Reaching survivor full retirement age unlocks the largest payment Social Security offers a widow or widower: 100 percent of what a late spouse’s own benefit would have been. Filing earlier, starting at the minimum age of 60, locks in a smaller share instead, one that starts at 71.5 percent and grows the longer filing is…

Social Security automatically withholds 50 percent of a monthly retirement, survivor or disability check once it decides a beneficiary was overpaid, and it keeps taking that share every month until the balance reaches zero. The same notice that sets the 50 percent withholding rate also opens a 30-day window, and a beneficiary who files an…

Auditors project that 4,347 surviving spouses already past age 70 have missed a combined $108.5 million in Social Security benefits because a required recalculation never happened, according to a March 2026 report from the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General. The estimate covers widow and widower beneficiaries whose payments should have grown to…

A required school form was missing from enough Social Security case files that the payments made without it reached $342 million over three years, according to a September 23, 2026 audit from the agency’s Office of the Inspector General. The missing document, Form SSA-1372, is supposed to confirm that an 18- or 19-year-old beneficiary is…

A surviving spouse received $1,826 a month in combined Social Security benefits well past age 70, an amount auditors say should have grown to $2,757 a month once delayed retirement credits were properly applied. The gap, worth $10,382 in benefits the beneficiary never received, appears in a March 2026 audit from the Social Security Administration’s…

One student’s Social Security file listed an expected graduation date of June 2022, a full year before that student actually finished high school in June 2023. The agency stopped the monthly benefit on schedule with the recorded date rather than the real one, underpaying the student $1,946 before the record was corrected. The case appears…

A teenager stopped attending high school in January 2023. The Social Security Administration did not catch the change for five months, continuing to send a student benefit check through June and creating a $9,330 overpayment by the time the agency finally closed the case. The example surfaced in a September 23, 2026 report from the…

A Supplemental Security Income recipient told the Social Security Administration about buying one vehicle in August 2019. Public vehicle records later showed the same person owned additional cars from October 2024 through September 2025, and once auditors added up what all of those vehicles were worth, the total pushed the recipient’s countable resources over SSI’s…

The Social Security Administration will charge $79 for certified yearly earnings totals on requests it receives on or after October 1, 2026, down from $96 under the schedule it set in 2024. The change appears in a Federal Register notice published September 21, which lowers the base charge for Form SSA-7050 earnings information from $61…

The Congressional Budget Office projects that Social Security’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund, which pays retirement and survivor benefits, will be exhausted in fiscal year 2032. The estimate comes from CBO’s 2026 Long-Term Projections for Social Security, released September 17, 2026, which also finds that the gap between the program’s outlays and revenues generally…