Social Security Disability: How Does Your Age Affect Your Eligibility
You’d be surprised at how many people think you can only get social security disability benefits if you are over 65 years old. These people are confusing disability benefits with retirement benefits. Disability benefits are available for anybody who qualifies, and who is not old enough to retire. But age does affect how easy it may be for you to qualify for benefits.
Social Security laws place people into age categories. Everybody aged 18 to 44 are considered young individuals, those 45-49 are younger individuals, 50-54 are called closely approaching advanced age, those 55-59 are considered advanced age, and 60-65 are closely approaching retirement age.
The older you are, the easier it will be for you to qualify for disability benefits. Your education and work skills will be part of that equation, but your age is the starting point in figuring out what you will have to prove in order to win. For example, if you are 48 years old with little formal education, and you can only do a job where you can sit all day, you will probably be denied disability if you are able to read and write. But if you are 52 in the same circumstances, you would probably win. When the age category changes, the eligibility criteria change as well. At age 48, you have to prove that you can’t do any work at all, but at Age 52, you only have to prove that you are limited to work that can be done sitting down.
The reason why age matters so much is that we don’t expect older people who are close to retirement to go through job retraining and start a new career. The younger you are, the more we might expect you to adapt and change so that you can participate in the workforce.
One of the reasons to consider hiring a lawyer for a social security disability claim is to take advantage of their knowledge about how age, education and job skills can be manipulated to your advantage to give you the best chance to win your case.