Social Security checks will be bigger in April for some retirees

Some Social Security recipients will see their monthly payment amount increase in April as a recently enacted law is implemented.

Americans who receive a public-sector pension in retirement were previously restricted from obtaining full Social Security benefits because of provisions known as the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO), which curbed benefits to certain public employees.

Under the Social Security Fairness Act, which then-President Joe Biden signed into law in January, beneficiaries affected by WEP and GPO will see their monthly benefit amounts increased as well as a one-time payment that's retroactive to January 2024, the first month WEP and GPO were lifted under the law. Lump-sum payments started going out in the last week of February.

The Social Security Administration (SSA) said on its website that beneficiaries will begin receiving their new monthly benefit amount in April 2025 for the March benefit, as Social Security benefits are paid a month behind. 

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Social Security payments will go out on April 9 for recipients with birth dates falling between the 1st and 10th of their birth month, while those born on the 11th to the 20th get payments on April 16, and those born from the 21st to 31st will get payments on April 23.

"We have been able to expedite payments using automation. For the many complex cases that cannot be processed automatically, additional time is required to manually update the records and pay both retroactive benefits and the new benefits amount," SSA wrote on its website. 

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"We are expediting these cases now. We are releasing retroactive benefits and sending new monthly benefits amounts as we process each case, with the expectation that all beneficiary records will be updated by early November 2025," SSA added.

SSA has asked beneficiaries to wait until April to ask about the status of their retroactive payments, so those were to be processed incrementally throughout March. SSA says it processed about 75% of adjustments, or about 2.3 million, under the Social Security Fairness Act as of March 28.

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SSA noted that most state and local government employees, or about 72%, work in Social Security-covered employment where they pay Social Security taxes and aren't affected by WEP or GPO policies. Those workers are unaffected by the changes and won't receive a benefit increase as a result of the new law.