Geared toward people close to retirement age.
Claim early at 62 and checks start sooner but shrink to 70% for life. Wait until 70 and they grow to 124%. This finds your break-even ages and the claiming age that pays you the most over a lifetime.
Get the exact figure (a few minutes). Create or sign in at ssa.gov/myaccount for an estimate built from your real earnings record — or use SSA's Quick Calculator if you'd rather not open an account.
Want to explore first? Rough 2026 bookends at full retirement age: the average retired worker's check is about $2,000/mo; the maximum — for someone who earned near the wage cap for 35 years — is about $4,150/mo. Pick a number in between to play with, then replace it with your real one before you trust the result.
The benefit adjustment. Your FRA benefit is 100%. Claim earlier and it's reduced by 5/9 of 1% per month for the first 36 months early, then 5/12 of 1% for any month beyond that — so at 62 with an FRA of 67 you get 70%. Claim later and you earn delayed retirement credits of 2/3 of 1% per month (8% per year) up to age 70, which caps at 124%. These are the official SSA formulas.
Lifetime total, in today's dollars. For each claiming age, the calculator pays that monthly amount from the claim date until your plan-to age and sums it. Because the figures are in today's purchasing power, we assume Social Security's COLA keeps pace with inflation — so each check holds its value and the comparison comes down to the real trade-off: claiming later means fewer checks, but each is permanently larger. The chart shows where the bigger checks overtake the head start.
Break-even age is where a later claim's cumulative total catches and passes an earlier one. If you expect to live past the break-even, waiting wins; if not, claiming earlier does. In today's dollars this typically lands around the early 80s.
Waiting is also insurance. The "best" age here maximizes the total only if you live exactly to your plan-to age. Claiming later does something a spreadsheet can't fully capture: it buys a larger, inflation-protected check for the scenario where you live a long time and risk outliving your savings. That protection has value even when the raw math is close.
This tool covers a single individual's retirement benefit. It doesn't model spousal or survivor benefits, the earnings test if you keep working before FRA, or taxation of benefits — all of which can shift the answer. Treat it as a strong first cut, not the final word.