How many graduate actuarial positions are available in the UK for September 2026? Is hiring up, down, or flat compared to last year?

These seem like straightforward questions. I spent a day trying to answer them. What I found — and what I got wrong — is itself worth reporting.

How many graduate positions are there?

The Actuarial Profession Guide 2025/26 (37th edition, published annually by actuarialcareers.co.uk in partnership with the IFoA) is the closest thing to a definitive answer. Its Employer Directory lists 32 firms recruiting actuarial trainees, and most publish their graduate intake numbers — from 1 (Atkin Pensions) to 100+ (Aon). A rough sum of the specific numbers gives approximately 400–500 graduate positions across the listed firms, though 12 of the 32 say “Varies” rather than giving a number. The guide does not attempt an industry-wide total, and smaller employers and non-traditional hirers are not included. What follows below is my own independent research, which found 20 employers — some overlapping with the guide, some not.

The IFoA publishes total membership (34,531 as at 2024/25, of whom 15,380 are students) but not how many new students register each year, or how many graduate positions employers collectively offer. Job boards count listings, not positions — and their numbers vary wildly depending on how broadly they define “actuarial graduate” (Glassdoor shows 13 in April 2026; LinkedIn shows 545 for ostensibly the same search).

So alongside the guide’s data, here is a verified, sourced snapshot of every employer I could independently confirm is running a graduate actuarial scheme for September 2026.

20 employers confirmed for September 2026

I checked career pages, graduate aggregators (Bright Network, Gradcracker, Prospects, StudySmarter), and specialist actuarial job boards. The following employers have confirmed September 2026 actuarial graduate schemes, verified from their own career pages or structured listings on aggregator sites.

Consultancies

Big 4

Insurers

Lloyd's market, banking, reinsurance & regulation

Additional employers visible on Bright Network but behind a login wall: Marsh, SCOR (x2 listings), and an additional L&G listing.

What about Lloyds Banking Group?

Lloyds Banking Group runs an actuarial graduate scheme offering £42,000 — the highest published starting salary of any scheme I found. However, their careers page currently shows "This opportunity is now closed for applications in 2025" and invites candidates to register interest. I could not confirm a 2026 intake has been announced. The scheme itself is notable for its 4-year duration and emphasis on Python, R, and Prophet alongside traditional actuarial work.

Source: Lloyds Banking Group careers

What do they pay?

Seven employers publish their starting salaries explicitly. The range is £28,332 (Vitality, Bournemouth) to £38,000 (Lloyd's of London, London).

For comparison, here is what the British Army pays new recruits (from the official Army careers page):

A graduate entering the Army as an officer earns £34,676 during training and £41,456 on commissioning — comparable to or above most actuarial graduate schemes, with the Army also providing free accommodation, healthcare, pension contributions, and 30 days' leave plus bank holidays. A non-graduate joining the Intelligence Corps reaches £34,083 as a Lance Corporal after Phase 2 training — more than some actuarial graduate starting salaries. And here is what a newly qualified teacher earns (from Get Into Teaching, GOV.UK, as at September 2025):

Teachers also receive a defined benefit pension with employer contributions of 28.6% — substantially more generous than most private sector pension schemes. A typical teacher reaches at least £45,352 after 5 years.

These comparisons matter: actuarial employers are competing for numerate graduates against a much wider market than just other actuarial firms.

For broader context, the Hays UK Salary & Recruiting Trends 2025 Guide (published via ActuarialCareers.co.uk) provides market averages for graduate actuaries by region and sector:

Source: Hays UK Salary & Recruiting Trends 2025 Guide (GI and Pensions); 2024 Guide (Life)

These are averages across the market, not specific to any employer. The London premium is significant — around £6,000–£11,000 above regional rates. Pensions consulting pays less at graduate level than insurance, though the gap narrows with seniority.

Every scheme I checked offers full IFoA exam sponsorship: paid study leave, exam fees, study materials, and tutorials. Several (Zurich, Beazley, WTW) explicitly offer salary increases with each exam passed.

What I missed — and what's still missing

My original version of this article claimed that no employer publishes graduate cohort sizes. That was wrong. The Actuarial Profession Guide, published annually for nearly 40 years, includes intake numbers for most of its 32 listed employers. I missed this definitive resource, and I’m grateful to Andrew Watcham FIA (Director and Scheme Actuary, Isio) for pointing it out.

What does remain genuinely difficult is constructing an industry-wide total. The guide covers 32 employers but the profession has many more — including the Big 4 (PwC, Deloitte, EY, KPMG), several Lloyd’s market firms, and specialist insurers, none of which appear in the guide’s directory. My research found 11 employers not in the guide. Neither source is complete.

Year-on-year comparison should be possible using previous editions of the guide, which have been published since 1988/89. I plan to source earlier editions and analyse how graduate intake numbers have changed over time — particularly whether AI adoption is affecting hiring volumes. That analysis will follow in a separate article.

The IFoA pipeline — what the admissions data tells us

The IFoA doesn't routinely publish annual student admissions data in an accessible format. Its Facts and Figures page shows total membership (34,531 as at 2024/25, of whom 15,380 are students) but these are stock figures — how many students exist at a point in time, not how many new students join each year.

