Social Security (United States)
American retirement system
In the United States, Social Security is the commonly used term for the federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program and is administered by the Social Security Administration (SSA). The Social Security Act was passed in 1935, and the existing version of the Act, as amended, encompasses several social welfare and social insurance programs.
The average monthly Social Security benefit for May 2025 was $1,903. This was raised from $1,783 in 2024. The total cost of the Social Security program for 2022 was $1.244 trillion or about 5.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). In 2025, there have been proposed budget cuts to social security.
Social Security is funded primarily through payroll taxes called the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) or Self Employed Contributions Act (SECA). Wage and salary earnings from covered employment, up to an amount determined by law (see tax rate table), are subject to the Social Security payroll tax. Wage and salary earnings above this amount are not taxed. In 2026, the maximum amount of taxable earnings is $184,500.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Social Security (United States)” as american retirement system. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12184791. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1935, 2025, 2024 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Social Security (United States)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.