Your decision about when to claim Social Security is one of the most consequential financial choices you will make in retirement. You have an eight-year window to start benefits, but claiming at 62 (the earliest option) produces a very different outcome than claiming at 70 (the age at which delayed credits stop accruing). The gap between those two choices can amount to hundreds of dollars a month for the rest of your life.
For many people, full retirement age feels like the obvious default. Full retirement age, or FRA, is when you become eligible for your standard benefit, also called your primary insurance amount. Why not simply claim then?
When you dig into the details of benefit optimization, claiming at FRA often turns out to be less than ideal. Here is why.
When is your full retirement age for Social Security?
Your FRA depends on when you were born. Here’s when yours is based on your birth year:
For anyone born in 1960 or later, FRA is 67. That is two full years later than the age 65 threshold that applied to earlier generations. In 2026, the FRA milestone reaches 67 for all workers born in 1960 or later, completing a 42-year phase-in that began with the 1983 Social Security Amendments. Even so, waiting until 67 may still not be enough to get the most out of your benefit.
Why claiming Social Security at full retirement age may not be the right move
There’s a straightforward reason that claiming Social Security at your full retirement age isn’t the right move for many retirees.
Benefits continue growing even beyond FRA. Each month you wait to claim after your FRA, your monthly check rises by 2/3 of 1%. That increase accumulates every month until you turn 70, at which point no further delay adds any value.
That monthly rate translates to an 8% annual increase. Consider a retiree whose FRA benefit is $2,000 per month. Waiting three full years to claim at 70 produces a 24% boost, lifting that payment to $2,480. The extra $480 each month adds up to $5,760 more per year, and that higher base persists for life.
There is another compounding advantage. Social Security cost-of-living adjustments are applied to the full benefit amount, and the 2026 COLA is 2.8%. Because COLAs are calculated as a percentage, a larger base benefit produces larger dollar increases each year, widening the gap over time between someone who delayed and someone who claimed early.
Should you wait to claim your Social Security?
The real question is whether a delay will maximize the total benefits you collect over your lifetime. An extra $480 per month feels meaningful, but only matters if you live long enough to recoup the checks you skipped. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that more than 90% of Americans between the ages of 45 and 62 would optimize lifetime income by waiting until 70 to claim.
Why does delaying work out so well for so many people? The delayed retirement credit system was originally calibrated when life expectancies were shorter. It was designed to equalize total lifetime payouts regardless of whether a person claimed early or late. Longer life spans have tilted the math firmly in favor of those who wait, because they collect the higher benefit for more years than the original designers anticipated.
To figure out the right timing for your situation, calculate your break-even age. That is the point at which the higher monthly benefit from delaying overtakes the checks you gave up while waiting.
The math works like this:
- Calculate how much income you gave up by waiting: If your FRA benefit is $2,000 and you wait until 70, you forgo three years of $2,000 monthly checks, totaling $72,000.
- Calculate how much higher your delayed benefit is: A $2,000 FRA benefit grows to $2,480 at 70, generating $480 more per month.
- Find the break-even point: Divide $72,000 by $480 per month and you get 150 months, or 12.5 years beyond your claiming age of 70.
Someone who claims at 70 breaks even at roughly age 82 to 83. Given that many people do reach that age, a delay beyond FRA is often the better financial decision. Health, personal finances, and other individual factors still matter, of course. A financial advisor can walk you through a personalized analysis and help you decide which claiming age fits your circumstances.
Editor’s note: This article was updated to correct the NBER citation supporting the lifetime-income statistic (the relevant paper is NBER Working Paper 30675, not w34199), to reflect the 2026 COLA of 2.8% and the current average monthly Social Security benefit of $2,071, and to add context on the completion of the 42-year FRA phase-in to age 67 for workers born in 1960 or later.
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