I delayed drawing my SS until age 70. I have continued to work an would like to know if they will recalculate my 35 years to include my wages now. I earn. much more than some of the years they calculated my rate on. Hope you can help with this as I get different answers from SS. Thanks, Carol

Hi Carol. The short answer is yes, Social Security should recalculate your benefit rate whenever you earn more in a year than you did in one of your previous highest 35 years of wage-indexed earnings. Social Security retirement benefits are calculated based on the highest 35 years of a person's earnings, but it's the highest 35 wage-indexed earnings years that are used (https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10070.pdf). Wage-indexing converts a person's historical annual earnings to amounts more reflective of current day dollars. So, in order to increase your benefit rate you would need to earn more in a year than you did in one of your previous highest 35 highest wage-indexed earnings years, not the lowest of your actual earnings years.

Social Security automatically recomputes benefits to include higher years of earnings, but those recomputations are generally not done until the fall of the year following the year of the higher earnings. So, for example, if your earnings in 2021 were higher than one of your previous highest 35 years of wage-indexed earnings, then you could probably expect to actually receive the increase in the latter part of 2022. Any such increase would be retroactive to your payment for January 2022, though, so Social Security would make up any back pay due after they process the recomputation.

Best, Jerry