Your benefits
Enter each monthly benefit at full retirement age straight from your SSA statement (ssa.gov/myaccount). This tool models claiming age, not your earnings history.
Every claiming combination
Rows are spouse A's claiming age, columns spouse B's. Each cell is the household's lifetime total to your planning ages — click one to make it your plan. Toggle to see the same grid with every check invested instead of just counted.
The break-even chart
Spouse A claiming at 62, 67, and 70 (spouse B held at the chosen age). The raw view crosses near 80; flip to the invested view and watch the crossover move — that motion is the whole timing debate.
The survivor check
When the first spouse dies, the survivor keeps the larger of the two checks — so the higher earner's claiming age is also a decision about the survivor's income. Reduced checks and delayed credits both pass through.
Claiming while working
Before FRA the earnings test withholds checks — a timing trap, not a true loss, because the withheld months raise the benefit at FRA. After FRA there is no test, but each check stacks on wages and gets taxed at your working marginal rate.
Year-by-year table — show your work
How the math works
Your number comes from SSA, not from us
The engine starts from each spouse's monthly benefit at full retirement age (the primary insurance amount), typed in from your SSA statement. It does not recompute your earnings record — no bend points, no AIME, no top-35-years math. Get your number from ssa.gov/myaccount; this tool models what happens to it at different claiming ages.
The claiming arithmetic
Claiming early reduces the check by 5/9 of 1% for each of the first 36 months before FRA and 5/12 of 1% per month beyond — 70% of PIA at 62 with an FRA of 67. Waiting past FRA earns delayed retirement credits of 2/3 of 1% per month (8% a year), with nothing further after 70 — 124% at 70. FRA itself is 66 for those born 1943–54, rising two months per birth year through 1959, and 67 from 1960 on. All three schedules are source-reviewed against ssa.gov (2026-07-27) and sit next to the data in the shared tax module.
Spousal and survivor, simplified on purpose
Each spouse receives the larger of their own benefit and up to 50% of the other's PIA, with the spousal share reduced (25/36 of 1% per month, then 5/12) if taken before the claimer's own FRA and never increased by delayed credits. Deemed filing is assumed; the top-up starts once both have filed. At the first death — modeled at each spouse's planning age — the survivor keeps the larger of the two actual checks, delayed credits included. Not modeled: RIB-LIM widow-limit edge cases, survivor benefits claimed before the survivor's FRA, divorced-spouse rules.
The earnings test is a timing trap, not a tax
Claim before FRA while still working and SSA withholds $1 of benefit per $2 of wages over $24,480 (2026); in the calendar year you reach FRA the limit jumps to $65,160, the rate softens to $1 per $3, and only pre-FRA months count. From the FRA month the test vanishes. Crucially, the withheld months are handed back: at FRA the reduction factor is recalculated as if you had claimed that many months later, permanently raising the check. The working panel shows both halves — the withholding and the recomputation.
Taxes and the invested-checks alternative
Each year's benefit runs through the provisional-income formula (IRC §86, thresholds frozen in law — the tax torpedo) on top of wages and other income, using the shared 2026 federal tax module. The "invest the checks" view deposits each year's benefit — after the tax it causes, by default — at the start of the year and grows it at your chosen return. That is the intellectually honest version of "claim at 62 and invest it": the raw crossover near 80 moves later, often well past 90, once the early checks are actually compounding. It also assumes you invest every check and never spend one, which is the strongest possible case for claiming early.
Dollars and COLA
The default is today's-dollars mode: benefits, wages, limits, and brackets all stay in current purchasing power, which is the cleanest way to compare claiming ages. Setting a COLA switches everything to nominal dollars — benefits, wages, other income, earnings-test limits, and bracket indexing all inflate together, while the §86 thresholds stay frozen as the law freezes them. Pick one convention and read the table in it; mixing them is how claiming charts lie.
What this tool is not
Not modeled, on purpose: divorced-spouse and children's benefits, family maximums, disability, RIB-LIM survivor edge cases, state taxes, Medicare enrollment timing and IRMAA surcharges, and any future change to Social Security law or solvency. (WEP and GPO, the old government-pension offsets, were repealed by the Social Security Fairness Act of 2023 for benefits payable after December 2023 — older statements may still show reduced numbers.) Both spouses' benefits are assumed to start cleanly on the modeled birthday grid; SSA pays by exact month and this tool works in whole-year rows.
Where this connects
Claiming age is one lever in a bigger machine. Delaying Social Security widens the low-income years that the RMD & IRMAA Horizon calls the conversion window. Every extra dollar of benefit feeds the torpedo the Real Marginal Rate Explorer prices. And the survivor check computed here is exactly the number the Widow's Penalty Simulator asks you to type in — run them together: pick a claiming plan here, then see what it costs the survivor there.