Retirees who spent decades working low-wage jobs stand to gain the most from a Senate bill that would restructure Social Security’s minimum benefit around years of coverage. S. 393, the Social Security Expansion Act introduced during the 118th Congress, targets lifetime low earners by raising the floor benefit for workers who logged enough qualifying years, a design that would deliver its largest dollar increases to those at the bottom of the earnings scale. The bill’s approach differs sharply from a competing Senate proposal and raises hard questions about whether any minimum-benefit redesign can reach the poorest older Americans as effectively as expanding Supplemental Security Income.
How S. 393 restructures the minimum benefit for low earners
Under current law, Social Security already offers a “special minimum benefit” for workers with long careers at low pay. That benefit kicks in only after a worker accumulates at least 11 years of coverage, as documented in program tables maintained by the Office of the Chief Actuary. But the existing special minimum has eroded over time because it is indexed to prices rather than wages, leaving it too small to lift many retirees above poverty and increasingly irrelevant compared with the regular benefit formula.
S. 393 would replace that fading formula with a more generous years-of-coverage structure. The statutory language proposes an increased minimum benefit specifically for lifetime low earners, calibrated so that workers with more qualifying years receive proportionally larger increases. A “year of coverage” is earned when a worker’s annual earnings exceed a threshold tied to the old-law contribution base, a figure the Office of the Chief Actuary tracks in its official YOC reference tables. Because the threshold is set relatively low, the formula favors people who worked steadily but never earned much, rather than higher-paid workers with shorter careers.
In practice, that means a worker who spent 30 or 40 years in low-wage service or agricultural jobs could see a significantly higher benefit than under current law, while someone with only a decade of low-paid work would receive a smaller boost or none at all. The stepwise structure allows the minimum to rise with each additional qualifying year, attempting to reward long attachments to the labor force even when wages never rose above modest levels.
A separate Senate vehicle, S. 2280, the Social Security 2100 Act, also includes a minimum-benefit provision, but it caps that benefit at 125% of the federal poverty guidelines, according to analysis by outside policy researchers. The Congressional Budget Office has examined what happens when Social Security benefits are tied to 125% or 150% of federal poverty guidelines, finding that such designs increase progressivity for lower-income beneficiaries by ensuring no one with a full work history falls far below the poverty line. S. 393’s years-of-coverage approach would, by design, produce larger average gains for workers with 20 or more years of sub-poverty earnings than the flat poverty-line floor in S. 2280, because the benefit grows with each additional qualifying year rather than stopping at a single percentage of the poverty line.
That contrast reflects a broader policy choice. A poverty-line floor aims to guarantee a minimum living standard for all beneficiaries who meet certain work tests, while a years-of-coverage formula aims to concentrate the largest gains on those whose low wages persisted across most of their careers. Supporters of S. 393 argue that this better targets scarce resources to the most vulnerable long-term workers, while critics note that it offers less protection to people with interrupted or informal work histories.
Who the bill would miss and why SSI expansion competes
The central limitation of any minimum benefit tied to years of coverage is that it requires a long formal work history. Workers who became disabled early in life, spent years as unpaid caregivers, or worked in the informal economy often lack enough qualifying years to benefit. The Congressional Research Service details these targeting tradeoffs, explaining how a years-of-coverage design can miss significant portions of the low-income population it aims to help, including many women, immigrants, and people with unstable employment.
Because the formula is built on Social Security–covered earnings, it does not account for unpaid but socially valuable roles such as raising children or providing elder care. Nor does it help very low-income older adults who immigrated later in life and never accumulated enough covered work in the United States. These groups may reach retirement with little or no Social Security benefit, regardless of how generous the minimum becomes for those who do qualify.
For that reason, many analysts view Supplemental Security Income, a means-tested program financed from general revenues, as a more direct anti-poverty tool. SSI does not require a work history, and its eligibility rules focus on income and assets rather than years of coverage. Expanding SSI benefit levels or loosening its asset and income limits would immediately reach very poor older and disabled adults who fall outside Social Security’s contributory system, including those whom S. 393’s minimum-benefit redesign would leave untouched.
The Brookings Institution and other researchers have argued that, dollar for dollar, SSI expansions can reduce late-life poverty more efficiently than changes to Social Security’s minimum benefit, precisely because they are not constrained by past payroll contributions. However, SSI’s political and administrative challenges are different: benefits are funded from the general budget, and the program carries a stronger means-tested stigma than Social Security. Lawmakers weighing S. 393 therefore face a familiar tradeoff. A more generous minimum benefit can substantially improve retirement security for lifetime low earners who paid into the system, but it cannot, on its own, eliminate deep poverty among older Americans without parallel reforms to SSI and other safety-net programs.
