What it costs to qualify as an actuary

What this tool does

Two numbers decide whether somebody starts the actuarial exams: the total, and how much of it lands on them personally. This works out both. Choose Associate or Fellow, tick the exemptions you expect to be granted, say how many subjects you plan to enter in a session and how often you expect to resit, then set how much of each bill your employer covers. The result adds up exam entry fees, resits, exemption fees, the one-off admission fee, an annual subscription for every year the plan runs, both stages of the online professionalism course, the PPD sign off fee and an optional study material line, and splits the answer two ways.

It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and the only thing kept anywhere is your own plan, in this browser, so that you can come back and compare two offers without starting again.

How the sum is built

The subject list comes from the IFoA’s own requirements, not from memory of how the curriculum used to work. An Associate sits ten exams: CB1, CB2 and CB3, CM1 and CM2, CS1 and CS2, then CP1, CP2 and CP3. A Fellow sits those ten and adds two Specialist Principles subjects and one Specialist Advanced subject. Nothing else can get into the total, so a plan cannot quietly bill you for the wrong number of papers.

Each subject is then priced at its own stage. The schedule charges by stage rather than by subject, which is why CB1 and CB2 cost the same, every CM and CS subject costs the same, and CB3, CP2 and CP3 are priced individually as online exams. An exemption swaps the entry fee for an exemption fee and takes the subject out of your exam sessions altogether. The resit rate turns a percentage into whole extra sittings, priced at the average entry fee of the subjects you are sitting, because a resit is a full entry fee again.

The number of years falls out of the exams. Written papers run twice a year, so a plan of ten subjects at two a session takes five sessions and lands in the third year. Every year of the plan carries a subscription, and a Fellowship plan pays the student rate up to Associate and the Associate rate after it. Work experience is a floor on all of that: the IFoA requires 24 months of recorded PPD before an Associate application and a further 12 before Fellow, so clearing every exam quickly does not shorten the plan below those.

What it assumes, plainly

That you pay the full rate unless you say otherwise. The IFoA sets the subscription by income and publishes three rates, and the calculator offers all three: the full rate for your category, a mid-tier reduced rate of £305 for Fellows and Associates earning between £9,401 and £30,499 a year, and a lower reduced rate of £94 for members earning £9,400 a year or less. Two things follow that the total has to be honest about. There is no mid-tier rate for the student category, so a student inside that band still pays the student rate here. And the fee schedule offers the reduced exam fees to a member who has paid the reduced membership subscription without saying whether the mid-tier one counts, so a mid-tier plan is priced at the full exam fees and says so rather than assume a discount nobody has published. On a graduate scheme you will be paying the full rate anyway.

That you are an IFoA member from the first exam, and that the admission fee is paid once, on joining. Membership is what that fee and every subscription in the total pay for, and it is why every exam here is priced at the member rate: the schedule publishes a separate £423 fee for a non-member sitting CM1 or CS1, and this tool never uses it. That both professionalism course stages are paid once each, which is what the IFoA requires before an Associate application. And that you sit every remaining subject exactly once plus whatever the resit rate adds. It is arithmetic on published fees, not a prediction about you.

The study material line is somebody else’s price list and is kept outside the IFoA total wherever it appears. It uses BPP Actuarial Education (ActEd) study material prices, one provider among several, whose prices exclude VAT and were correct as at 13 April 2026. Where that provider lists no pack for a subject, the tool budgets nothing for it and says so rather than averaging one in.

Where the figures come from

Every number on this page was read from a primary source on 10 September 2026 and each line in the result links back to the document it came from with the date that document takes effect. Exam entry fees, exemption fees, the professionalism course and the PPD sign off are from the IFoA fee schedule effective 1 July 2026. The admission fee and the subscriptions are from the membership subscriptions table effective 1 October 2026. What each qualification requires, and the work experience floor, are from the IFoA’s own requirements page.

Those two schedules move on different dates: exam fees on 1 July, subscriptions on 1 October. That is why the figures live in one data module with an effective date on each of them, and why a test fails the build when either falls behind its own cycle. The current fee schedule is published as a PDF, so a person reads it and edits the figures. No script is allowed to.

This is an estimate on published fees, not a quotation and not advice. The IFoA prints beside its own schedule that fees are subject to change, employers change their study policies, and plans slip. Check the linked documents before you commit money to anything.