The Social Security Administration, or SSA, publishes an annual document called the Social Security Statistical Supplement. This contains a lot of information about the Social Security program (it's over 500 pages long), but one particularly useful thing it does is provide a breakdown of Social Security benefits by age.
According to the latest edition, from 2024, the average 67-year-old retired worker receives a monthly payment of $1,884, which works out to about $22,600 per year.
Image source: Getty Images.
Why does the average 67-year-old get a lower benefit?
This is a bit less than the overall average of $1,905 per month, and the main reason is that as a group, the roughly 2.9 million 67-year-old retired workers includes people who waited until full retirement age to start collecting benefits and people who decided to claim Social Security early. But unlike the overall average, it doesn't include people who chose to wait years after reaching full retirement age to start collecting benefits.
In fact, of the 2.9 million retired workers collecting Social Security who are 67 years old, nearly 1.6 million of them have reduced benefits for early retirement. A quick calculation shows that the 67-year-old retired workers who did not claim Social Security early receive an average monthly benefit of $2,145, significantly more than the overall average.
One thing to keep in mind is that all of these figures from the Social Security Statistical Supplement were before the 2025 cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) added 2.5% to all benefits. So the average 67-year-old in 2025 is likely to receive about:
- $1,931 per month (overall average).
- $1,708 per month if claiming Social Security early.
- $2,199 per month if not claiming Social Security early.
These are just averages, and many retirees get significantly more or less than these figures, depending on their claiming age, how much they earned throughout their career, and other factors.
