA, FCAS for CAS) that takes 5 to 10 years and pays $150,000 to $300,000+ at fellowship level.

You'll live with this decision longer than most credential choices, because the exams take 5 to 10 years and switching from one society to the other partway through costs you exam credits. I passed the SOA exams, and most of what I say about careers below comes from working alongside FSAs and FCASs on insurance and pension work. For how these fit with other finance credentials, see the Finance Credentials Map.

Factor	SOA (Life, Health, Pension)	CAS (Property & Casualty)
Industry	Life insurance, health insurance, pension/retirement consulting	Auto, homeowners, commercial lines, reinsurance
Designations	ASA (Associate), FSA (Fellow)	ACAS (Associate), FCAS (Fellow)
Preliminary exams	P, FM (joint with CAS), FAM	P, FM (joint with SOA), MAS-I, MAS-II
Mid-path exams	SRM, PA, ATPA, ALTAM, ASTAM	Exams 5, 6, 7
Final exams	FSA modules (specialty track: ILA, GHC, RET, GFI, PA, QFI)	Exams 8, 9
Typical time to Fellow	5-10 years	6-10 years
Largest employers	Big insurance companies (MetLife, Prudential, MassMutual), consulting (Mercer, WTW, Aon), pension departments	Big insurance companies (Allstate, Travelers, Progressive), reinsurance (Munich Re, Swiss Re), consulting (Milliman P&C)

What the work looks like, and what it pays

SOA actuaries work on life insurance pricing, reserving, valuation and asset-liability management; health insurance underwriting, pricing, predictive modeling and Medicare/Medicaid analytics; and pension funding, plan design, retirement consulting and post-employment benefits. On a given day you might price a new life insurance product (estimating mortality, lapse rates and expenses, then setting premiums), compute reserves for an annuity block under statutory accounting, value a defined-benefit pension liability under FAS 87 (now ASC 715), build a stochastic asset-liability model for an insurer's investment portfolio, or run a long-term care insurance experience study.

CAS actuaries work on property and casualty pricing (ratemaking), reserving, predictive modeling, catastrophe modeling and reinsurance analytics. You might build a generalized linear model (GLM) for auto pricing by territory, age and vehicle class, compute loss reserves with chain-ladder, Bornhuetter-Ferguson or stochastic methods, analyze catastrophe model output for hurricane exposure in Florida, price a reinsurance treaty for workers' compensation, or work on a homeowners' rate filing for a state insurance department.

Pay is similar on both paths. With 0 to 2 exams passed, you'll start around $60,000 to $80,000 depending on geography and company, and bonuses for each passed exam are common ($1,000 to $3,000 per preliminary). At ASA or ACAS, with 3 to 7 exams passed, both paths pay roughly $90,000 to $140,000, and most large employers give a raise of $5,000 to $10,000 per exam. Fully credentialed FSAs and FCASs earn roughly $150,000 to $300,000 in base plus bonus, and senior FSAs in pricing at consulting firms and senior FCASs in pricing at large P&C carriers can earn more.

CAS-credentialed actuaries earn a small premium over SOA-credentialed ones on average, especially at the FCAS level. There are fewer FCASs, because the exam pipeline is smaller and P&C is a smaller industry than life and health combined, and that scarcity pushes pay up. Job security on both paths is among the highest of any finance career. The exams keep the supply of credentialed actuaries tight, and FSAs and FCASs don't get laid off in large numbers during downturns the way investment-banking or asset-management staff do.

The exams on each path

The first two exams are the same for both societies, so you can start without picking a side.

Exam P (Probability): 30 multiple-choice questions in 3 hours. Calculus-based probability, distributions, joint distributions, conditional probability and expectation, with a lot of integration. On FreeFellow, the Exam P practice questions are 73.9% pure-numeric multiple choice.
Exam FM (Financial Mathematics): 30 multiple-choice questions in 2.5 hours. Time value of money, annuities, loans, bonds, swaps and asset-liability matching. The Exam FM practice questions are 85.6% pure-numeric, the highest of any credential in the FreeFellow bank.

Most candidates take P first, and a lot of people pass FM first because they prefer financial math to probability. The order doesn't matter, since you need both whichever society you choose.

