Exam P drew 8,735 candidates across its six sittings in 2022 and 13,182 across the same six in 2025, a rise of 50.9%. Exam FM rose 48.9% over the same window. Those two exams are the empirical core of the claim that career changers displaced by the tech downturn have refilled the entry-level pipeline. The dataset behind this site's exam pass-rate explorer carries every sitting of 74 CAS and SOA exams, some back to 2007, and it locates the surge precisely: at the shared prelims, at 2019 volumes, and thinning before MAS-I.
Half Again as Many Candidates, at 2019 Volumes
Neither prelim changed its number of sittings between those years, so the comparison runs like for like: half again as many people sat the entry pair in 2025 as in 2022. Exam P's 8,735 in 2022 was its lowest annual total in over a decade. Its 13,182 in 2025 lands at 94.5% of the 2018 figure and 99.8% of 2019's 13,213, while FM's 11,305 sits a fraction above its 2019 count of 11,267.
Both exams ran considerably hotter in the mid-2010s. Exam P cleared 18,296 candidates in 2013 and stayed above 15,000 through 2017, so three years of steep growth have retraced ground the profession last covered in the middle of the previous decade. Steep slope, familiar destination.
Exam P and Exam FM are the shared entry pair, and a candidate heading for Fellowship in either society sits both before anything else. Their volume therefore measures general interest in the profession, and it counts every student who takes a prelim and then goes somewhere else entirely. Commitment registers one exam later, at the first paper that requires a candidate to have picked a society.
Where the Climb Stops: MAS-I Per Sitting
MAS-I, the first CAS-only exam, went from 1,661 candidates in 2022 to 2,145 in 2025, an annual increase of 29.1%. The CAS ran three MAS-I sittings in 2025 against two in 2022, and per sitting the exam shed 13.9%. MAS-II, which also gained a third sitting, shed 5.7% per sitting. Exam 5 held at two sittings in both years and gained 21.3%, though its 2025 candidates cleared the prelims well before this surge began.
| Exam | 2022 candidates | 2025 candidates | Sittings | Annual change | Per-sitting change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exam P (shared entry) | 8,735 | 13,182 | 6 → 6 | +50.9% | +50.9% |
| Exam FM (shared entry) | 7,590 | 11,305 | 6 → 6 | +48.9% | +48.9% |
| CAS MAS-I | 1,661 | 2,145 | 2 → 3 | +29.1% | −13.9% |
| CAS MAS-II | 1,166 | 1,649 | 2 → 3 | +41.4% | −5.7% |
| CAS Exam 5 (upper level) | 1,440 | 1,747 | 2 → 2 | +21.3% | +21.3% |
Read as a funnel, the gateway grew by half while the first track-specific exam grew by 29.1%, a gap of nearly 22 percentage points on an annual basis, and thinned at every individual sitting. Some of that gap is transit time. A candidate who first sat Exam P in 2023 reaches MAS-I in 2025 or 2026, so a share of the arrivals counted here is still upstream, and the third sitting the CAS added in 2025 spreads whatever population does arrive across more dates by construction.
Two 2026 sittings are on the books for each prelim. Against the same two sittings a year earlier, Exam P is up 6.5% (4,480 against 4,207) and FM is flat at plus 0.7% (3,440 against 3,417). The climb has leveled off at the top of the funnel while the CAS end is still absorbing what already came through.
Pass Rates Held While Volume Recovered
A crowd of underprepared newcomers should drag pass rates down. In 2019, 13,213 candidates sat Exam P and 45.0% of them passed. In 2025, 13,182 sat it and 45.0% passed. The two years differ by 31 candidates and by two hundredths of a percentage point. These are aggregates computed across all six sittings in each year rather than figures the SOA publishes as annual totals, and the arithmetic is total passes over total candidates.
Exam P's raw pass rate peaked at 51.8% in 2020, its highest annual figure anywhere in the 2007 to 2025 record, on a cohort of 8,868. FM ran 53.8% that year against 48.6% in 2018. Small cohorts sitting through a disrupted testing period cleared both exams at rates neither had produced in ordinary conditions, and the volume recovery has since put both back on their 2019 marks.
Anyone treating a prelim pass rate as a planning input inherits a 6.8-point problem on Exam P. A hiring plan that budgets for some number of analysts clearing a prelim this year, a university program's advising, or a study-time estimate anchored to 2020's 51.8% will over-predict throughput against 2025's 45.0%. FM carries the only real crowding signal in the set, and it is modest: at essentially the 2019 volume it passed 44.7% against 48.5%, 3.8 points lower, well inside the swings CAS upper-level papers routinely produce under consistent-standard grading.
MAS-I moved the other way on both counts. Its raw pass rate ran 51.5% in 2022 and 45.2% in 2025, 6.3 points lower on a per-sitting cohort 13.9% smaller. A dilution story would put more candidates in the room and a smaller share through the door. MAS-I has fewer per sitting and a smaller share, which leaves the prelim surge with no visible footprint at the CAS entry point in either dimension.
The stability of that 45.0% is what complicates the headcount reading. A sitting is a registration, and Exam P failed 7,247 of its 13,182 candidates in 2025, many of whom appear again in a later total, so the annual count tracks the exam's own failure rate alongside genuine arrivals. A 50.9% rise in sittings therefore bounds the rise in distinct people rather than measuring it, and the bound loosens exactly when volume is climbing fastest. Every figure above counts attempts. Demand, which is where the complaint about the first job actually lives, leaves no trace anywhere in this dataset.