The Actuarial Pay Index

Chief actuary salary

What chief actuary roles pay in the US in 2026, how base pay steps up from AVP and VP level, and why the whole package matters most at the top.

Base salary range, chief actuary roles, US

$200k to $446k

Updated 6 October 2026 in the CTS Actuarial Pay Index.

What chief actuary roles pay

Chief actuary pay varies more than at any other level, so a single median would mislead. In the last 12 months, the US roles we tracked at chief actuary level (chief actuary, chief actuarial officer, and chief pricing or reserving actuary) carried base salaries from $200k at the bottom of their ranges to $446k at the top. The middle of those ranges ran from about $230k to $373k. Pay at this level depends heavily on the size and type of company, which is why we benchmark chief actuary packages case by case.

The levels below

Typical base salary for the levels below chief actuary in the US:

AVP or director: $192k median, typically $176k to $226k
VP or senior director: $214k median, typically $194k to $263k

Bonus and total pay

At this level, bonus and long-term incentives usually come on top of base salary and can be worth as much as base itself, so compare whole packages rather than base alone.

Hiring a chief actuary, or weighing an offer at this level? We run confidential searches for senior actuarial roles and can benchmark a package against the current market. Talk to us.

See pay by title in the Actuarial Pay Index → You can compare employer types and see what the same level is called at an insurer, a reinsurer or a consultancy.

How these figures are built

For job titles we combine the pay ranges in the actuarial roles advertised over the last 12 months with what we see in our own search work, and every figure is reviewed by our team. For chief actuary roles we show the full span of base salaries on offer, from the lowest to the highest, because pay at this level varies too much for percentiles. For the levels below, each figure is a typical base salary, and lower and upper figures are the lower and upper quartiles. These figures show what employers pay to hire, not what current staff earn. No individual salaries are ever published. How the index is built.