Women Get a Bigger Social Security Bump

The magic number is 35.

That’s how many years of earnings the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) uses to calculate every worker’s pension benefit.  But 35 years can be a tall order for the many boomer women who took time off or cut back on their hours to raise their children.  Nearly half of 62-year-old working women today didn’t make any money for at least one year in their earnings history on record with SSA.

But this also means they have more to gain financially than men from working longer, because each additional year of work substitutes for a zero- or low-earning year during motherhood in the benefit calculation, according to research by Matt Rutledge and John Lindner at the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog.

Beefing up one’s earnings record is actually one of the two ways that working longer raises monthly benefits.  The other, more familiar way is a benefit increase from delaying collecting Social Security.

Delaying claiming compresses the time period over which workers will receive benefits.  The resulting increase when they finally do start is known as Social Security’s “actuarial adjustment.”  Take the most extreme example: both men and women who begin their Social Security at age 70 receive 76 percent more per month from this adjustment than they would’ve gotten had they started at 62.

But it is women who generally gain much more from additional years in the labor force.

By working to 70, rather than retiring at 62, the average woman can increase her monthly Social Security check by 12 percent, the researchers found.  Adding this to the standard actuarial adjustment produces an 88-percent increase, from roughly $1,112 per month at 62 to $2,090 at age 70.

The earnings bump that 62-year-old men get from working to 70 is half as big – about 6 percent – because men typically already have had more years of higher earnings during their working lives.

A woman doesn’t have to work all the way to 70 either to benefit. Any period of delay will increase monthly benefits – and that will help.

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