Social Security

When you claim Social Security is one of the most consequential decisions in retirement — the gap between claiming at 62 and at 70 can be six figures over a lifetime, and for a couple it also shapes what the survivor lives on. RetireRange models it as a real, adjustable decision rather than a fixed number.

Entering your numbers

For each person, RetireRange needs the projected monthly benefit at:

• Age 62 (earliest, reduced),
• Full Retirement Age (FRA) (your full benefit), and
• Age 70 (maximum).

RetireRange interpolates every age in between. Your FRA depends on your birth year — it’s 67 for anyone born in 1960 or later — and RetireRange looks it up automatically from the birth date you entered.

Import Your SSA Statement — the Recommended Path

The fastest and least error-prone way to fill these in is to import the file straight from SSA. On the Household tab, each person’s Monthly SS Benefit Estimates section has an Import SSA statement (XML) button.

1. Sign in to your my Social Security account at ssa.gov.
2. Choose Download Your Statement Data, and pick the XML format.
3. Click Import SSA statement (XML) and select the file.

You’ll get a preview showing the name, birth date, FRA age, and the three benefit figures the file contains. Nothing changes until you click Accept and overwrite — which replaces that person’s name, birth date, and three estimate rows, and leaves everything else (retirement date, claiming age, mortality settings) untouched. If the file can’t be read, you’ll see a message saying so and can still type the numbers in by hand.

The file never leaves your computer. It’s parsed in your browser — nothing is uploaded, and RetireRange never receives it. Only the figures you accept go into your plan. Like the rest of your plan, they’re stored on our servers when you save a scenario or run an optimizer job. See the Privacy Policy for what’s stored and how to delete it.

Recompute From Your Earnings History

The estimates SSA prints are its projections, and they carry SSA’s assumption that you keep earning at your current rate right up until you claim. If you plan to stop working years before that — which is the whole point for most early retirees — those figures are too high.

The importer can fix that. Alongside the preview, pick Recompute PIA from earnings history and two fields appear:

• Stop earning at age — the year you turn this age is the first year with $0 earnings.
• Annual future earnings ($/yr) — what you assume you’ll earn each year between the statement’s last year and that stop age. Enter 0 to model "I’ve already stopped."

The recomputed benefits at 62, FRA, and 70 appear inline before you accept, so you can see the difference against SSA’s own numbers. Accepting writes the recomputed figures instead.

What it’s doing. It rebuilds your Primary Insurance Amount the way SSA does: your year-by-year FICA earnings from the file, wage-indexed and averaged over your top 35 years, then run through the bend-point formula for your eligibility year. Wage indexing uses the SSA National Average Wage Index series, with years beyond the published data projected at an assumed growth rate (3.5%/yr by default — the SSA Trustees’ intermediate assumption). Both are visible on the Reference Data tab.

Expect the numbers to differ — sometimes a lot. For an early retiree that’s the correct result, not an error: SSA’s bar chart assumes years of earnings you don’t plan to have. If fewer than 35 years contribute, an amber note tells you so, because SSA divides by 35 regardless and the empty years pull your average down.

Counting a part-time job. The recompute panel also has a checkbox: Count this person’s Other Income earned streams as covered earnings. It’s ticked by default when this person has Other Income streams marked Earned income and assigned to them. Any year a stream covers replaces the flat Annual future earnings figure for that year, and the panel tells you how many years and how much it counted. Self-employment counts at 92.35% of net profit, as it does on Schedule SE, and each year is capped at that year’s Social Security wage base. This is the only place a modeled job raises your benefit: if you enter your estimates by hand, it won’t change them.

Work between 62 and your claim counts. The recompute counts earnings through the year before the year you claim, the way SSA recomputes, so a part-time job you keep while waiting to claim at 67 raises your benefit. Those years come from your earned Other Income streams when the checkbox above is ticked, and otherwise from the flat Annual future earnings figure up to your stop age. Earnings after the year you claim aren’t counted, which is the conservative choice. (Before October 2026 the recompute stopped counting at 62.)

