Every month, roughly 70 million Americans deposit a Social Security check. For many retirees, that payment covers rent, groceries, and prescriptions with little left over. If Congress fails to shore up the program’s finances before its trust fund reserves run out, those checks will not stop, but they will shrink by hundreds of dollars, a hit that millions of households cannot easily absorb.
The 2025 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees, released in May 2025, projects that the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund will be depleted by 2033. When combined with the Disability Insurance fund, the merged OASDI reserves are expected to run out by 2035. After that, incoming payroll taxes would cover only about 83 percent of scheduled benefits under the trustees’ intermediate assumptions, leaving a gap of roughly 17 cents on every dollar owed.
That gap is not a distant abstraction. Below is what the government’s own numbers show, where the legal gray areas lie, and what it all means for the people counting on those monthly deposits.
What the official projections show
Social Security is financed primarily by a 12.4 percent payroll tax, split evenly between workers and employers. In years when collections exceed benefit payments, the surplus flows into the trust funds and is invested in special-issue Treasury securities. When payments exceed collections, the program redeems those securities to cover the difference. The trustees have warned for years that redemptions are outpacing new investment, and the 2025 report confirms the downward trajectory has accelerated.
One factor behind the acceleration: the Social Security Fairness Act, signed into law in January 2025. That legislation eliminated the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset, expanding benefits for roughly 3 million public-sector retirees. The change was widely supported but also increased the program’s near-term costs, contributing to the earlier OASI depletion date noted in the trustees’ report and in Associated Press coverage of its release.
A Congressional Research Service brief prepared for lawmakers distills the headline numbers: full scheduled benefits can be paid only through the projected depletion year. After that, the program shifts to partial payments funded entirely by current tax revenue.
The Social Security Administration makes the same point on its trust fund FAQ page, stating that “some benefits could be paid” even after reserves are exhausted because payroll tax income does not stop. The agency’s actuaries estimate that ongoing collections would cover roughly three-quarters or more of scheduled benefits, depending on the year and the economic assumptions used.
The Congressional Research Service’s detailed legal analysis (RL33514) reaches the same structural conclusion: Social Security would not shut down. It would become a pure pay-as-you-go system, paying out only what it collects in a given period.
To put that in dollar terms: a retiree receiving the approximate average benefit of $1,976 a month (based on SSA data from early 2025, before the latest cost-of-living adjustment took effect) could see that check fall to roughly $1,640 under an across-the-board 17 percent reduction. That is about $336 less per month, or more than $4,000 a year. For the millions of seniors who rely on Social Security for the majority of their income, a cut of that size can mean choosing between medication and utilities.
What remains uncertain
The broad outline is clear. The critical details are not.
Perhaps the biggest open question is mechanical: how, exactly, would the Social Security Administration reduce payments? The Social Security Act does not spell out a process for cutting benefits after trust fund depletion. The CRS analysis in RL33514 identifies at least two possible approaches. The agency could continue paying full benefit amounts but delay some checks until enough revenue accumulates, meaning retirees might wait days or weeks for a deposit. Alternatively, it could send every check on time but reduce each one by a uniform percentage so that total outlays match incoming tax revenue.
Both paths lead to less money for beneficiaries, but they create very different hardships: unpredictable timing in one case, a predictable but permanent cut in the other. There is also no statutory guidance on whether all beneficiaries would absorb the same percentage reduction or whether certain groups, such as the oldest retirees or disabled workers, would be partially shielded. Without direction from Congress or the courts, the agency would be navigating uncharted legal territory.
Another question readers often raise: what happens to annual cost-of-living adjustments if benefits are cut? The trustees’ projections assume COLAs continue to be calculated on the full scheduled benefit. But if the agency can only pay 83 percent of that amount, a COLA applied to the scheduled figure would still leave the actual check below what retirees expected. In practice, a 3 percent COLA on a reduced payment does less to keep up with inflation than a 3 percent COLA on the full benefit.
The projected depletion dates themselves carry uncertainty. The trustees use intermediate assumptions about economic growth, immigration, fertility, and labor productivity. Stronger-than-expected economic performance or higher immigration levels could push depletion back. A recession or worsening demographic trends could pull it forward. The 2025 report moved the OASI depletion date to 2033 from the 2034 projection in the 2024 Trustees Report, illustrating how sensitive these forecasts are to updated data.
The share of benefits payable after depletion is similarly conditional. The 83 percent figure applies at the point of combined fund exhaustion, but that percentage is expected to decline gradually in subsequent decades as the ratio of workers to retirees continues to fall. Over the trustees’ 75-year projection window, the payable share could drop closer to 73 percent if no legislative changes are made.
As of spring 2026, Congress has not enacted a comprehensive solvency fix. Lawmakers from both parties have introduced proposals ranging from raising the cap on earnings subject to the payroll tax to adjusting the benefit formula or gradually increasing the full retirement age, but none has advanced to a floor vote. The official forecasters treat depletion as a live policy risk precisely because no enacted law eliminates the projected shortfall.
What this means for beneficiaries
For anyone currently receiving Social Security or planning to claim within the next decade, the practical takeaway is this: the program is not disappearing, but the purchasing power of its benefits could drop meaningfully unless lawmakers intervene.
The most reliable numbers come from the Social Security Administration’s own actuaries. The 2025 Trustees Report provides the baseline projections for depletion timing and the percentage of benefits payable afterward. The agency’s trust fund FAQ translates those numbers into plain language: ongoing payroll taxes would still fund a substantial majority of scheduled benefits, but not the full amount. And the CRS legal analysis adds an important caution: because the law does not prescribe how cuts would be administered, the actual experience for beneficiaries, whether smaller checks or delayed checks, remains an open question that only legislation or formal agency action can resolve.
History offers some reassurance. In 1983, with the OASI fund just months from running dry, Congress passed a bipartisan package that included a gradual increase in the full retirement age, the taxation of a portion of benefits for higher earners, and an acceleration of previously scheduled payroll tax increases. That deal extended solvency for decades. Whether a similar compromise is politically achievable in today’s environment is uncertain, but the precedent shows that last-minute action is not without precedent.
Financial planners generally advise workers still years from retirement to factor potential benefit reductions into their savings targets rather than assume the full scheduled amount will be there. For current retirees, staying informed about legislative developments matters, but so does perspective: Social Security checks will continue even in a worst-case scenario, and the recurring claim that the program is about to vanish entirely is a myth unsupported by any official projection.
The bottom line: if the trust fund is depleted and Congress has done nothing, Social Security checks will keep arriving, but they will be smaller than what current law promises. The projected cut at the point of combined fund exhaustion is roughly 17 percent, based on the 2025 trustees’ figures. That is a serious reduction for millions of households, but it is a long way from zero. The clock, however, is running. Every year without a fix narrows the range of painless options available to lawmakers and raises the stakes for the people who depend on those deposits most.
