Nothing may be more important to a Social Security disability case than the Alleged Onset Date (AOD). This is the date a claimant contends that impairments they suffer from have become disabling enough that they are unable to maintain gainful employment. Now, gainful employment may mean different things to different people, but for the purposes of Social Security disability, gainful employment is the ability to earn, as of 2016, $1,130 or more in gross income per month from work-related activities. Once a person earns this much money or more per month while working they are really not able to claim to Social Security that they are disabled and unable to work regardless of the types of impairments they may suffer from or the severity of those impairments.
The AOD must be a date from which moving forward, a claimant has not shown the ability to maintain gainful employment. Social Security will look at a claimant’s earnings history to make sure they are not making over $1,130, which Social Security terms Substantial Gainful Activity (SGA).
If it can be proven that a claimant’s AOD is a date in which their impairments became severe enough to prevent them from maintaining SGA, then Social Security may agree with a claimant’s AOD and make it the Established Onset Date (EOD) of disability.
By the time some people apply for Social Security disability they have not worked in several years. For instance, a particular claimant may have become injured in 2012 and ever since was unable to work at an SGA level. For some reason or another, maybe with hopes of returning to work at some point, this claimant doesn’t decide to apply for Social Security disability until 2016. Ideally this claimant would claim an AOD of the day and month in 2012 in which they stopped working and no longer were able to work at an SGA level. Most people are aware that Social Security will pay disabled workers ongoing monthly benefits, but also past-due benefits going to back to the EOD as long as it is within Social Security’s rules related to past-due benefits.
In the previous scenario it would make sense that a person who became unable to work in 2012 and who filed a disability claim in 2016 could claim past-due benefits to the time in which they became disabled, but Social Security does not allow this. Even in a perfect scenario Social Security will only go back as far as a year prior to the application to pay someone who is found disabled. Currently Social Security is on shaky financial ground, so asking the agency to pay benefits going back several years for potentially millions of Americans is just not feasible. Because Social Security will only pay disability beneficiaries up to a year prior to filing the initial application it is important to not wait too long after you are unable to work to file a claim. As you can see by the example we mentioned before, in that situation the disabled worker ends up forfeiting up to three years worth of past-due benefits. Considering the average monthly Social Security disability payment is about $1,100 per month, which means leaving close to $40,000 on the table. For more information about the disability date click here.
