Social Security Claiming Factors: What the Registry Holds and What It Does Not

The Social Security rows in the facts registry are few on purpose. What is there is sourced to SSA's published formulas; what is not there is a scope statement, not an oversight.

Social Security is where financial content ages worst, because it mixes three kinds of facts: formulas that are permanent law, factors that depend on birth year, and rules that Congress occasionally deletes outright. The registry's approach is to hold a small, precisely scoped set of claiming factors, derive what can be derived from published formulas, and name everything else as out of scope. This piece is the tour.

The two rows

The registry holds two Social Security reference factors, both for a full retirement age of 67 — the FRA for anyone born in 1960 or later. Claiming at 62 yields 70 percent of the full benefit, sourced to SSA's "Effect of Early or Delayed Retirement." Delaying to 70 yields 124 percent, sourced to SSA's delayed-retirement-credits page. Both rows carry the same anatomy as every registry row — id, period, source, verification date — and both are pinned as FRA-67 reference endpoints.

Behind the reference values sit the general formulas, and since version 1.1.0 the social-security-timing model derives its factors from them rather than hard-coding endpoints: benefits are reduced five-ninths of one percent per month for the first thirty-six months claimed before FRA and five-twelfths of one percent per month beyond that, and delayed-retirement credits accrue at 8 percent per year from FRA to 70 for anyone born in 1943 or later. For FRA 67, those formulas produce exactly the 0.70 and 1.24 the registry rows state — the rows are the checkable anchors, the formulas are the computation.

At 62 (60 months early): 1 − (36 × 5/9 + 24 × 5/12)/100 = 0.70.  At 70 (36 months delayed): 1 + 3 × 8% = 1.24

What is deliberately not in the registry

The list of absences is the honest half of this piece. The registry does not hold the bend points — the dollar thresholds in the primary-insurance-amount formula that convert an earnings history into a benefit. It follows that no Worthune model computes a benefit from an earnings record; the models take the user's SSA-stated benefit as an input. The registry does not hold the earnings-test thresholds, spousal or survivor coordination rules, taxation-of-benefits thresholds, or the year-by-year FRA schedule for earlier birth cohorts. Each of those belongs to a benefit estimator with an actuarial scope — a different product with different data obligations, and SSA's own calculators already do it with the actual earnings record.

Why a short list beats a long one

The temptation for any registry is completeness, and completeness is exactly wrong here. A row is only worth holding if it can be sourced to a primary document, verified on a date, and consumed by something that cites it. The two claiming factors meet that bar: SSA publishes them, the timing model consumes them, and every timing answer's envelope cites them. Bend points would add rows that no shipping model reads — inventory that ages without anyone noticing, which is precisely the failure mode a registry exists to prevent. The scope statement does more work than the rows: a user who asks why the model will not estimate their benefit from their earnings history gets a real answer — that computation needs your earnings record, SSA has it and we do not, and here is what we do instead.

• ✓Use the registry factors for FRA-67 claiming comparisons — they are exact for birth years 1960 and later.
• ✓Bring your age-62 benefit estimate from your SSA statement — the model works upward from it in ratios, not earnings records.
• ✓For earlier birth cohorts, expect different factors — the FRA schedule is SSA's, not the registry's.
• ✓Treat WEP and GPO as repealed history in anything you publish or compute.
• ✓Read absence as scope — what the registry does not hold, no Worthune model silently invents.