SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION BALTIMORE, MD 21235-0001

SOCIAL SECURITY

Office of the Chief Actuary

March 31, 2020

The Honorable Kevin McCarthy

Minority Leader

United States House of Representatives

Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Minority Leader McCarthy:

This letter is in response to your request for estimates of the financial effects on Social Security 

of H.R. 5904, the “Clergy Act of 2020,” which you introduced on February 13, 2020. The 

estimates provided here reflect the intermediate assumptions of the 2019 Trustees Report.

Under current law, members of the clergy (any duly ordained, commissioned, or licensed 

minister of a church, a member of a religious order, or a Christian Science practitioner) have the 

option to exempt themselves from Social Security coverage. This exemption must be filed by the 

due date, including extensions, of the clergy member’s tax return for the second tax year in 

which they had at least $400 in net earnings from self-employment, any of which came from 

ministerial services. In order to obtain this exemption, members of the clergy must certify that 

they are conscientiously opposed to the acceptance of public insurance that makes payments in 

the event of death, disability, old age, or retirement, for services performed as a member of the 

clergy. 

This bill would allow members of the clergy who have been exempt a period in which they may 

revoke their exemption from Social Security coverage. Members of the clergy may apply to 

revoke their exemption at any time during the period that would start after the bill is passed and 

would end on the due date of the Federal income tax return for the applicant’s second taxable 

year beginning after December 31, 2020. Once the agreement to revoke an exemption from

Social Security coverage is effective, the revocation could not be reversed.

Information shared with us by the Joint Committee on Taxation indicates that about 2,000 Form 

4361 exemptions are accepted by the Internal Revenue Service each year. We roughly estimate 

that (1) there are about 40,000 members of the clergy in the United States who have exempted 

themselves from Social Security coverage, (2) average earnings for members of the clergy are 85 

percent of the national average wage index (AWI), and (3) 5 percent of the clergy members who 

are currently exempted from Social Security coverage would elect to revoke their exemption by 

tax year 2022.
Page 2 – The Honorable Kevin McCarthy

We estimate that enactment of this bill would have a negligible positive effect on the long-range 

OASDI actuarial balance (an increase of less than 0.005 percent of the 75-year present value of 

taxable payroll) and a negligible effect on each annual balance throughout the long-range period

(as a percentage of taxable payroll for each year). In the near term, we estimate that enactment of 

this bill would result in an increase in OASDI payroll tax revenue, totaling roughly $93 million

for calendar years 2022 through 2028.

Please let us know if we may be of any further assistance on this or any other matter related to 

Social Security.

Sincerely,

Stephen C. Goss, ASA, MAAA

Chief Actuary