What If I Claim Social Security Early?

Claiming Social Security at 62 gets you guaranteed income sooner — but at a permanently smaller monthly check. Waiting until 70 does the opposite. This is one of the highest-stakes decisions in retirement, and RetireRange lets you test it directly instead of guessing.

New here? Build a baseline plan first with Getting Started. For the background on how benefits work, see Social Security.

The quick version

1. Set the claiming age earlier (e.g., 62) for the person you’re testing.
2. Save it as a named strategy — "Claim SS at 62."
3. Run Comparison against your baseline — and add a later claim (e.g., 70) too.

Step by step

1. Build the early-claim version. On the Household tab, set the claiming age earlier for the person you’re testing.

2. Save it as a named strategy (the Strategies button) — "Claim SS at 62."

3. Test the other direction too. Save a later-claim strategy (say, 70). Seeing early, baseline, and late together is far more useful than early-vs-baseline alone.

4. Run Comparison on the Compare tab. With Compare against baseline on (the default), your baseline anchors the chart; add your early- and late-claim strategies and they all run against the same market sequences. Load Baseline (⤺) returns you to your plan.

What to look at

• Success Rate — claiming early can actually help a portfolio early on, because guaranteed income means you withdraw less from investments in the vulnerable first years. Claiming late means leaning harder on the portfolio until the bigger checks start. Watch which effect wins for your numbers.
• Lifetime Social Security received — claiming late produces larger checks, so it tends to pay off more the longer you live. This is the longevity trade-off in numbers.
• The longevity question. Turn on mortality modeling and try different life expectancies. Early claiming tends to win if life is shorter; delaying tends to win if it’s longer.

Two things people miss

• Claiming early permanently shrinks the survivor benefit. For a married couple, when one spouse dies the survivor keeps the larger of the two benefits. If the higher earner claims early, they lock in a smaller benefit — and that smaller amount is what the survivor may live on for years. Model the surviving-spouse scenario before deciding.
• Your SSA estimate assumes you keep working. If you’ve already stopped, your actual benefit may be a little lower than the statement shows.

Let RetireRange find the best age

Rather than testing ages by hand, hand it to the Optimizer — it searches claiming ages (for one or both spouses) and ranks them by your goal, whether that’s success rate, lifetime income, or legacy.