However, the IFoA used to publish annual admissions figures in its annual reports, and did so again in its 2023/24 annual report. Here is the available time series:

This tells us that approximately 2,500–3,500 people registered as new IFoA students each year over the period covered. The 2023/24 figure of 3,088 is within the historical range — but that figure pre-dates the rapid advances in AI capability during 2024-2026. If AI is changing the volume or nature of graduate actuarial hiring, the effect would show up in 2024/25 and 2025/26 admissions data — which the IFoA has not yet published.

But new student admissions are not the same thing as UK graduate positions. The IFoA is a global qualification body — over half of its students are based outside the UK, with large student populations in Ireland, India, and elsewhere. Some of those international students will be working in actuarial roles locally; others may be studying independently.

In the UK, the standard route into the profession is a full-time paid graduate role with an actuarial employer. These are not academic studentships — they are salaried positions (£28,000–£38,000 as we've seen) where you work as an actuarial analyst or trainee consultant while studying for IFoA exams alongside the day job. Employers typically provide a study package: paid study leave (a set number of half-days per exam subject, up to an annual maximum), exam fees, tutorial courses, and study materials. Qualifying as a Fellow of the IFoA typically takes around 7 years for those who complete the process — and roughly half of those who start do not reach Fellowship (based on my own analysis of enriched IFoA qualifier data). This employer-sponsored model is so dominant in the UK that "actuarial student" and "trainee actuary in a paid role" are essentially synonymous.

One statistic underlines how far the IFoA student population is from the "graduate trainee" image. The IFoA's 2024/25 annual report gives the "average age" of its students as 34.9. That is a surprisingly high figure for a category that in the UK is dominated by people in their twenties working towards qualification. The IFoA does not define whether this is a mean or median, and does not break it down by region. If it is being driven by a large cohort of older international students — or by long-standing students who registered years ago and are still on the books — it would be helpful for the IFoA to explain the composition behind this number.

The 3,088 admissions figure therefore includes a mix of: UK graduates starting these employer-sponsored roles (which is what this article is about), international candidates in equivalent roles abroad, career changers entering the profession mid-career, and some university students registering early to gain exam exemptions. The number of UK graduate actuarial positions in any given year is some fraction of these total admissions, but nobody publishes what that fraction is.

This is a gap worth closing. Actuarial science graduates, career changers, and employers would all benefit from knowing the approximate size of the UK graduate actuarial job market. The IFoA, as the professional body, is best placed to publish this — ideally with a UK/international breakdown.

What the picture tells us

Even without hard numbers, the qualitative picture is clear:

All major employer categories are hiring. Big 4 (all four confirmed), consultancies (Aon, WTW, LCP, First Actuarial, Broadstone), insurers (Aviva, L&G, Phoenix, Zurich, Just, Vitality, Beazley), Lloyd's market (Lloyd's of London, Arch Capital), reinsurance (SCOR), banking (Lloyds Banking Group — probable but unconfirmed for 2026), and public sector (GAD, FCA). But "all the same employers are still running schemes" does not mean they are hiring the same number of people. Cohort sizes could be shrinking — particularly as AI tools take on more of the routine analytical work that graduate trainees have traditionally done — and we would have no way of knowing from public data.

Most schemes closed between October 2025 and February 2026. If you're reading this in April 2026 and haven't yet applied, the main recruitment cycle is over. A few positions remain open on a rolling basis (First Actuarial, LCP, Broadstone, Phoenix/Standard Life, Vitality). The lesson for students: applications for September 2027 schemes will likely open from September 2026.

Starting salaries cluster between £31,000 and £38,000 for most employers, with a clear London premium. Outliers at both ends: Vitality at £28,332 (Bournemouth) and Lloyd's of London at £38,000 (London). If Lloyds Banking Group's £42,000 is confirmed for a 2026 intake, it would be the highest by some margin.

Methodology and sources

This research was conducted on 4 April 2026 using a combination of direct employer career page checks, graduate aggregator searches (Bright Network, Gradcracker, Prospects.ac.uk, StudySmarter, ActuarialCareers.co.uk), and web searches. Salary data comes from either employer-stated figures on career pages or the Hays UK Salary & Recruiting Trends Guide (2024/2025 editions) published via ActuarialCareers.co.uk. IFoA membership data is from the IFoA Annual Report 2024/25; student admissions data is from the IFoA Annual Reports 2015/16 through 2018/19 and the 2023/24 Annual Report. All sources are linked inline.

I have not included employers where I could not independently verify a 2026 scheme from a primary or structured secondary source. Several employers (Mercer, Hymans Robertson, Barnett Waddingham, XPS Pensions) almost certainly run 2026 graduate schemes, but their career pages showed only generic programme descriptions without year-specific confirmation at the time of research.

If your employer runs a graduate actuarial scheme and is not listed here, I would welcome corrections — please contact me via INQA Group.

Update (6 April 2026): The primary resource I should have consulted is the Actuarial Profession Guide 2025/26 (37th edition, published by actuarialcareers.co.uk in partnership with the IFoA), which lists 32 employers with graduate intake numbers and locations. I was not aware of this guide when I published the original article.

Patrick Lee is the founder of INQA Group, a professional community helping actuaries leverage AI and modern tools. He qualified as a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries in 1990 and worked in actuarial consulting, pensions, and software development before founding INQA Group.