Which actuarial practice area should I choose?

Choose on the work, and on how a first year in it is actually spent. This quiz asks eleven questions about the work and reports which of general insurance, life insurance, pensions and investments your answers describe, with the first-year tasks quoted from employers’ own graduate pages so you can check the description against the job. It does not tell you which seat you are suited to: nobody can score that from eleven answers.

Pensions or general insurance?

They differ in almost every daily particular. Pensions is mostly consulting around a statutory appointment: the trustees of a scheme appoint an actuary, valuations run on a cycle set by statute, and graduates draft advice and do member and scheme calculations. General insurance is mostly in-house: pricing what a risk should cost, reserving for claims that have not finished developing, capital, and catastrophe modelling, with underwriters and claims teams rather than trustees on the other side of the desk.

Life or general insurance?

Both sit inside a regulated insurer and report to the PRA on a timetable, so the shape of the year is similar. The risk is not: life models how long people live and whether they keep paying, over decades, and general insurance models how often claims happen and what they cost, mostly over months and years. Life work leans on cash flow projection and the balance sheet; general insurance leans on statistical models of claims data.

Which actuarial practice area pays most?

The published bands differ by area, and this quiz will not rank them, because a twenty year career chosen on a recruiter’s band is a bad trade. Our salary calculator holds every band with the survey it came from and the caveats that belong to it, including the London premium and the fact that the guides used there publish no separate band for investment actuaries.

Free · 11 questions · 2 minutes · No signup

Which practice area matches the work you want?

11 forced choices, every one of them about the job rather than about you. The result names the area whose day job your answers describe most, or every area that finishes level with it, and ranks the rest below it, with the first-year tasks quoted from employers’ own graduate pages.

It runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, there is no account and no email to hand over, and pay is not part of the scoring.

1.Whose questions would you rather spend your week answering?
2.Which of these would you rather put a number on?
3.The model is finished and the answer is on screen. Which part of that job would you rather own?
4.Some actuarial advice goes out signed by a named actuary who holds a certificate for that role. How does that read to you?
5.Which working calendar sounds better?
6.Which of these files would you rather open on a Monday morning?
7.Would you rather know one thing deeply, or several things at once?
8.Which of these would you rather get genuinely good at?
9.Which sentence would you rather be the person in the room who can say?
10.Which set of things would you rather understand inside out?
11.Which of these mistakes would bother you most?

0/11 answered

What this quiz does

Most people arriving at an actuarial application have already decided they want the profession. What they have not decided is which seat, and the four main ones lead to genuinely different weeks: general insurance, life insurance, pensions and investments. The choice is usually made on a rumour about pay or on whichever area a careers fair happened to explain. This tool tries to make it on the work instead.

Each of the 11 questions offers two or four descriptions of a working week and asks which you would rather have. Whose questions you spend the week answering. Which risk you would rather put a number on. Whether you would rather rebuild the model or write the advice that goes out with it. How advice signed by a named actuary reads to you. Which calendar you would rather work to, which file you would rather open, and which mistake would bother you most. Not one question asks about your degree, your grades or your personality, because none of those decide which practice area you would enjoy.

How the scoring works

Every answer carries a weight for one or more areas: two where the option describes that area’s work squarely, one where it describes part of it, nothing where it has nothing to do with it. The area that picks up the most weight is the one the result opens on, and beside its name the result prints how many of your 11 answers described it, because a count of answers is what this tool actually knows.

Ties are shown rather than broken, and only a real tie is called one. Where two or three areas finish on exactly the same weight, every one of them is named as the result and the page says they finished level. Where one area finishes ahead, it is named on its own: an area that came second is shown further down, in a section that says it sits below the leader and above the rest, with its own count of your answers beside it, because second by one answer and second by ten are not the same thing and a shared heading would hide the difference. If all four finish level, the result says that instead of picking one.

The rest of the result is the areas your answers described least, with the topics where the answer you gave described a different seat. That is the whole of the reasoning, and it is reversible: change one answer and you can see what moved.

What it will not do

It will not score you. A result here is a statement about which described work your answers matched, never about your suitability for a seat, and it cannot predict whether you would be hired into one. It will not rank the four areas by pay either. Where a matched area has a published band, the result shows the junior figure from the same survey the salary calculator uses, with the caveat that belongs to it: these are recruiter placement estimates for London, not offers. Where no survey publishes a band, as with investment actuaries, this tool says so rather than inventing one.

The assumptions, stated plainly

Four areas is a simplification. Health and care, risk management, data science, banking and the public sector all hire actuaries, and an actuary can spend a career in any of them. The four here are the four with the most UK graduate intake and the four our courses cover. Second, an area is not a single job: pricing and reserving inside general insurance feel different from each other, and the same practice area feels different again at an insurer, a consultancy and an investment firm. Third, the first-year task lists are quoted from a handful of employers who publish them, not from a survey of all of them, so treat them as real examples rather than a national average. Many large employers name an actuarial scheme and describe no task at all, and where a page said nothing, nothing is quoted from it.

Last, the specialist subjects. The result names the subjects the IFoA groups under each area, because a reader deciding between seats deserves to know where the exam route leads. They arrive years after a first job, so they are not a reason to choose one seat over another, and this page makes no claim about how many of them Fellowship requires: the IFoA’s curriculum pages do not state a number, so neither do we.

Where the facts come from

Every claim the result makes about the work was read off a primary page and is quoted in that page’s own words, with a link to it and the day it was read. Employers’ own graduate pages for the first-year tasks. The IFoA’s own curriculum pages for the specialist subjects, and its practising certificates page for the roles that need one. The Bank of England’s regulatory reporting page for the timetable insurers work to, the Pensions Act 2004 for the valuation cycle a pension scheme works to, and the Pensions Act 1995 for the appointment the pensions seat is built on, including the subsection that lets regulations exempt some schemes from it. Salary bands come from the salary calculator, which names its own surveys.

Sources last read on 10 September 2026.

Questions people ask before they choose

Which actuarial practice area should I choose?: Choose on the work, and on how a first year in it is actually spent. This quiz asks eleven questions about the work and reports which of general insurance, life insurance, pensions and investments your answers describe, with the first-year tasks quoted from employers’ own graduate pages so you can check the description against the job. It does not tell you which seat you are suited to: nobody can score that from eleven answers.
Pensions or general insurance?: They differ in almost every daily particular. Pensions is mostly consulting around a statutory appointment: the trustees of a scheme appoint an actuary, valuations run on a cycle set by statute, and graduates draft advice and do member and scheme calculations. General insurance is mostly in-house: pricing what a risk should cost, reserving for claims that have not finished developing, capital, and catastrophe modelling, with underwriters and claims teams rather than trustees on the other side of the desk.
Life or general insurance?: Both sit inside a regulated insurer and report to the PRA on a timetable, so the shape of the year is similar. The risk is not: life models how long people live and whether they keep paying, over decades, and general insurance models how often claims happen and what they cost, mostly over months and years. Life work leans on cash flow projection and the balance sheet; general insurance leans on statistical models of claims data.
Which actuarial practice area pays most?: The published bands differ by area, and this quiz will not rank them, because a twenty year career chosen on a recruiter’s band is a bad trade. Our salary calculator holds every band with the survey it came from and the caveats that belong to it, including the London premium and the fact that the guides used there publish no separate band for investment actuaries.

Once you have a shortlist

The guide compares the four areas in full, including how reversible the choice is and how to answer “why this area?” at interview. Each course walks through one area’s work with the calculations an analyst in it actually does.

Read the practice area guide →See the four courses →