How it works
How your benefit, your spouse's top-up, and survivor adjustments are estimated — this mirrors the real Social Security Administration formula, but isn't a substitute for your actual SSA statement.
Start by choosing your marital status — Married/Registered Domestic Partner (RDP), Married/RDP but legally separated, Not married, or Divorced. This branches the form: separated and divorced statuses ask whether your spouse is still living or whether you've remarried, and a divorce only carries spousal/survivor eligibility if the marriage lasted 10+ years — the form explains each rule as it applies and, for a short marriage, stops there since no spousal or survivor benefit applies.
For yourself (and your spouse, if applicable), enter date of birth, projected income, planned retirement age, and life expectancy, then choose how to estimate the benefit: upload your real SSA earnings statement (XML) for the most accurate figure, enter a known AIME directly, or use a simplified estimate based on years worked. An uploaded statement shows a preview of the imported year-by-year earnings and computed AIME that you explicitly accept or reject before it's used.
Click "Estimate" to see your results: a recommended claiming age and lifetime benefit total, a table of the benefit at every claiming age from 62–70, and interactive sliders you can drag to try different claiming ages and watch the benefit recompute live. Two tabs let you compare the simple lifetime total against the "adjusted real value" view, which accounts for investing what you don't spend and for inflation. If your spouse has no Social Security record of their own, their slider is disabled and follows your filing age automatically, since their benefit is entirely a spousal top-up.
Social Security bases your benefit on your highest 35 years of earnings, each "indexed" to account for wage growth over your career — a dollar you earned in 1995 counts for more than a dollar earned in 2024, because average wages have grown since then. RetireWell uses the real published national wage-growth data for indexing, the same series the SSA itself uses.
If you upload your actual SSA earnings statement, RetireWell uses your real historical earnings — the most accurate option. Without one, it estimates your history by projecting from your current income (compounding your income growth rate both backward and forward in time), capped each year at that year's Social Security maximum taxable wage.
If you have fewer than 10 years of covered work (35+ counting years planned before retirement), you're not eligible for a retirement benefit at all, and RetireWell shows $0.
Your top 35 indexed years are averaged into one monthly figure (your AIME). That figure runs through a three-tier formula that weights your first dollars of lifetime earnings much more heavily than your last — this is by design, since Social Security replaces a larger share of income for lower lifetime earners. The result is your benefit at full retirement age (67, in this projection).
Claiming before 67 permanently reduces your monthly benefit; claiming after 67, up to age 70, permanently increases it by roughly 8% per year of delay. Both adjustments are applied to your full-retirement-age amount.
Once both spouses have started claiming, each person receives whichever is larger: their own age-adjusted benefit, or a spousal top-up based on 50% of their spouse's full-retirement-age benefit (not the spouse's own age-adjusted amount).
That spousal top-up is itself reduced if you claim before your own full retirement age — the same way your own benefit is — so claiming early affects both pieces, not just your own-record amount.
If one spouse passes away, the survivor receives whichever of the two benefits — their own, or their late spouse's — was higher, and the other line in your results drops to $0, since only one person is left to draw a benefit.
A legally separated spouse is treated like a married spouse for Social Security purposes, with one extra condition: your spousal top-up only applies once your spouse has actually started their own benefit. RetireWell asks this directly, since a legally separated spouse's finances aren't otherwise tracked closely enough to infer it automatically.
A divorced-spouse benefit only exists if the marriage lasted 10 or more consecutive years — under that, there's no spousal or survivor benefit on that record at all, and RetireWell stops asking further questions about it.
If it lasted 10+ years, you're eligible for a spousal benefit once you've been divorced for 2 consecutive years — and unlike a still-married spouse, your ex doesn't need to have started their own benefit first.
If your ex-spouse has since passed away, the same survivor rules described below apply to their record, just as if you'd still been married.
A surviving spouse — or a surviving divorced spouse, if the marriage lasted 10+ years — can claim a survivor benefit as early as age 60, worth 71.5% to 100% of the deceased's benefit depending on the age it's claimed. Your own benefit still applies too; whichever is higher wins.
If the deceased had started their own benefit early (before their full retirement age), your survivor benefit is capped at what they were actually receiving — never below 82.5% of their full-retirement-age amount. RetireWell asks whether this applies so it can apply the same cap.
Remarriage affects a survivor benefit and a living ex's spousal benefit differently. Remarrying before age 60 blocks a survivor benefit from a deceased spouse or ex while the new marriage is active; remarrying at 60 or later doesn't affect it at all. A living ex-spouse's spousal benefit, on the other hand, is blocked by remarriage at any age — there's no age-60 exception, since that benefit comes from someone who's still alive rather than a survivor benefit. Either way, if the new marriage later ends (divorce, death, or annulment), your eligibility on the original record is restored.
If you remarried at 60 or later, RetireWell can also compare your survivor benefit against a spousal benefit on your new spouse's record (available once you've been married a year and your new spouse is 62+) — enter a little about them and RetireWell takes whichever of the three benefits (survivor, your own, or the new-spouse spousal top-up) is highest.
Once you've started claiming, RetireWell increases your locked-in benefit every year to approximate a real cost-of-living adjustment, based on that year's projected inflation rate rather than a separately modeled wage index.
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