The Social Security Administration pays a large number of benefits each month to different groups of United States citizens. These groups are very diverse and some of them have applied for a check at age 62, others at age 70 and others even earlier because of a disability.
However, the Social Security Administration does not send checks to all Americans who apply for a benefit, since certain requirements must be met beforehand. In the case of requesting a check for retirement due to age, we must take into account the work credits. Even if you reach the age of 62, without sufficient work credits you will not be able to get a retirement payment.
How do you get Social Security at age 62?
Work credits are key to getting a Social Security benefit. If we take into account that you have to work a minimum number of years to get these minimum credits, we will understand the situation. It is not only necessary to reach 62 years of age to be eligible for retirement.
The minimum requirements to obtain Social Security retirement are:
- To be 62 years of age. This is true except in cases of disability retirement, since in that situation there is no minimum age.
- Have earned at least 40 work credits.
Therefore, being 62 years of age does not imply being able to apply for payment from the Social Security Administration. In order to be able to do so, we must have worked before reaching 40 work credits. In order to do so, you must have worked for at least 10 years. It is not necessary to work the years in a row, but it is possible to work in different stages.
In any case, reaching these minimum requirements does not imply having a good check from the Social Security Administration, quite the contrary. We may not have a very good benefit, so in that case we should apply for additional benefits as well.
Get the biggest payment from Social Security
If we are thinking about applying for a Social Security Administration check, we may want to think about how best to get the maximum check. There are three things to consider:
- Retirement age. The closer we are to 70, the better our monthly payment will be.
- Years worked. The minimum number of years worked for a payment from the Social Security Administration is 10 years, but the ideal is to work for 35 years.
- Salary as a worker. The higher the salary during the working years, the better monthly retirement check we will have later.
So the closer we are to these parameters, the closer we are to getting the best check of $4,873 per month from the Social Security Administration in this year 2024. If we don’t have such a check we could have something along these lines.