For How Long Can You Receive Disability Benefits?

How long can you receive Social Security disability or SSI disability benefits? Once your application for disability benefits has been approved, you may potentially receive disability benefits up to the point at which you reach retirement age, unless there is a reason they should stop. (At retirement age, your benefits continue, but as Social Security retirement income or SSI for the elderly.)

Earning Too Much Money

One possible reason why benefits might stop is if you being to earn too much money. SSDI and SSI are supposed to provide benefits for people who do not work, so if you become able to earn a substantial income, this may affect your ability to collect. Generally, if you begin to make more than $1,010 per month (in 2012), your benefits will be suspended (blind people can make a bit more). However, there are programs where you can try working for a period of time without jeopardizing your right to collect benefits, called a trial work period. 

Medical Improvement

Benefits may also stop if you improve medically so that you no longer would be considred disabled. 

Periodic Reviews

Social Security disability and SSI recipients periodically have their cases reviewed every so often to determine whether or not their condition still qualifies them for disability payments. This review is known as a CDR, or continuing disability review. A CDR will generally occur every three or seven years, though, in rare cases, such reviews are conducted once a year. (This usually only occurs if, at the time of approval, the SSA notes that it looks as though a claimant's condition might improve at some point in the near future).

Backlogs

Since the Social Security Administration has backlogs of every sort (backlogs for disability applications, backlogs for disability hearings, and backlogs for disability reviews), it is usually the norm that reviews of disability cases are not done on time. In other words, a review that is set for every three years may actually be done every fifth year.

Chances of Benefits Being Stopped

If a claimant's medical records don't show medical improvement, their disability status, and the payment of benefits, will be continued. And, most often, this is the case. In actuality, the percentage of people whose benefits are terminated because of medical improvement is very low. This is because it is very difficult in most cases for Social Security to find that medical improvement has taken place.

Through my experience as a Social Security disability examiner and as a claims representative, I have observed a couple of things. First, most claimants who get approved manage to keep their benefits after each successive review of their claim. Second, it is harder to determine that an individual has had medical improvement if he or she was approved for disability benefits through an administrative law judge (ALJ) hearing versus being approved at the initial claim or reconsideration appeal levels. 

There is a reason for this: ALJs have more flexibility in formulating their decisions than disability examiners, which means that many individuals who received their disability approvals at the ALJ hearing might not necessarily have been awarded disability under the rules and guidelines used to make decisions at the state disability agency (DDS, or Disability Determination Services). 

In conclusion, while no one is guaranteed a lifetime of disability benefits, in all likelihood, once a person has been awarded disability benefits, they will continue to receive disability benefits until retirement age, at which point their benefits will convert from the disability category to the retirement category.