Personal Finance

Is 2025 Your Year to Claim Social Security? Ask Yourself These Questions to Decide

Christy Bieber

Published: January 13, 2025 9:22 am

Are you thinking about claiming Social Security this year? You don’t want to rush into filing for your benefits, as they are an important income source. The decisions you make can affect how much money you get for the rest of your life, so you need to be 100% sure you’re ready.

To determine if 2025 is your year to file, there are three key questions you need to ask yourself. Here’s what they are.

1. Do you have a 35-year work history?

Before making your benefits claim this year, it’s worth reviewing your career history. Specifically, you’ll want to see if you’ve worked for at least 35 years. That’s because of how the Social Security benefits formula works.

Although most people only need a 10-year work history to qualify for benefits, your payment amount is calculated based on average wages in the 35 years when you earned the most money. If you work less than 35 years, this formula does not change. So, for example, if you work only 25 years, you have 10 years of $0 wages that are factored into the average wages your benefit is based on.

The more years of $0 wages included, the lower your average wages and the more you shrink your benefits. Ideally, you’ll want to avoid this outcome and be sure you work for at least 35 years. Many people will actually want their careers to last a little longer. That’s because your salary often goes up over time. If you make more now and put in an extra year or two on the job, you can push out some of your lower-earning years from your benefit calculation.

At a minimum, though, you should aim to get that 35 years under your belt unless you want a smaller Social Security check than you could otherwise get.

2. How much will your benefit be?

The next big thing to look at is how big your benefits will be if you claim this year. There are two reasons for that:

1. You need to make sure it’s enough to provide the income you need
2. You’ll want to understand how claiming in 2025 affects your monthly benefit

When you find out how much you earn from Social Security, you may be surprised to learn that it’s not nearly as much as you’d think. Benefits are only meant to replace 40% of pre-retirement earnings, so they won’t offer you enough to live comfortably. If you aren’t aware of this, it could come as a shock — and you don’t want to find out too late that your Social Security checks are smaller than you need them to be.

As for the second point, you should know that you can claim benefits any time between the ages of 62 and 70. However, you must claim at your full retirement age to get your standard benefit. FRA is:

• 67 if you were born in 1960 or later
• 66 and 10 months if you were born in 1959
• 66 and 8 months if you were born in 1958
• 66 and 6 months if you were born in 1957
• 66 and 4 months if you were born in 1956
• 66 and 2 months if you were born in 1955
• 66 if you were born in 1943 – 1954

Any month you claim before FRA reduces benefits and any month you claim after shrinks them.

If you visit mySocialSecurity.gov, you can see your exact benefit amount if you claim in 2025, based on how old you’ll be when you start receiving checks. If you find out that you’re shrinking your benefit, you’ll need to decide if you’re OK with that or if you’d rather wait to claim.

3. Do you have other income sources to support yourself?

Finally, the last big thing to think about is where your other income will come from.

If you were planning on working while collecting Social Security and you haven’t yet reached FRA, you can only earn so much before your benefit checks are reduced so be sure you know the work rules. If you’ve reached FRA, you can work as much as you want.

If you aren’t planning on bringing in income from a job, be sure you have enough income from a pension or from your retirement account at a safe withdrawal rate. If you don’t have supplementary funds, then 2025 is not your year to claim benefits.

By asking yourself these three questions, you can decide whether starting Social Security this year makes good sense or not. It’s far better to find out before you claim benefits that you aren’t ready after all.