SOA path after FM

FAM (Fundamentals of Actuarial Mathematics): short-term and long-term models, parametric estimation, pricing. 71.4% pure-numeric. Practice FAM.
SRM (Statistics for Risk Modeling): regression, GLMs, time series, decision trees, unsupervised learning. 16.5% pure-numeric, lower because the choices are often statistical methods written out in words. Practice SRM.
PA (Predictive Analytics): a written-response exam with 10 to 12 tasks interpreting provided R output, typed into Word at Prometric. FreeFellow reproduces every released sitting as graded task walkthroughs with rubrics and grader commentary. Practice PA.
ATPA (Advanced Topics in Predictive Analytics): project-based, in R or Python.
ALTAM (Advanced Long-Term Actuarial Mathematics): multi-state survival models, pension funding, long-term insurance pricing. Mostly written-answer. Practice ALTAM.
ASTAM (Advanced Short-Term Actuarial Mathematics): loss models, credibility, simulation. Mostly written-answer. Practice ASTAM.

After the ASA, you pick a specialty track for the FSA modules: ILA (Individual Life and Annuities), GHC (Group Health Care), RET (Retirement Benefits), GFI (General Financial Insurance), PA (Predictive Analytics) or QFI (Quantitative Finance and Investment). Each track has 2 to 3 modules and a Fellowship Admissions Course (FAC), and the total time to FSA is 5 to 10 years.

CAS path after FM

MAS-I (Modern Actuarial Statistics I): probability models, frequency and severity distributions, simulation. 16.5% pure-numeric on FreeFellow. Practice MAS-I.
MAS-II (Modern Actuarial Statistics II): credibility theory, linear mixed models, statistical learning, time series. 0.2% pure-numeric, because CAS writes its choices as interval buckets. The real difficulty is closer to SRM. Practice MAS-II.
Exam 5 (Basic Techniques): ratemaking and reserving. Written-answer.
Exam 6 (Regulation and Financial Reporting): NAIC regulation, US GAAP, statutory accounting. Written-answer.
Exam 7 (Estimation of Policy Liabilities, Insurance Company Valuation, Enterprise Risk Management): written-answer.
Exam 8 (Advanced Ratemaking): written-answer.
Exam 9 (Financial Risk and Rate of Return): written-answer.

You earn the ACAS after Exam 6 and the Online Course on Risk Management, and the FCAS after Exams 7 to 9 and the COP modules. Total time to FCAS is 6 to 10 years.

If you switch societies after passing only P and FM, both carry over and you don't retake anything. Past FM it's different. SOA exams like FAM and SRM don't transfer directly to CAS. CAS may give partial credit depending on the exam, but you'll probably need to take MAS-I, MAS-II and Exams 5 to 9 from scratch, so I wouldn't switch lightly once you're three or more exams in.

FreeFellow has free question banks for Exam P, Exam FM, Exam FAM, Exam SRM, ALTAM, ASTAM, CAS MAS-I and CAS MAS-II, plus free past-exam walkthroughs for Exam PA. All of them include condensed outlines, formula sheets, and the societies' published sample questions reproduced verbatim with attribution. For how calculation-heavy each exam is compared with other credentials, see the quantitative vs conceptual breakdown.

How to decide

If you're not sure where you fall, try the free 10-question SOA vs CAS sampler quiz. It pulls real questions from both tracks, scores you by track, and says plainly what the result can and can't tell you. The three questions below cover the rest.

1. What industry do you want to be in?

If you want life insurance, health insurance, retirement consulting or a pension department at a large employer, go SOA. If you want auto, home or commercial insurance, reinsurance or P&C consulting, go CAS. The credentialing is built the same way on both sides, but a life insurance pricing actuary and a homeowners pricing actuary do very different work.

2. What kind of math do you prefer?

SOA work leans on multi-decade discount-rate forecasting, mortality and morbidity modeling, and asset-liability matching. It has longer time horizons and more contact with investments and capital markets. CAS work leans on frequency-severity modeling, GLMs for pricing, loss reserving and catastrophe modeling, with shorter time horizons and more contact with claims data and rate regulation.

3. Where can you find an entry-level job?

SOA roles cluster in the Northeast (the insurance hubs of Hartford, NY and Boston), the Midwest (Des Moines, Columbus, Chicago) and California. CAS roles cluster in the Midwest (Chicago, Bloomington, Columbus), the Northeast (Hartford, NY) and the Southeast (Atlanta). If you're tied to one region, look at which credential the employers there want.

If you're still torn after all that, pick one and start. Both are good careers, and since P and FM count for both societies, starting before you've decided doesn't cost you anything.