If you have claimed Social Security before your full retirement age and you are still working, 2026 lets you earn $24,480 before the Social Security Administration begins withholding benefits. In the calendar year you actually reach full retirement age the figure rises to $65,160, and from the month you reach it, the limit disappears completely.
Those amounts are set each autumn in the SSA’s annual determination notice — the 2026 figures were published in the Federal Register on November 3, 2025, alongside the 2.8% cost-of-living increase.
The three tiers, in one table
| Your situation in 2026 | Annual limit | Monthly limit | Withheld above the limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under full retirement age all year | $24,480 | $2,040 | $1 for every $2 |
| Reaching full retirement age in 2026 (months before the birthday) | $65,160 | $5,430 | $1 for every $3 |
| From the month you reach full retirement age | none | none | nothing |
Full retirement age is 67 for anyone born in 1960 or later. The middle row only counts earnings in the months before you hit it — what you make in November does not matter if your birthday was in September.
“Earnings” means a paycheck, not income
This is where most of the confusion lives. The earnings test looks at wages from a job and net earnings from self-employment — including bonuses, commissions and vacation pay. That is the whole list.
What does not count toward the limit: pensions, annuities, IRA and 401(k) withdrawals, dividends, interest, capital gains, most rental income, veterans’ benefits, and other government or military retirement pay (SSA.gov).
So a 64-year-old in Clearwater drawing $60,000 a year out of an IRA is not touched by the test at all. A 64-year-old earning $60,000 at a job is squarely inside it. Same income on a tax return, completely different treatment.
What the withholding actually looks like
Suppose you claimed at 63, your benefit is $2,000 a month, and you take a part-time job in Tampa paying $44,480 for the year.
- You are $20,000 over the $24,480 limit.
- At $1 withheld for every $2, that is $10,000 of benefits withheld.
- The SSA does not shave each check. It withholds whole months — here, five checks of $2,000 — and then pays you normally for the rest of the year.
That last detail catches people off guard. Budgeting for a smaller check every month is one thing; five months with no deposit at all is another.
The withheld money is not a fine
The most common misconception about the earnings test is that the money is gone. It is not. When you reach full retirement age, the SSA recalculates your benefit to credit you for the months in which benefits were withheld, and your monthly payment goes up permanently (SSA Program Explainer).
The honest caveat: you get it back as a slightly larger check for the rest of your life, not as a refund. It takes many years of that higher payment to recover the dollars that were withheld in your sixties. Whether that trade works in your favor depends on your health, your other income and how long you expect to be collecting — which is exactly the arithmetic a claiming analysis is for.
The first-year rule most people never hear about
If you retire partway through the year, an annual limit can produce an absurd result — you earned $90,000 through June, so no benefits at all for July through December?
The SSA’s special earnings limit rule exists for that. In your first year of retirement, the agency can apply the limit month by month instead of annually. Earn under $2,040 in a given month, and do not perform substantial services in your own business, and you are paid in full for that month regardless of what you made earlier in the year.
This rule applies for one year only, and you have to tell the SSA that you have stopped working. It is not automatic.
The part nobody connects: a paycheck at 63 can raise your Medicare premium at 65
Wages count toward the modified adjusted gross income that determines your Medicare IRMAA surcharge — and IRMAA runs on a two-year lookback. For an individual filer, MAGI above $109,000 triggers a surcharge on both Part B and Part D.
That means the consulting year you take at 63 to bridge the gap is the tax return the SSA reads when it sets your Medicare premium at 65. Two decisions people think of as unrelated are, in fact, the same decision. Our IRMAA calculator will show you where a given income lands.
If you are self-employed, the test measures two things
Employees are assessed on wages alone. If you run your own business, Social Security looks at net earnings from self-employment and at how much time you put in.
The second test is the one nobody expects. In your first year of retirement, the agency asks whether you performed substantial services in the business in a given month. As a general guide, more than 45 hours a month in your own business counts as substantial — and as few as 15 hours can, if the business is one you materially manage or the work is highly skilled.
So a consultant who bills nothing in July but spends August running the company has a problem in August, even with no income that month. The counterpart is that a genuine wind-down can qualify for the monthly rule even while old invoices are still being paid.
Two practical points: pay yourself deliberately in the transition year, and keep a record of hours. The hours question is asked, and “roughly part-time” is not an answer.
How Social Security finds out, and what you owe them
The earnings test is not enforced from your tax return alone.
You are expected to report an estimate of what you expect to earn, and to tell the agency when that estimate changes materially. Social Security then withholds against the estimate during the year, and reconciles afterwards against your actual W-2 or self-employment earnings.
That reconciliation runs both ways:
- Under-reported earnings create an overpayment, and Social Security will recover it — usually by withholding future benefits until the balance clears. Discovering this two years later is common and unpleasant.
- Over-withheld benefits are refunded once the real figure is in.
None of it is automatic. If you take a job, leave a job, or your income changes shape mid-year, tell them. The people who get hurt by the earnings test are rarely the ones who earned too much — they are the ones who did not update the estimate.
Working in retirement in Florida
Florida has no state income tax, so a paycheck in Tampa keeps more of itself than the same paycheck in most of the country. That is a real part of why so many people here work past 62 — seasonal work, consulting, a business that never quite closed.
The earnings test does not care. It is federal, and it reads gross wages, not what you keep. A $44,480 job produces exactly the same $10,000 of withholding in Clearwater as it would in Connecticut.
There is a second-order effect worth planning around, though, and it is the one that catches Florida retirees. Because take-home pay is higher here, part-time work is more attractive here — which means more people cross the limit without having modelled it, and more people generate the wage income that later feeds IRMAA. The state tax advantage makes working more appealing and does nothing to soften either federal consequence.
What this changes about when to claim
The earnings test is one of the strongest arguments against claiming early while you are still working. If your benefit is going to be withheld anyway, claiming at 62 or 63 mostly buys you a permanently reduced check in exchange for money you do not receive on schedule.
It also cuts the other way. Because the test vanishes at full retirement age, someone planning to work until 67 has a cleaner path than they assume — and someone with a spouse or a survivor benefit in the picture has a genuinely different calculation, because delaying the higher earner’s claim raises the survivor benefit too. That is covered in our guide to claiming at 62, 67 or 70.
Survivors are treated differently, and worse than they expect
A widow or widower who claims a survivor benefit before full retirement age and keeps working is subject to the same earnings test — and the detail that catches people is which full retirement age applies.
Survivor benefits can be claimed as early as 60, and the full retirement age for survivor benefits can be earlier than the one for your own retirement benefit. But the earnings test uses your retirement full retirement age, not the survivor one. So a 62-year-old widow working full time can find her survivor benefit withheld for years longer than she assumed from reading about survivor rules.
There is a planning consequence that cuts the other way and is worth knowing. Survivor benefits and your own retirement benefit are separate claims, and you can take one and switch to the other later. For a working widow or widower, that flexibility is often more valuable than the benefit being withheld today — and it is the kind of question an analysis answers properly rather than a rule of thumb.
Getting the sequence right
Working in retirement is common in Florida, and there is nothing wrong with it — the earnings test is a timing rule, not a penalty for staying busy. What it does mean is that the claiming date, the work plan and the Medicare enrollment date should be decided together rather than one at a time.
Virginia Barausky is a Registered Social Security Analyst (RSSA®) and works through the claiming decision as an analysis, not a guess — including how it interacts with your Medicare timing. You can see how she approaches it on our Social Security planning page, or schedule a 15-minute conversation to talk through your own numbers.
This article is educational and reflects the 2026 figures published by the SSA. Your own limits, full retirement age and benefit amount depend on your earnings record.