What could your degree exempt you from?

An exemption is the IFoA agreeing that a subject you have already studied covers one of its examinations, so you never sit that paper. It is the single biggest variable in how long qualifying takes, and it is decided years earlier than most people realise: by which university and which programme you enrol on, and then by the modules you choose and the marks you get in them.

Where the rows come from. The IFoA keeps a directory of the universities it has exemption agreements with, programme by programme, with the subjects each programme can lead to a recommendation for. That directory is the only list that decides anything, and it is the only source this tool reads. We read all 53 entries on 10 September 2026 and shipped them as data: 108 programmes, each one with the exemption line exactly as the IFoA prints it, so you can see the source’s own words next to the subject codes we parsed out of them. No row here comes from a prospectus, a course page, a league table or a university’s own claim about its accreditation. A university cannot grant you an exemption and its marketing is not evidence that the IFoA will. Once a month a job re-reads the directory and compares it line by line with what is shipped here, so a programme whose entry has moved becomes a piece of work for us rather than a stale row for you. What that job never does is edit a row: it reports, and a person reads the page and decides.

What a listing does and does not mean. The IFoA’s own sentence is the one to hold on to: depending on your modules, grades and enrolment date, completing a listed course can lead to a recommendation for exemption from some or all of the exams shown. Three things sit inside that. Your modules, because a programme listed against six subjects usually gets there through specific optional modules. Your grades, because a pass in a module is not automatically an exemption in the subject. And your enrolment date, because the directory lists different exemptions for different intakes of the same programme at three of these universities. On an accredited course your university confirms your own recommendations in writing; until it does, the row on this page is what the programme can reach, not what you hold.

The window, which people get wrong. An exemption is not banked by graduating. You have 5 years from the date on your degree certificate to claim it: the IFoA’s worked example is a certificate dated July 2021, claimable until July 2026. That is a real trap for anybody who works for a few years before deciding to qualify, which is why the tool asks for your award month and shows you the month the window closes.

And the bill. Exemptions are charged per subject. The published fee for the CS, CM and CB stages is £248 per subject at the full rate and £161 at the reduced rate, with the practice and specialist subjects priced separately, in force from 1 July 2026. An approved exemption is invoiced and granted when the invoice is paid, so a six-subject degree is a four-figure decision worth seeing before you make it. The reduced rate is applied for rather than granted automatically.

What is left, and what that list is not. The tool subtracts what a programme covers from the 25 subjects the IFoA publishes, and it adds up the study hours the IFoA recommends for the ones you would be exempt from, which is the honest way to see the size of what an agreement saves. It does not tell you which of the remaining subjects you have to sit, because that depends on whether you are going for Associate or Fellow and which specialist subjects you choose, and the IFoA publishes that in its qualification handbook rather than anywhere read for this tool. Nobody sits all of them.

If your university is not listed. The tool says we have not checked it, and it never says you have no exemptions, because those are different statements and only one of them is ours to make. Universities join the directory, leave it and change their names. Search the directory yourself, and read Route D while you are here: an actuarial or maths based degree from a university with no agreement can still reach CS1, CB1, CB2, on a module-by-module mapping you make yourself against the IFoA’s mapping document. There is deliberately no calculator for that route on this page. Whether your modules cover a subject is a judgement the IFoA makes on your syllabus, your marks and your assessment methods, and a tool that guessed at it would be inventing the one thing you came for.

And one thing worth saying out loud. An exemption removes an exam. It does not teach you the material, and the subjects above it assume you have it. Employers know that, which is why an interview for a graduate scheme will happily open on something from CS1 whether you sat the paper or were exempt from it.