Your golden years,
priced.

Field guide

How a Social Security estimate actually works.

Social Security retirement benefits look opaque from the outside, but underneath they are a tidy three-step formula. Your earnings history is averaged into a single monthly figure, that figure is run through a bracketed formula that produces your Primary Insurance Amount, and finally your claim age applies a discount or a bonus depending on whether you start checks before or after your Full Retirement Age. Every dial in the chart above is one of those three knobs.

Step 1 · From salary to AIME

SSA tracks your top 35 years of taxable earnings, indexes each one for wage inflation, and divides the total by 420 (35 years × 12 months). The result is your Average Indexed Monthly Earnings, or AIME.

Anything above the annual Social Security wage base is invisible to the formula, both for the tax you pay and the benefit you accrue. The cap is $184,500 for 2026 and $192,300 for 2027; income above that line is simply trimmed away. This calculator approximates AIME from your current salary, capped at the wage base; it's the figure you'd converge on if you stayed at this real income for the rest of your career.

Step 2 · From AIME to PIA via bend points

PIA is built from three slices of your AIME, each multiplied by a different factor. The boundaries are called bend points and adjust with average wages each year. The PIA formula is:

B1 and B2 are $1,286 and $7,749 for 2026, and $1,340 and $8,077 for 2027. SSA locks in the bend points by the year a worker first becomes eligible (turns 62), so the year toggle in the calculator is a today's-dollars stand-in, not a forecast of the points that will apply to you.

The first slice is heavily favored. That 90% factor is why lower earners replace a much higher fraction of their working income than higher earners. By the time AIME crosses the second bend point, every additional dollar of AIME only adds 15¢ to the monthly check.

Step 3 · Full Retirement Age

Your Full Retirement Age (FRA) is the age at which you collect 100% of your PIA. It depends entirely on the year you were born; Congress raised it on a sliding scale in the 1983 amendments to keep the program solvent as life expectancy climbed.

• 1937 or earlier: FRA is 65
• 1938 → 1942: FRA slides 65y 2m → 65y 10m, in 2-month steps
• 1943 → 1954: FRA is 66
• 1955 → 1959: FRA slides 66y 2m → 66y 10m, in 2-month steps
• 1960 or later: FRA is 67

FRA is the pivot. Claim before it and your benefit shrinks for life; claim after it and it grows. The check you start on never gets re-priced, only annual cost-of-living adjustments move it from there.

Step 4 · The early-vs-delayed adjustment

Early retirement (62 to FRA). SSA reduces your benefit by 5⁄9 of 1% for each of the first 36 months you claim before FRA, then by 5⁄12 of 1% per month beyond that. For someone with a 67 FRA who claims at 62, that's a permanent 30% haircut.

Delayed retirement (FRA to 70). For workers born in 1943 or later, SSA awards delayed retirement credits of 8% per year — or 2⁄3 of 1% per month — up to age 70. After 70 the credits stop, so there's no benefit to delaying further.

The combined swing is dramatic: a 67-FRA worker who claims at 70 collects roughly 76% more per month than the same worker who claims at 62 — for life.

2026 and 2027 figures at a glance

SSA announced the 2027 figures on October 14, 2026. They take effect on January 1, 2027; the 2026 figures stay in force until then.

• Wage base: $184,500 in 2026, $192,300 in 2027
• PIA bend points: $1,286 and $7,749 in 2026, $1,340 and $8,077 in 2027
• Cost-of-living adjustment: 2.8% for 2026, 3.6% for 2027
• Earnings limit (not modeled here): $24,480 in 2026 and $25,560 in 2027 before full retirement age; $65,160 and $67,920 in the year you reach it

So when should you actually claim?

The break-even point, where the larger delayed check overtakes the cumulative head start of the early check, typically lands in the late 70s. If you expect to live well past that and you don't urgently need the income, delaying generally wins. If you don't, or if you have other reasons to start early (health, a spouse's claiming strategy, debt service), the smaller check now can be the better call. SSA's own calculators work from your real earnings record, so expect differences from the steady-salary shortcut used here.

What this calculator does not do

• It does not pull your actual SSA earnings record. Real PIA uses your top 35 indexed years; we approximate from one salary.
• It does not compute spousal, survivor, or disability benefits.
• It does not apply the windfall elimination provision (WEP) or government-pension offset (GPO) that affect some public-sector workers.
• It does not project future bend-point inflation or wage-base changes. Only SSA's published 2026 and 2027 figures are used, whichever year you select.
• It does not apply the retirement earnings test, which can withhold benefits if you claim before full retirement age and keep working. See the Social Security Earnings Test Calculator.

For an authoritative figure tied to your real earnings record, sign in at ssa.gov/myaccount. The math here is the same, only the inputs differ.

Disclaimer

This estimator is for educational planning. It is not financial advice and is not affiliated with the U.S. Social Security Administration. It uses SSA's published 2026 or 2027 wage base and bend points, not your actual earnings record. Claim-age decisions should be coordinated with a qualified planner, especially for couples and for workers with non-covered employment.