The Self-Employed and Social Security Disability Benefits

You can get Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits if you’re self-employed as long as you’ve paid self-employment taxes (SECA) and earned enough work credits to qualify for the program. People who work for companies as employees pay into Social Security through paycheck withholding (FICA taxes), but when you’re self-employed, you pay Social Security through self-employment taxes—either quarterly or when you file your income tax return.

So if you own your own business or work as an independent contractor (“freelancer”), it’s crucial to know whether you’ll be able to count on SSDI benefits to help if you become disabled. This article can familiarize you with certain terminology used by the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the methods the agency uses to determine SSDI coverage for the self-employed.

How Can You Get Social Security Disability Insurance If You Are Self-Employed?

To be eligible for SSDI benefits as a self-employed person, both of the following must be true:

• You have earned enough in “work credits” to become insured under the program.
• These credits must have been earned recently enough that you’re still insured on the date you became disabled.

Work credits are earned by (unsurprisingly) working and paying taxes on your earnings. The dollar amount it takes to earn a work credit changes annually. In 2026, you earn one work credit for each $1,890 you earn, up to four credits per year. It doesn't matter when during the year you made the money. For example, if you report a self-employment income of at least $7,560 for the year, you’ll earn all four available work credits.

The number of credits you need to earn to qualify for SSDI depends on how old you are when you become disabled. But anyone who earns 40 credits in 10 years has met the work credit requirement to receive full benefits. You’ll also need to have earned a certain amount of your work credits in recent years, based on how old you are when you become disabled. For most self-employed people, this means you had to have paid self-employment taxes for five of the last ten years.

What Does Social Security Consider Self-Employment?

Even if you’re eligible to receive SSDI, Social Security won’t award you benefits if you’re still engaging in what the agency calls substantial gainful activity, or “SGA”. For traditional employees, SGA is essentially a certain amount of earnings—$1,690 per month in 2026—above which Social Security can’t find you disabled. (The agency doesn’t consider you disabled if you’re still working full-time, which the SGA amount is supposed to represent.)

Due to the nature of self-employment, however, the SGA dollar number isn’t always an accurate representation of whether you’re working or how much. So for business owners, consultants, freelancers, and gig workers, Social Security will use one of three tests to determine if you’re engaging in substantial gainful activity.

Test One: Significant Services and Substantial Income

This test looks at how much you currently earn from your business relative to how much you earned before you became disabled. If your average income is either more than SGA or under SGA but comparable to what you made before your alleged onset date, you won’t qualify for disability. But if your earnings are much lower than they were before, Social Security will compare your current income to that of non-disabled members of your community who run businesses similar to yours. If you’re earning significantly less than the average for non-disabled people in the same line of work, you should pass this test.

Test Two: Comparability

This test gauges whether the work activity you do for your business is comparable to the work done by an unimpaired person who has the same kind of business in your community, looking at factors such as your job responsibilities, skills, and the number of hours you work. While similar to test one in that it looks at your work relative to other people, this test focuses on what tasks you actually perform at your business rather than the money you make.

Test Three: Worth of Work

This test examines how much the work you do for your business is worth. Social Security will consider how much value your work brings to your business and what it would cost to pay someone else to do it. If the work you do is worth more than the SGA limit, you won’t qualify for disability.

If your self-employment passes all three of these tests, Social Security won't consider your work as SGA.

SSDI and Self-Employment Taxes

To be eligible for SSDI benefits, you have to pay the self-employment tax, which includes both Social Security and Medicare taxes. So if you’re self-employed, you'll likely file a Schedule SE at tax time. The self-employment tax rate is 15.3% (in 2026). Social Security gets 12.4% of this, and the remainder goes to Medicare. You can learn more about self-employment tax on the IRS website.

Some business owners aren't required to pay the self-employment tax. For instance, owners of “S corporations” don't pay the self-employment tax on company profits. So if you own an S corporation, you can’t collect Social Security disability benefits unless you have also earned wages as an employee (of your own business or another) and pay Social Security taxes (FICA) on those wages.

How Much Will I Get in SSDI If I'm Self-Employed?

Your disability amount is based on your reported earnings—from either self-employment or wages from a job—not on your work credits. Work credits simply allow you to qualify for benefits. They don’t determine the amount of those benefits.

Social Security uses your "average indexed monthly earnings" (AIME) to determine your actual benefit amount. Your AIME is calculated using a highly complex formula that takes into account factors such as the average wage earned by workers in certain “base years” as well as your actual dollar amount earned. You can learn more in our article about how your SSDI benefits are calculated.

Can You Get Temporary Disability If You’re Self-Employed?

The SSA doesn’t award temporary disability benefits to people who aren’t going to be out of work longer than a few weeks or months. (Part of the agency’s definition of disability is that you have a medically determinable impairment that lasts for at least one year.) However, you may live in a state that offers public temporary disability benefits for its residents. Or, you may have purchased private short-term disability insurance for yourself. These may be options if you don’t have enough work credits to qualify for SSDI or if you expect to recover from your health issue in less than twelve months.

Although SSDI is considered “permanent” disability, many self-employed people who receive benefits like to stay involved in their business or vocation in some way. After you're approved for disability benefits, like other workers, you’re allowed to try to go back to self-employment during a nine-month “trial work period” during which you can earn more than SGA without losing your benefits. You can also try to start your own business during your trial work period. To learn more, check out our articles on trial work periods when you’re self-employed and starting a small business while receiving SSDI.