When should I take Social Security?
In one paragraph
Delaying Social Security from 62 to 70 increases the monthly benefit by roughly 76% and is the right choice for most people who are healthy and have sufficient assets to bridge the gap. Claiming early makes sense when health is poor, life expectancy is short, or portfolio depletion is an immediate risk.
What this actually means
Social Security benefits can begin as early as 62, but claiming before full retirement age (66–67 depending on birth year) permanently reduces the monthly payment — as much as 30% below the full benefit. Waiting past full retirement age earns delayed retirement credits of 8% per year up to age 70, at which point credits stop accruing.
The math on breakeven is widely cited: delaying from 62 to 70 typically requires roughly 12–15 years of higher payments to offset the years of forgone benefits. Someone who claims at 62 and dies at 76 comes out ahead versus the delayed claimer. Someone who lives to 85 or 90 — increasingly common — collects significantly more lifetime income by waiting.
But the breakeven calculation, while useful, misses the full strategic picture. Social Security functions as longevity insurance. The risk it hedges isn't dying young; it's living longer than expected and running out of assets. From that framing, maximizing the lifetime income stream for the longest-lived scenario — not the median — is the rational objective.
For married couples, the decision carries an additional dimension. When one spouse dies, the survivor keeps only the higher of the two benefits. The higher-earning spouse delaying to 70 maximizes the survivor benefit for potentially decades. Coordinating claiming strategies between spouses can add hundreds of thousands of dollars in expected lifetime income.
Several factors legitimately favor earlier claiming: poor health and below-average life expectancy; the need to withdraw portfolio assets in early retirement while the market is unfavorable (sequence-of-returns risk); a pension that reduces Social Security benefits via the Windfall Elimination Provision; or a tax situation where delaying creates problematic provisional income thresholds.
Social Security optimization software (available from SSA.gov and various financial planning tools) can model breakeven dates and lifetime income projections under different claiming combinations. For couples especially, running the numbers before making an irreversible decision is worth the time investment.