Social Security Spousal Benefit Calculator (2026)

Who Can Claim a Spousal Benefit

A current spouse needs three things: a marriage of at least a year, an age of at least 62, and a worker who has already filed for their own benefit. That last one catches people out — you cannot claim on a record its owner has not opened, so a couple planning around this has to coordinate. A divorced spouse needs a marriage that lasted at least ten years, to be unmarried now, and to be 62. In exchange they get something a current spouse does not: after two years of divorce they can claim whether or not the ex has filed, which exists precisely so that a bitter ex cannot block the claim by refusing to retire.

Half the worker's full benefit, less any benefit of your own, reduced if you claim before your full retirement age

Why Waiting Past Full Retirement Age Is Wasted

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding about spousal benefits. A retirement benefit on your own record grows by 8% a year between full retirement age and 70 — that is the delayed retirement credit, and it is why waiting is so often good advice. A spousal benefit earns none of it. Half the worker's amount is the ceiling, reached exactly at your full retirement age, and it is the same figure at 68, at 69 and at 70. Somebody who waits three extra years for a spousal benefit gives up three years of payments and receives not one dollar more per month for it.

The corollary matters too. If you have a benefit of your own worth waiting for, delaying still helps that part — your own benefit keeps earning credits while the spousal top-up sits at its ceiling. So the right answer for a couple is rarely "both wait" or "both claim now": it usually depends on whose record is larger, and the household often does best when the higher earner delays and the lower earner does not.

If You Have a Work Record of Your Own

You do not choose. Filing for one is filing for both — the deemed filing rule — and Social Security pays your own benefit first, then adds the amount by which half the worker's figure exceeds your own. That addition is called the excess, and the two halves are reduced on their own separate schedules if you claim early: your own on the retirement schedule, the excess on the steeper spousal one.

The shorthand you will hear is "you get the higher of the two", and it is close enough at full retirement age but wrong before it. A claimant with a $600 benefit of their own and a spouse on $2,800, claiming at 62, gets $420 of their own plus $520 of excess — $940, not the $910 the shorthand gives. This page uses the excess method, which is what SSA actually does.

The Government Pension Offset Is Gone

For decades the Government Pension Offset cut a spousal benefit by two-thirds of any pension earned in work that did not pay Social Security tax. For a retired teacher, firefighter, police officer or federal employee under the old civil service system, it usually wiped the spousal benefit out entirely. The Social Security Fairness Act repealed it. The law was signed in January 2025 and applies to benefits payable from January 2024, so the money is not only going forward — back payments have been going out since.

Two things follow. If you never applied because you were told the offset would leave you nothing, apply — that advice is now out of date, and it was correct when it was given. And treat any calculator that still asks for your government pension with suspicion: this one does not ask, because the answer no longer changes anything.