What it doesn’t model: the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset, the disability freeze on the indexing period, and death before age 60.

Entering the Numbers by Hand

You can always type the three figures straight off your paper or PDF statement instead. Everything works the same way afterwards — but the continued-earnings caveat is yours to manage: if you’ll stop working before you claim, trim the numbers accordingly.

How claiming age changes your benefit

The choice is permanent, and the swing is large:

There’s no benefit to waiting past 70. Longevity is the trade-off most people know about: delaying pays off the longer you live; claiming early pays off if life is shorter. But it isn’t the only one — what your portfolio does while you wait matters just as much, and that’s the part a benefit-only comparison misses. See below.

What delaying actually costs — and why waiting isn’t always best

Conventional advice says "delay if you can." RetireRange models the decision properly instead of assuming it, because delaying has a real, immediate cost that a benefit-only comparison hides.

Your withdrawal target is total household spending, and Social Security counts toward it — reducing what comes out of your accounts dollar for dollar (see Strategy tab). So during any year you delay, there’s no benefit offsetting your spending and the portfolio carries the entire load.

Example. You spend $8,000/month and would receive $3,000 from Social Security. Claim now and your accounts supply $5,000/month. Delay four years and they supply the full $8,000 — roughly $144,000 of extra withdrawals over those years, plus the growth those dollars would have earned.

That’s the case against waiting. The case for it is still strong: a permanently larger, inflation-adjusted, government-backed check, a bigger benefit protecting the survivor, and less of your plan riding on market returns. Delaying essentially buys longevity insurance using portfolio dollars.

Which side wins depends on your situation — genuinely:

• Portfolio size. A large portfolio absorbs the delay-years drawdown easily, so the bigger lifetime benefit tends to win. A tighter portfolio may not survive four years of unsupported withdrawals — especially in a bad market.
• Sequence risk. Delay years fall in early retirement, when a downturn does the most damage. Larger withdrawals into a falling market are the classic failure pattern — see Understanding your results.
• RMDs and later taxes. This one cuts for delaying, and it’s easy to miss. Spending down Traditional balances during the delay years shrinks the balance subject to RMDs later, which can mean lower forced income, a lower bracket, and less IRMAA exposure in your 70s and 80s. Claiming early preserves those balances — and the larger RMDs that come with them.
• Longevity and survivor needs. The longer you (or your surviving spouse) live, the more the bigger check compounds in your favor.

These pull in different directions, and the balance is specific to your numbers — which is exactly why it’s worth testing rather than assuming. Run it: what happens if I collect early? · let the Optimizer search claiming ages

Working while you collect: the earnings test

If you claim before your full retirement age and keep working, Social Security withholds part of your benefit. Many people believe that money is gone for good. It isn’t. At full retirement age, SSA permanently recalculates your benefit as though you had claimed later by the number of months it withheld. Over a normal lifespan, most of the withholding comes back. The test defers part of your benefit; it doesn’t take it away.

How the withholding works:

• Before the year you reach FRA: $1 of benefit is withheld for every $2 you earn above an annual exempt amount ($24,480 in 2026).
• In the year you reach FRA: $1 for every $3 above a higher amount ($65,160 in 2026), counting only what you earn before the month you reach FRA.
• From your FRA month on: no test, at any income.

RetireRange models both the withholding and the increase at full retirement age. A few details:

• Only earned income counts. That means wages and self-employment entered as Other Income marked Earned income. Pensions, annuities, rental income and portfolio withdrawals never count.
• Only your own earnings count against your own benefit. An earned stream assigned to Household names no earner, so it isn’t tested. Assign it to the person doing the work.
• The exempt amounts rise each year with national wages. The current values are on the Reference Data tab.

So working part-time isn’t by itself a reason to delay claiming. Model both versions and compare: What if I work part-time in early retirement?

