CAS Exam Results No Longer Name Passing Candidates

Beginning with the Fall 2025 administration, the CAS stopped publishing named lists of passing candidates. Exam-passing windows now appear in CAS Public Directory profiles only for candidates who choose to make them public. The aggregate statistics continue: Fall 2025 saw 383 of 847 MAS-I candidates pass, a 45.2% raw ratio. The default moved from public to private, and that changes what can be counted.

Key Takeaways

• 383 of 847 MAS-I candidates passed in Fall 2025, a 45.2% raw pass ratio, and that full-population figure is still published even though the names behind it are not.
• The default flipped. A candidate previously appeared on the passing list regardless of preference and had to contact the CAS to opt out; now a passing window appears only if the candidate affirmatively enables public visibility.
• Directory counts measure self-selection, not pass volume. Candidates who make profiles public skew toward active job searchers and earlier career stages, so any directory-based count understates the pool by an amount that varies with the cycle.
• MAS-I's effective pass rate is 58.6% across 15 sittings since May 2018 against a per-sitting average nearer 45%, a 13-point spread the named lists never made visible.
• The verification tool covers candidates who sat an exam within the last two years. That boundary always existed; the passing lists were what covered the gap around it.

What Ended and What Replaced It

The passing lists were published under Exam Results within days of each release, naming individual passers by exam and sitting. Recruiters used them as the fastest route to candidates who had just cleared a milestone, at the moment those candidates are most open to outreach. Employers used them as a quick first-pass check on a claimed result. Analysts used them as an ad hoc census of the pool at each exam.

The replacement is the CAS Public Directory, where a passing window tied to the sitting appears for candidates who have enabled public visibility. It shows the administration period rather than a precise date, and it carries no score or rank.

The substantive change is the direction of the friction. Under the old system a candidate appeared whether or not they wanted to, and opting out meant contacting the CAS office. Under the new one, an exam pass generates no public footprint unless the candidate creates it. For someone navigating an internal transition, or at a firm with strict confidentiality norms around job searches, that is a default they no longer have to override.

What Can Still Be Counted, and What Cannot

Counting public directory profiles measures a self-selected subset. Candidates who make profiles public are more likely to be actively searching, earlier in their careers where visibility pays, and engaged with professional associations in ways that themselves correlate with exam performance. Candidates secure in senior roles, or who finished the pathway years ago, have little structural reason to maintain visibility.

So a count of MAS-I passing windows in the directory measures how many recent passers chose visibility, not how many passed. The two diverge in a direction that understates the pool, by a margin that varies with career stage, firm type and economic cycle in ways no adjustment recovers.

The aggregate statistics carry no such filter.

Recent CAS MAS-I Sittings: Candidates and Pass Rates

Sitting	Candidates	Raw Pass Rate
Fall 2025	847	45.2%
August 2025	446	50.0%
May 2025	852	42.6%
May 2024	932	55.3%
Effective rate (15 sittings, May 2018–present)	–	58.6%

Those are full-population counts, published per sitting with candidate counts, passer counts, raw ratios and effective ratios, in files covering every exam from 2011 to the present. Every CAS exam's sitting-by-sitting history is charted in our exam pass-rate explorer.

The aggregate data is also more analytically useful than the names ever were. A list told you which individuals cleared a sitting. It could not tell you whether they had attempted the exam before, what else they were carrying, or where they sat in the pipeline.

The clearest example is the raw-to-effective spread: MAS-I's effective rate is 58.6% across 15 sittings since May 2018 (Actuarial Lookup) against a per-sitting average nearer 45%. That 13-point gap is the repeat-attempt cohort that eventually passes, and a named list could never separate it, because a list of passers mixes first-time and repeat successes with no way to tell them apart.

Verification Is Where the Gap Actually Sits

The Verify Candidate's Exam Status tool remains the authoritative route for employers, and its scope is stated plainly: most active CAS candidates, meaning those who have taken an examination within the last two years.

That boundary is not new. What changed is that the passing lists used to cover around it. A candidate who passed Exam 7 three years ago and has not sat an exam since does not appear in the active-candidate search, so confirming that credit now means checking the member directory for ACAS or FCAS conferral or contacting the CAS office directly. For most hiring situations the gap is theoretical. It is real for a mid-career hire whose ACAS has not been conferred and whose relevant sitting was more than two years back.

Name collisions compound it. Where a search returns multiple results, the CAS requires direct contact with the office rather than returning an unverified match, so verifying a common-named senior candidate can require a formal inquiry regardless of the tool's availability.

The PCPA makes the calendar problem concrete. Mandatory for ACAS candidates as of January 2026, it pairs a two-hour Pearson VUE exam at $300 per attempt with a 15-day independent modeling project through The Institutes at $700 per attempt on a quarterly cycle, roughly 20 hours of work.

The two components produce separate results on different timelines, and the project arrives on a rolling quarterly basis rather than in a batch. With MAS-I and MAS-II moving to four annual sittings in 2026 and Exams 8 and 9 going twice-yearly, a partial record, exam passed and project pending, is now a common state that a profile search does not clearly display.