Social Security has been paying the wrong monthly benefit to thousands of widows and widowers whose spouses died before age 62, and the agency’s own watchdog has now put a dollar figure on the damage. Investigators traced the error to a specific calculation the government is required to run whenever a wage earner dies young, and getting it wrong lowers a survivor’s check for the rest of that survivor’s life. The finding applies to anyone who filed, or will file, a widow or widower claim on the record of a spouse who died before turning 62, because the same formula still governs those payments today.
What the SSA Inspector General Reviewed
The Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General examined two groups of widow and widower beneficiaries between October 2024 and January 2026, pulling a random sample of 120 cases to test whether the agency had paid the correct monthly amount. The office’s April 2026 report found that SSA paid 59 percent of the sampled beneficiaries, 71 of 120, the correct amount. The remaining 41 percent, 49 people, were either paid the wrong monthly benefit or had case files that never documented whether an SSA employee explained their filing options.
“Providing beneficiaries the accurate monthly benefit amount is vital to protecting the public’s earned benefits,” said Michelle L. Anderson, the Office of the Inspector General’s Assistant Inspector General for Audit as First Assistant, who signed the report. Her office also confirmed that Social Security agreed to carry out every recommendation in the report, including fixing the cases already identified and reviewing the wider population still at risk.
Free eligibility map: Spousal, divorced-spouse and survivor benefits follow different rules, and they are easy to mix up. Find the right lane with the free benefits map.
The WINDEX Formula Social Security Is Supposed to Apply
Social Security normally calculates a worker’s Primary Insurance Amount using the year that worker turns 62, becomes disabled, or dies, a step that determines which years of wage data get indexed to current dollars. When a wage earner dies before reaching 62, a different rule applies: the widow(er)’s indexing calculation, known inside the agency as the WINDEX Primary Insurance Amount. WINDEX substitutes the widow or widower’s own eligibility year, or the year the deceased spouse would have turned 62, for the year of death when indexing the earnings record. Because wage levels rise over time, using that later year typically produces a higher Primary Insurance Amount, and therefore a higher monthly survivor benefit, than indexing to the year the spouse actually died.
The distinction is not academic. In the case example the report cites, a wage earner died in October 1992 at age 32. When his widow applied for benefits in December 2016, the SSA employee handling the claim indexed her benefit to 1992, the year of death, instead of 2009, the year she first became eligible for widow’s benefits. That single substitution paid her $1,856 a month instead of the $2,170 she was owed, an underpayment of $35,247 by the time the SSA Office of the Inspector General reviewed the file in January 2025.
How the Miscalculation Produced 8,618 Underpaid Widow(er)s
The 54,843 widow(er) beneficiaries in that portion of the audit were all entitled to benefits on the record of a spouse who died before age 62 but showed no WINDEX Primary Insurance Amount on file. Out of a random sample of 70 of those cases, SSA employees had manually processed 11 without applying the WINDEX calculation, and the SSA Office of the Inspector General wrote that it could not determine why the correct formula was skipped. Projecting that 11-of-70 error rate across the full population, the audit report, number 032409, estimates that SSA underpaid 8,618 widow(er)s approximately $50.4 million. That figure is a statistical projection, not a completed accounting of every check: the report’s own confidence range runs from roughly $13.6 million on the low end to about $87.2 million on the high end, built from the actual $97,768 shortfall the sample of 11 real cases showed. Left uncorrected, the report projects SSA will underpay 5,484 beneficiaries a further $221.4 million combined over their remaining lifetimes.
Widow(er)s Who Were Never Told They Could Wait
A second, separate population in the same audit covered 7,253 beneficiaries who became entitled to both widow(er) and retirement benefits in the same month, before age 70. Filing that way forfeits a strategy available to some widow(er)s: taking survivor benefits alone and delaying the retirement claim until 70 to add delayed retirement credits on top of it. Of 50 sampled cases, SSA employees had not documented, in 37 of them, whether they told the beneficiary about that option before the retirement claim was filed. Projected across the population, the SSA Office of the Inspector General estimates 5,367 widow(er)s could have received a combined $113.8 million more had they been informed and chosen to delay. Because Social Security’s administrative finality rules bar reopening most closed claims, the agency has said it will not revisit those 37 cases individually.
SSA’s Response and a Repeat Finding
This is not the first time the SSA Office of the Inspector General has flagged the WINDEX problem. A prior audit in 2016 found SSA had underpaid 25,309 widow(er)s roughly $224 million for the same reason, and a 2018 review found the agency was failing to inform dually entitled widow(er)s about delaying retirement claims. SSA agreed with both of those earlier findings, and the new report notes that, as of January 2026, the agency still had not built the system alerts it had promised after either one. This time, the SSA Office of the Inspector General made four recommendations covering the 11 identified cases, the remaining 54,773 widow(er)s in that population, new controls for evaluating WINDEX eligibility, and system alerts reminding employees to discuss and document filing options. SSA agreed to implement all four, according to the report’s Agency Comments section.
Survivor Benefit Math and the Rules That Set It
The WINDEX calculation is only one of several formulas that decide what a survivor, spouse or divorced spouse actually collects, and the audit above shows how easily a single indexing year can shift a monthly check for decades. Widow(er)s weighing whether to file for survivor benefits alone or claim retirement benefits at the same time face the same sequencing question the dually entitled beneficiaries in the report never had explained to them.
The Social Security Claiming & Family Benefits Kit is a 27-page kit built around a six-tab calculator for claiming age, break-even and survivor benefits, along with spousal and survivor sequencing worksheets.
Compare the spousal and survivor sequencing worksheets in The Social Security Claiming & Family Benefits Kit.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.
David M. Keller is a finance writer based in Columbus, Ohio, covering personal finance and consumer-focused economic topics. He earned his degree in journalism from Ohio University and began his career reporting on local business and economic trends for a regional media outlet. Since then, he has contributed to a variety of online publications, focusing on clear, practical coverage of topics such as cost of living, debt, and everyday financial decision-making.
