Spreadsheet
Social Security Claiming Calculator
Claim at 62 or wait until 70? The break-even is the wrong question, and this shows you why while answering it anyway.
Download the worksheet
Opens in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, and LibreOffice Calc. To use it in Google Sheets, upload the file to Drive and open it with Sheets.
What the claiming age is worth
Against a full retirement age of 67, from the statutory rules
- Benefit at 62
- 70% of full
- Benefit at 70
- 124% of full
- Ratio, 70 against 62
- 1.77x
Permanent in both directions. The schedule in the worksheet is computed from the reduction and credit rates rather than looked up, so it stays right as long as the rules do.
No dollar amounts, on purpose
Any benefit figure printed here would be wrong for you and out of date by next January. The formula is re-indexed annually and depends on thirty-five years of your own earnings record. So the worksheet asks you for one number, your primary insurance amount, which is on your statement at ssa.gov, and computes everything else from the rule structure.
That structure has been stable since 1983 and does not move with the cost-of-living adjustment. Claiming before full retirement age costs five ninths of one percent a month for the first thirty-six months and five twelfths of one percent a month beyond that. Claiming after it earns two thirds of one percent a month, stopping at seventy.
The discounting most calculators skip
A dollar at seventy-five is not a dollar at sixty-two, and a comparison that treats them as equal is not a comparison. Benefits are inflation-adjusted, so the right adjustment is a real discount rate, and the worksheet asks you for one. Set it to zero and you get the naive break-even that most calculators print. Set it to two percent and every crossover moves two to three years later. Set it to four and delay can stop paying altogether.
All three are defensible, which is the point. The break-even is not a fact about Social Security; it is a fact about your discount rate.
What is inside
- Schedule, the benefit at every claiming age from sixty-two to seventy, each cell computed from the statutory rates rather than read from a table.
- Break-even, cumulative benefits for your chosen pair of ages, year by year to age one hundred, discounted to sixty-two, with the crossover identified.
- Cheat sheet, the rules, the traps, and the published break-evens for the three standard comparisons.
Why the break-even is the wrong question
The Social Security actuaries state plainly that because the reduction factors and the delayed retirement credits are roughly actuarially fair, lifetime benefits are about the same for the average beneficiary regardless of claiming age. So the break-even is not a recommendation. It is a statement that the decision is nearly a wash in expectation.
What is not a wash is the risk, and the two risks are not symmetric. Dying early having claimed late is not a problem you will experience. Running short at ninety is. Claiming late raises the floor under a long life, and that is the argument, and it does not depend on a break-even calculation at all.
What it deliberately does not cover
Spousal and survivor benefits, which can dominate the decision for a married couple; the earnings test if you claim while still working; and the taxation of benefits, which depends on your other income. Each is real, each would need its own sheet, and each can change the answer. Treat this as the single-earner core of the decision rather than the whole of it.
One interaction worth planning for, because it is easy to waste. The years between retiring and claiming have to be funded from the portfolio, and those same years are the cheapest in a lifetime for Roth conversions. Delay and conversion compete for the same window. Decide them together.
Found an error, or think a calculation should work differently? Tell me. Corrections get published with a date attached, the same as they do for the research reports.