Financial · Live
Your golden years,
priced.
Estimate your monthly Social Security retirement check at every claim age from 62 to 70. We use the same PIA formula and bend points the SSA uses, paired with the official Full Retirement Age schedule, so the gap between an early and a delayed claim is laid out in dollars.
Inputs
Your earnings
- Full Retirement Age
- 67y
- Indexed monthly avg (AIME)
- $6,250
- PIA (benefit at FRA)
- $2,681
Estimated monthly check at age 67
At FRA · full
≈ $32,172/yr in benefits · Full Retirement Age is 67y for someone born in 1980
Over a 20-year retirement, waiting from 62 to 70 puts an extra $347,280 in your pocket, assuming you live long enough to collect it.
Claim age curve
Monthly benefit · age 62 → 70
Schedule
Benefit by claim age
- Claim at age 62
-30% vs FRA
$1,877/ month - Claim at age 63
-25% vs FRA
$2,011/ month - Claim at age 64
-20% vs FRA
$2,145/ month - Claim at age 65
-13.4% vs FRA
$2,323/ month - Claim at age 66
-6.7% vs FRA
$2,502/ month - Claim at age 67Picked
FRA · 100%
$2,681/ month - Claim at age 68
+8% vs FRA
$2,895/ month - Claim at age 69
+16% vs FRA
$3,110/ month - Claim at age 70
+24% vs FRA
$3,324/ month
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 2024 cap is $168,600; 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 for inflation each year. The 2024 PIA formula is:
+ 32% × max(0, min(AIME, $7,078) − $1,174)
+ 15% × max(0, AIME − $7,078)
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.
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 official quick-calculator agrees within rounding error with the numbers shown here for steady-earner profiles.
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 — the 2024 figures are used throughout.
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. Claim-age decisions should be coordinated with a qualified planner, especially for couples and for workers with non-covered employment.