For couples

• Spousal benefit. Each spouse receives the larger of their own benefit or up to 50% of the other spouse’s FRA benefit. RetireRange applies this automatically — you don’t configure it. Two things about it catch people out:

  • Delaying past your FRA adds nothing to a spousal benefit. Your own benefit grows about 8% a year for every year you wait past FRA, up to 70. A spousal benefit does not — it caps at 50% of your spouse’s FRA amount and earns no delayed credits. (Your own benefit keeps growing, though, and can eventually overtake the spousal amount — which is the calculation the model runs each month.)

  • Claiming it early costs more than claiming your own early. The reduction is steeper. If your spousal benefit starts when you are 62, and your FRA is 67, it works out to 32.5% of your spouse’s FRA amount, not 50%.

  • It can’t start until your spouse has filed. SSA pays no spousal benefit while the worker spouse hasn’t claimed, and RetireRange models that gate. So if you claim at 62 and your spouse delays to 70, you receive your own benefit for those eight years and the spousal top-up begins when they file — not before.

  • The reduction is set by your age when it begins, not when you claimed. This follows from the gate, and it cuts in your favor. Waiting on your spouse’s filing means the spousal benefit may start at or after your own FRA, in which case there’s no early-claiming reduction at all.

  Example. Your spouse has a $3,000 PIA, an FRA of 67, and delays to 70. You have no benefit of your own and claim at 62. You receive nothing in spousal terms until they file — at which point you’re 70, past your own FRA, and the benefit starts unreduced at $1,500/month (the full 50%).

  Because of this, a couple’s claiming-age results can move quite a lot when one of you delays substantially — which is exactly the pattern the claiming-age optimizer tends to favor for the higher earner. It’s worth re-running an older comparison rather than trusting one from memory.

• Survivor benefit. When one spouse dies, the survivor keeps the larger of the two benefits; the smaller one stops. This is why the higher earner’s claiming age matters so much: delaying locks in a bigger check that can support the survivor for years. RetireRange models the survivor benefit with the real SSA age-graded factor — from 71.5% at age 60 up to the full 100% at the survivor’s full retirement age — paid as the larger of the survivor’s own or the deceased’s benefit. Model it directly in what if my spouse dies first? and Surviving spouse.

Social Security and taxes

Up to 85% of your benefit can be subject to federal income tax, depending on your total income (RetireRange uses the IRS Pub 915 formula). Roughly, for a married couple filing jointly:

• Below about $32,000 of combined income (counting half your SS): none of your benefit is taxed.
• $32,000–$44,000: up to 50% becomes taxable.
• Above $44,000: up to 85% becomes taxable.

(Lower thresholds apply to single filers.) At higher retirement incomes, assume 85% of your benefit is taxable. See Taxes.

Important caveats

• A hand-entered SSA estimate assumes you keep working until you claim. If you retire earlier, your actual benefit may be lower, because those missing years drop out of your earnings record. Trim your entered estimates to reflect the earlier stop — or import your statement XML and use Recompute PIA from earnings history, which does that arithmetic properly from your actual record.
• The earnings test is the annual version only. SSA’s special monthly test for your first year of retirement isn’t modeled, so a mid-year retiree may see more withholding in that year than SSA would apply. More in Limitations.
• RetireRange doesn’t model future policy changes. It projects your stated benefit forward with inflation (or a Social Security COLA rate you set), and doesn’t attempt to predict legislative changes to the program. It does keep the model up to date with enacted law, though — we maintain tax brackets, IRMAA thresholds, RMD tables, and Social Security parameters as the rules actually change; what it won’t do is guess at reforms that haven’t passed.

How RetireRange helps you decide

Save scenarios for different claiming ages and compare them on the same market sequences, or hand the decision to the Social Security optimizer to search ages for one or both spouses and rank them by your goal. For how to read what comes back, see Understanding your results.