I'm thinking about taking my career in a direction of SAS programming. i have an MS in math/statistics, and have passed a handful of actuarial exams.

I know that there are certification exams for SAS, are these sufficient to finding work? Are they actually helpful in what one would do as a SAS programmer?

My current work is heavy on administration, and it really isn't my strong point. I need some sort of mental stimulation to help me bring energy to my work.

I've done a fair amount of R programming, although I was all self taught, and wouldn't rate my proficiency that high in it.

Yes absolutely if you get expertise in SAS programming and have enough practice than defintely you can get a decent job. Certification will defintely help you land a job. I also did courses of web design from udemy and i got an entry level job.

How would a job in statistical programming rank against a job as a statistician?

SAS is just terrible. IDK how you would torture yourself with that. Learn MATLAB, R, Python, Octave, Stata, etc. Hell, I have more fun coding in Fortran than when I need to access something using SAS.

Ofc, if this is just about making money and the self-fulfillment aspect is secondary to that, go ahead and learn SAS. There are def jobs out there for people with math/stats/business administration background and a very solid grasp of SAS.

I would imagine most jobs in statistics require some sort of statistical programming.

Of course, there are exceptions. E.g., theory guys in academia. Guys in statistical bureaus and the relevant divisions of major financial institutions and certain non-profits which help construct new statistical measures and models but for whom statistics is just the auxiliary science.

But most stuff involves programming. For instance, I know many banks outsource the programming of the code which will ultimately be used "in production" on their servers. But the statisticians at the bank still need to be able to code for exploratory studies and such. They still code prototype models. Just the generation of the final production code is outsourced.