Social Security retirees won’t be getting checks this week, according to the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) payment schedule.
Social Security payments are administered monthly, paying benefits to about 70 million people. When benefits are paid into bank accounts depends on your birth date and what type of benefits you receive.
The SSA makes the first round of retirement benefits for everyone whose claims began in the second or third week of the month after May 1997. If the month begins on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, payments are made in the second week of the month. If the month begins on Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday, payments are made in the third week.
Since August began on a Thursday this year, payments will not be made this week, but next week, Wednesday, August 14, for people whose birthdays fall between the 1st and 10th of any month of the year.
People whose birthdays fall between the 11th and 20th will receive their monthly amount on August 21, and people born between the 21st and 31st of any month will have their benefits paid on August 28.
Some recipients may have already received checks for this month, including people who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a benefit that provides monthly payments to adults with disabilities, blindness, children and adults age 65 and older, and people who have been claiming retirement benefits since before May 1997.
If you haven’t received your benefits when you expected, the SSA recommends waiting three business days before contacting them.
Later this month, SSI recipients will receive another payment for September a little earlier than normally expected. That’s because the normal payment date of September 1 falls on a weekend.
“We do this to protect you from financial loss and ensure you don’t have to wait beyond the first of the month to receive your payment,” the SSA said in a 2022 blog post. “This does not mean you’re getting a duplicate payment in the previous month, so you don’t need to contact us to report a second payment.”
The amount received by Social Security recipients varies because it’s based on several factors such as the age at which benefits were claimed and the person’s highest-earning years of work. Among all retirees, the average benefit paid in June 2024 was $1,869.77, according to the SSA’s latest data.
