Suppose you were born on Jan. 1, 1960, and had an average annual income of $50,000. As of May 2023, you would get a monthly benefit of $1,386 if you filed for Social Security at 62; $1,980 at full retirement age (in this case, 67); or $2,455 at 70.
(It will settle at 67 for people born in 1960 or later.) If you can wait until 70 to start collecting, you'll receive your maximum monthly benefit. A single person born in 1968 who has averaged a $50,000 salary, for example, would get $1,410 a month by retiring at 62, the earliest age to start collecting.
This means their monthly Social Security benefit will be $1,886. If your work history shows that you had higher earnings in prior years, that could increase your benefit. Your spouse and children may also qualify for disability benefits of $900 a month.
If you earn $75,000 per year, you can expect to receive $2,358 per month -- or about $28,300 annually -- from Social Security.
You get 90% of the first $885 in average indexed monthly earnings. That works out to $796.50. Then, you get 32% of the amount up to $5,336 per month. In this example, that takes care of the remaining $2,448, and 32% of that amount is $783.36.
If you delay taking your benefits from your full retirement age up to age 70, your benefit amount will increase. If you start receiving benefits early, your benefits are reduced a small percent for each month before your full retirement age.
Therefore, if you retire at full retirement age, which is 66 and two months for someone turning 62 next year, then you'll get about $1,030 as your monthly benefit. Notice something important about the result. Social Security does a reasonably good job of replacing work income for low-income individuals.
We: Base Social Security benefits on your lifetime earnings. Adjust or “index” your actual earnings to account for changes in average wages since the year the earnings were received. Calculate your average indexed monthly earnings during the 35 years in which you earned the most.
The full retirement age is 66 if you were born from 1943 to 1954. The full retirement age increases gradually if you were born from 1955 to 1960 until it reaches 67. For anyone born 1960 or later, full retirement benefits are payable at age 67.
While you may have heard at some point that Social Security is no longer taxable after 70 or some other age, this isn't the case. In reality, Social Security is taxed at any age if your income exceeds a certain level.
Beneficiaries are currently searching for information on How Do I Receive the $16728 Social Security Bonus? Retirees can't actually receive any kind of “bonus.” Your lifetime earnings are the basis for a calculation that the Social Security Administration (SSA) uses to calculate how much benefits you will receive.
The maximum benefit depends on the age you retire. For example, if you retire at full retirement age in 2024, your maximum benefit would be $3,822. However, if you retire at age 62 in 2024, your maximum benefit would be $2,710. If you retire at age 70 in 2024, your maximum benefit would be $4,873.
If you have a personal my Social Security account, you can get an estimate of your future retirement benefits and see the effects of different retirement age scenarios. If you don't have a personal my Social Security account, create one at www.ssa.gov/myaccount.
Beginning with the month you reach full retirement age, your earnings no longer reduce your benefits, no matter how much you earn.
The Social Security disability five-year rule allows people to skip a required waiting period for receiving disability benefits if they had previously received disability benefits, stopped collecting those benefits and then became unable to work again within five years.
You can get Social Security retirement benefits and work at the same time. However, if you are younger than full retirement age and make more than the yearly earnings limit, we will reduce your benefits. Starting with the month you reach full retirement age, we will not reduce your benefits no matter how much you earn.
If you're younger than full retirement age, there is a limit to how much you can earn and still receive full Social Security benefits. If you're younger than full retirement age during all of 2024, we must deduct $1 from your benefits for each $2 you earn above $22,320.
"If you live to be older than the break-even age for having waited, you will have lost out on the higher payout you would have received by waiting. However, you simply cannot predict how long you will live, so we advise taking Social Security as soon as you stop working."
Assuming your full retirement age is 67, if you file for those retirement benefits at 62, you'll receive around 70% of your full retirement age benefit amount. If you file for disability and are awarded those benefits, the amount that you would receive would be 100% of your full retirement age benefit, even at 62.
Based on data from the SSA's Office of the Actuary, nearly 566,000 aged 62 retired-worker beneficiaries were receiving $1,274.87 as of Dec. 2022. Meanwhile, the average Social Security check for the 2.27 million retired workers at age 66 is $1,719.85.
Exactly how much in earnings do you need to get a $3,000 benefit? Well, you just need to have averaged about 70% of the taxable maximum. In our example case, that means that your earnings in 1983 were about $22,000 and increased every year to where they ended at about $100,000 at age 62.
As many millionaires and billionaires inherited their wealth and live off investment income, this means they don't pay Social Security taxes and are thus ineligible for retirement benefits unless they work and pay taxes that way.
Here's the starting benefit for each of those same final annual incomes, if you wait until age 70: Final pay of $80,000: benefit of $2,433 monthly, $29,196 yearly. Final pay of $100,000: benefit of $2,811 monthly, $33,737 yearly.