The Social Security Check-Up Most Women Skip: Fix Your Earnings Record Now

Social Security does not look at your career and decide what you deserve. It takes a list of your earnings, one line per year, adjusts the older years for wage growth, keeps the 35 highest, and runs a formula on the average. A year with nothing on its line counts as a zero, and nobody ever asks you to proofread that list before the formula uses it. October is a sensible month to do it, because on Wednesday, October 14, the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes September inflation data, and the Social Security Administration (SSA) is expected to announce the 2027 cost-of-living adjustment the same day. The 2026 increase was 2.8 percent, and the coverage of the next one will treat the percentage as the whole story. But a percentage applied to a number built from a faulty record is still a faulty number, and the evidence you need to fix it is probably sitting in a drawer in your house.

How One Blank Year Becomes a Smaller Check

The SSA explains its method in a one-page publication: it indexes your highest 35 years of earnings, and if you have some years of no earnings or low earnings, your benefit "may be lower than if you'd worked steadily." That "may" hides real money, so here is a hypothetical built on the 2026 formula figures the SSA publishes for people who turn 62 this year. Picture a worker whose indexed earnings average $6,000 a month across 35 full working years. At full retirement age the formula pays 90 percent of the first $1,286 of that average, 32 percent of the amount between $1,286 and $7,749, and 15 percent of anything above, which comes to about $2,665 a month. Give the same worker only 30 years of earnings and five zeros, and her 35-year average falls to $5,142, which the formula turns into about $2,391. That is roughly $275 less every month, or about $3,300 a year, for as long as she collects, and every future cost-of-living increase is applied on top of the smaller figure.

This is an illustration, not a forecast: it assumes identical indexed earnings in every working year and rounds down the way the formula does. Your own estimate lives in your SSA account, calculated from your real record. The middle row is the one to study. Each full-earning year that replaces a zero adds about $55 a month in this example, which explains why a few extra years of work can repair a thin record, and why an error that quietly deletes a year you actually worked costs about the same amount in the other direction. The catch is that the formula only counts your top 35, so if you already have more than 35 years of earnings, a missing teenage summer job probably changes nothing at all.

Why This Lands Harder on Women

Women are the majority of the people Social Security pays, and their average retirement check is still smaller.

The SSA's figures for December 2024 show that women made up 55 percent of adult beneficiaries, and that the average retired-worker benefit was $1,780 for women against $2,181 for men. The agency's own publication for women gives the reasons: women tend to live longer (a 65-year-old woman can expect to live to about 87, a 65-year-old man to about 84), they often have lower lifetime earnings, and they may reach retirement with smaller pensions and other assets. Time spent out of the workforce raising children or looking after parents feeds the second reason directly, because those years may leave nothing on the line for the formula to count. A longer life on a smaller monthly check means the shortfall compounds across more years, so the one input you can still correct is worth half an hour of your attention.

The same data show another side. Women collecting on a spouse's or late spouse's record averaged more than men in the same categories: $949 as spouses of retired workers against $645 for men, and $1,843 as widows against $1,616 for widowers. Leaning on someone else's record only works while the marriage and that record hold up, though. A divorced woman can qualify on an ex-spouse's work history only if the marriage lasted 10 years or longer and she is unmarried, so a marriage that ended after nine years gives you no claim on his record, and your own earnings history has to carry everything.

Where a Record Goes Wrong

The SSA builds your record from the W-2 your employer files and, if you work for yourself, from the tax return you send the IRS, so every error enters through one of those two doors. These are the ones worth looking for, though the list is not exhaustive.

• A name that no longer matches. If you changed your name at marriage or divorce and never updated your Social Security card, the name and number on your employer's W-2 may not agree with the SSA's files, and the agency warns that it may then fail to record your earnings properly.
• Freelance income that never reached Schedule SE. Net self-employment earnings of $400 or more have to be reported there, and income that stays off the return can stay off your record.
• An employer report with the wrong amount, or no report at all, which is among the situations the SSA says it will correct when you show proof.
• Earnings you never made. A record that lists work you did not do is a warning sign for identity misuse, and the SSA lists reviewing your earnings history among the ways to protect yourself.

Credits deserve a sentence of their own, because freelancers lose them quietly. In 2026, each $1,890 of covered earnings buys one credit, and nobody can earn more than four in a year, so $7,560 fills the year. Retirement benefits generally require 40 credits, which the SSA describes as usually 10 years of work. A freelancer who nets $5,000 this year earns two credits if the income is reported and zero if it never makes it onto Schedule SE.

The 30-Minute Check

1. Create a my Social Security account at ssa.gov/myaccount. You must be 18 or older, and the SSA lets you sign in through Login.gov (email address, government-issued photo ID, phone number) or ID.me (email address, photo ID, and a device with a camera).
2. Open your Social Security Statement and find the earnings record, the year-by-year list of what the SSA has on file for you.
3. Lay your old W-2s and tax returns beside it and compare each year, starting with the years you changed jobs, changed your name, or worked for yourself.
4. Expect 2026 to be missing, since employers send W-2s after the year ends.
5. If a year is wrong or absent, request a correction through your account where the option appears, or call 1-800-772-1213 (TTY 1-800-325-0778) with your W-2s and pay stubs in hand.

The clock matters here. The SSA generally corrects a record for three years, three months and 15 days after the end of the year the wages were paid, which means the window for 2023 earnings closes on April 15, 2027, and the window for 2022 earnings closed on April 15, 2026. After the deadline the SSA can still fix errors to match the tax returns you filed with the IRS, along with a few other situations, which is the best reason to keep every return and W-2 you can find long after the shoebox starts to feel silly. Phone lines are the other practical obstacle. The SSA's own advice is that it is less busy later in the week and later in the month, and Thursday, October 29 fits both.

What a Clean Record Lets You Decide

Once the record is right, the same account shows estimates for starting benefits at different ages, and that is where the real choices begin. For anyone born in 1960 or later, full retirement age is 67. Claiming at 62 cuts the monthly benefit by 30 percent, so a $1,000 benefit becomes $700, while each year you wait beyond 67 adds 8 percent until the increase stops at 70. Because the reduction is permanent and women live longer on average, the cost of claiming early grows with every extra year you collect. Run the 62, 67 and 70 estimates side by side before you file, and treat 62 as an exception that needs a reason, such as a health problem, a layoff, or a spouse's larger benefit waiting its turn. The SSA's tools cannot see your health, your marriage or your other savings, so these are questions to answer for yourself, not rules.

If you are widowed, survivor benefits can begin as early as age 60 (50 if you have a disability), and the SSA says people who also have their own work record have options worth discussing with a representative before filing for either one. Divorce works the same way: if your marriage lasted at least 10 years, ask about your ex-spouse's record too, because the SSA says many people qualify for a higher benefit on it, especially when the ex-spouse has died.

Then there is the worry that sits behind all of this. The 2026 Trustees Report projects that the combined retirement and disability trust funds can pay all scheduled benefits until 2034, after which incoming revenue would cover 83 percent of them. The retirement-and-survivors fund on its own is projected to run out in the fourth quarter of 2032, with 78 percent payable. Those are projections that Congress can change, and neither figure says benefits drop to zero. If anything, a benefit that may someday be smaller than scheduled is a stronger reason to confirm that the record it is calculated from is complete.

The COLA headline will be forgotten by the weekend. Your earnings record stays on file, and if a year is missing from it, you will be the only person who ever notices.