How is social security disability back pay calculated?

The amount of back pay you receive may vary considerably depending on the length of time it took for you to get approved and your determined disability benefits amount. If you’ve already found out how much your monthly benefit will be, you can easily calculate how much back pay you’ll receive by multiplying your monthly payment by the number of months between applying for benefits and when you were approved (minus, of course, the standard five-month waiting period). 

You can look up your monthly benefit on the Social Security Administration website. 

For example, let’s say you initially applied for SSDI benefits in January of 2019 and were denied (like most first-time applicants). Let’s say it took five months for you to receive the denial. In June 2019, you requested a reconsideration review. This took another three months, putting you in September 2019. 

Your reconsideration review was also denied (again, a very common occurrence), so you requested a disability hearing. You waited a whole year before you got the chance to present your case to a disability judge in September 2020. Within two months of that hearing, you finally got approved for SSDI benefits in November 2020. Your monthly benefit is determined to be $1,000. 

At this point, it’s been 22 months since you applied for benefits. After subtracting the five-month waiting period, you are left with 17 months during which you did not receive benefits. As such, you would be entitled to $17,000 in disability back pay. This amount would be used to calculate your attorney fee if you had a lawyer. Usually a lawyer gets 25% of the back due benefits up to a maximum of $6000.00.

If you need helping applying for Social Security Disability or SSI, please contact me at joshben99@gmail.com. I have over 20 years experience with Social Security Disability cases.

Location: Michigan, USA

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