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# Social Security

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## 

Office of the Chief Actuary

Detailed Calculator Home

## Social Security Benefit Calculator Description

Summary description

The Office of the Chief Actuary, Social Security Administration, produces a Social             Security Benefit Calculator. It produces the Social Security benefit for an             old-age, survivor, or disability claim, given the characteristics of a             particular worker (such as birth date, past earnings, and type of benefit). It             also produces the "primary insurance amount" (PIA), "maximum family benefit",             the actuarial reduction or increment factor (for early or delayed retirement),             and the monthly benefit amount (MBA).

Online calculator

          The Detailed Calculator is a comprehensive benefit calculator which is designed          to compute historical benefits as well as estimate future benefits.  It is somewhat          unwieldy and can be difficult to use.  If you are estimating a future retirement           benefit, you may wish to use our           Online Calculator first          because it is much easier to use. 

Detailed description

        There are two versions of the interactive calculator: one works on IBM PC's             and compatibles running recent versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system,            including Windows 10 and Windows 11.              It is possible that it may work on older versions of Windows, but we have             not been able to confirm this ourselves.	  The             other version runs under older versions of the Mac OS. 	  The benefit can be computed for either a new entitlement             or a recomputation after initial entitlement. Several pages of output are printed in the 	  application window, with summary results on the first page.            Later pages display details of the benefit computation.

The calculator can produce a benefit for any historical case from the first             Social Security benefit paid (1940). It can also produce a projected benefit,             based on standard or user-specified assumptions, through 2095.

Although we have tried to be as accurate as possible, this is not the same             calculator as is used for official Social Security calculations and it may             produce results that differ from an official calculation. In particular, for primary            benefits, we have made approximations for pre-1965 benefits and for the frozen minimum PIA,             and we only partially take account of disability non-exclusion computations and the              disability guarantee computation.  In addition, the calculator is not set up to estimate            dependent or survivor benefits where the dependent or survivor also receives benefits            based on their own record, or survivor benefits where the benefit is affected by            the worker's retired worker benefit prior to death.  Based on experience to date,             this calculator matches the official calculations very well, with most differences             due to late posting of earnings to the earnings record, or different assumptions             for projected benefits.

The 2024.1 version, which takes all amendments to the law, and             automatic adjustments, through 2023 into account, is now             available at this web site. It updates the 2023.2 version by updating the economic data with the new       automatic adjustments announced in the fall of 2023.

Special note for the Mac OS version

We now have a Mac OSX version of the Detailed Calculator.  It is functional but still under development.            It has all the basic features that the Windows version has, and produces the             same results for a given case. However, it is lacking the more advanced features             of the Windows version, such as context-sensitive help. We will update it as we             implement new features.

In addition, the Mac version does not work on Macs running Lion or newer	  versions of the OS X operating system.  We hope to produce a Mac version which will 	  work on newer versions of OS X, but we have very limited resources to devote to           that project at this time.

Questions or comments

If you have questions or comments about the Detailed Calculator, please visit our      Contact Social Security       page for ways to contact us.  Remember to use "Detailed Calculator" as the subject      so we know which calculator your question or comment refers to.

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