If you qualify for the federal Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program, your payments are determined by a complex formula drawn from a number of factors about your work experience, income and age. By nature of this formula, you will always receive less than you earned, on average, over the years you worked — in some cases much less and in others up to 90 percent of what you used to make.
If you have an account with the Social Security Administration (SSA), you can see a detailed and more accurate calculation of your benefits on the SSA website. For a quick ballpark estimate of what someone in a position similar to yours might receive if approved for disability in 2018, try the calculator below.
How much might you receive from disability benefits, and would you qualify?
Fill out the three prompts below to estimate how much you might receive from SSDI and how that compares to what you currently earn.
Based on the information you entered, you probably would not qualify for disability benefits.
You have about 0 work credits, 6 fewer than the minimum needed for someone of your age to qualify. You would have to work 2 more years to earn enough credits to receive these benefits.
The figures in this calculator are ballpark estimates only. Read more about the methodology and data used.
How the calculator works
This calculator replicates SSA’s process of calculating SSDI payments.
This process includes determining elapsed years, computation years and average indexed monthly income (AIME) according to SSA’s guidelines. Those variables are then used in the SSA’s primary insurance amount (PIA) formula to calculate the benefit amount.
To avoid having you enter every year of your income, this calculator makes assumptions about past earnings. It assumes that you earned less money earlier on in your career because you had fewer skills and less experience and that later in your career your earnings grew more slowly.
This simulated wage growth and simplified formula provide only a ballpark disability payment estimate. They don’t take into account extenuating factors that can affect payments, such as years spent caring for a child instead of earning income. This calculator also doesn’t include some SSA provisions, like the “recency-of-work” test, which determines whether you’ve worked recently enough to qualify.
For a more detailed look at disability payments by income, try the SSA’s calculators or register for an account with SSA.
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