2025 Annual Report of the SSI Program

II. Highlights

The SSI program is a nationwide Federal assistance program administered by SSA that guarantees a minimum level of income for aged, blind, or disabled individuals. This section presents highlights of recent SSI program experience, a summary of important legislative changes to the program in the last year, a discussion of current issues facing the SSI program, and a summary of the key results from the 25-year projections.

A. Recent Program Experience

SSI program experience during the past year included the following:

•

During calendar year 2024, 1.38 million individuals applied for SSI benefits based on blindness or disability, an increase of 3 percent as compared to the 1.35 million who applied in 2023. Additionally, about 163,000 individuals applied for SSI benefits based on age, an increase of 1 percent as compared to the roughly 160,000 who applied in 2023. In 2024, about 655,000 applicants became new recipients of SSI benefits, an increase of 16 percent as compared to the roughly 566,000 who became new recipients in 2023.

•

Each month on average during calendar year 2024, 7.3 million individuals received Federal SSI benefits. This group was composed of 1.1 million aged recipients and 6.2 million blind or disabled recipients, of which about 62,000 were blind. Of these 6.2 million blind or disabled recipients, 1.0 million were under age 18, and 1.2 million were aged 65 or older. During calendar year 2024, 8.1 million aged, blind, or disabled individuals received Federal SSI benefits for at least 1 month.

•	Federal expenditures for payments under the SSI program in calendar year 2024 totaled $63.1 billion, an increase from $60.8 billion in 2023.

•

Each month on average during calendar year 2024, 1.3 million individuals received federally administered State supplementation payments. This group was composed of approximately 399,000 aged recipients and approximately 927,000 blind or disabled recipients, of which about 16,000 were blind. Of these approximately 927,000 blind or disabled recipients, about 108,000 were under age 18, and about 275,000 were aged 65 or older. During calendar year 2024, 1.5 million aged, blind, or disabled individuals received State supplementation payments for at least 1 month.

•	State expenditures for federally administered State supplements, excluding fees for Federal administration, totaled $3.4 billion in calendar year 2024, an increase from $3.2 billion in 2023.

•	The cost SSA incurred to administer the SSI program in FY 2024 was $4.6 billion, which was roughly 8 percent of total federally administered SSI expenditures.1

•	In January 2025, 7.4 million individuals received federally administered monthly SSI benefits averaging $714. Of these, 7.3 million received monthly Federal SSI payments averaging $688, and 1.3 million received monthly State supplementation payments averaging $213.

B. SSI Legislation Since The 2024 Annual Report

Since we submitted the 2024 Annual Report of the Supplemental Security Income Program to the President and Congress on May 30, 2024, there have been no legislative changes made to the SSI program.

C. Current Issues Facing The SSI Program

For more than 50 years, the SSI program has provided a financial safety net for aged, blind, and disabled Americans who have nowhere else to turn, and who must rely on SSI benefits to meet basic needs of food and shelter. The program plays a crucial role in the lives of about eight million people and is funded from general tax revenues. Accordingly, we take great care to administer the program as accurately and efficiently as possible and remain committed to effectively overseeing the program, protecting taxpayer dollars, and maintaining the public's trust.

Program Integrity

We strive to prevent improper payments—either paying too much (overpayments) or paying too little (underpayments)—and to find, correct, and recover improper payments as soon as possible when they occur.

Making correct payments is especially challenging because SSI is a means-tested program. Accordingly, the correct monthly SSI payment amount changes as a recipient’s income, resources, living arrangements, and other circumstances change. The first line of defense against improper payments is timely reporting of these changing circumstances. We require recipients to report changes that may affect their benefits right away. However, some circumstances, such as the recipient’s medical impairment, may make reporting changes in a timely manner difficult. For this reason, it is important we have strong program integrity tools to detect unreported changes that may affect SSI eligibility and payments. These tools help us ensure that only individuals who are eligible for benefits receive them, and that we pay eligible individuals correctly.

One of our most effective program integrity tools is the SSI non-medical redetermination process, under which we conduct scheduled reviews of all non-medical factors of eligibility to determine whether the recipient is still eligible for SSI and if his or her payment amount is correct. These reviews are often time-consuming and resource-intensive, therefore it would be administratively challenging and burdensome to complete scheduled redeterminations on each SSI recipient every year; consequently, to maximize resources and limit the burden to the public, we use a statistical model to prioritize redeterminations. This allows us to focus on recipients who are most likely to have a change that affects eligibility or the amount of benefits. These redeterminations save billions of program dollars with a comparatively small investment of administrative funds.

Ongoing Efforts

We continue to rely heavily on emerging technology to support our efforts to review recipient eligibility. On December 31, 2024, we published the Final Rule Use of Electronic Payroll Data to Improve Program Administration² outlining our intent to obtain wage data electronically from a payroll data provider. We began receiving data through the exchange on April 7, 2025. Data from the exchange will be used to update SSI records timely. This increases the accuracy of payment amounts, reduces time field office technicians spend verifying wages and manually entering data, and reduces reporting responsibilities for individuals who earn income that could affect their eligibility or payment amount.

Conclusion

The SSI program continues to provide support for millions of vulnerable individuals. Our goal remains consistent: to pay the right person the right benefit at the right time. We will continue to use every tool at our disposal to ensure that SSI payments are accurate.

D. KEY RESULTS FROM THE 25-YEAR PROJECTIONS

The major findings in the 25-year projections prepared for this report are:

•

In recent years the SSI recipient population has declined as the number of applicants for SSI payments declined through 2021. The number of applications decreased from 2010 through 2021, including a particularly sharp decrease in 2020, due to a number of pandemic-related effects. Since 2021, the number of applications has increased moderately. By 2027, the number of applications is projected to increase substantially, reaching levels more consistent with longer-term historical experience, and then remain at roughly this level thereafter. By 2049, we project that the Federal SSI recipient population will reach 8.2 million. As a percentage of the total Social Security area population, we project the number of Federal SSI recipients to increase from 2.09 percent of the population in 2025 to 2.16 percent in 2032, and then decline very gradually to 2.11 percent by 2049. This decline occurs for several reasons, including that the percent of the population potentially eligible for SSI based on their citizenship and residency status is projected to decline slightly in the future.

•

We project that Federal expenditures for SSI payments in calendar year 2025 will increase by $2.2 billion to $65.3 billion, an increase of 3.4 percent from 2024 levels. In dollars adjusted by the Consumer Price Index to 2025 levels, we pro­ject that SSI program outlays will increase to $73.4 billion in 2049, a real increase of 0.5 percent per year.

•

Federal SSI expenditures were 0.22 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2024. We project that such expenditures will decrease to 0.21 percent of GDP in 2025 and decline thereafter to 0.17 percent of GDP by 2049. Federal SSI expenditures are projected to grow more slowly than GDP both because the share of the population that will be potentially eligible for SSI will decline and because the maximum Federal SSI benefit is projected to grow more slowly on average than the growth in average income in the future.

---

1

Administrative costs do not include the costs of beneficiary services provided to recipients through State vocational rehabilitation (VR) agencies and employment networks for VR services and payments under the Ticket to Work program.

2

https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-30593