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How a Social Security-Run Safety Net Program Keeps Recipients From Getting Ahead
AARP is backing a bill to allow older adults and people with disabilities receiving Supplemental Security Income to save significantly more
Taylor Callery
Key takeaways
- Supplemental Security Income was created to help vulnerable older adults and people with disabilities, but beneficiaries face strict asset limits that have not been updated in more than 35 years.
- Advocates say those caps make it difficult for beneficiaries to build up even a small financial cushion, forcing people to live on a financial precipice.
- AARP supports bipartisan legislation that would lift the asset limits and make it easier for beneficiaries to save for emergencies and move toward self-sufficiency.
Peggy Mather lives on a financial tightrope.
She tries to tuck away a bit of savings for critical expenses, like the new brakes she urgently needed this spring for her 2016 Jeep Renegade. “They were metal to metal,” she says.
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But the 58-year-old Ohioan also must make sure her bank account never goes above $2,000. That’s because she receives Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a monthly benefit program overseen by the Social Security Administration (SSA) for people with very limited financial resources who are age 65 or older, blind or have a disability.
Among other stringent eligibility requirements, SSI carries strict limits on assets, such as bank accounts: $2,000 for an individual recipient, $3,000 for a married couple. The SSA monitors beneficiaries' financial resources, and those who go over the asset limit can lose eligibility.
Mather had a series of low-wage jobs until she developed severe back problems, including bulging and degenerative discs, in her mid-40s. She now gets $1,014 a month between SSI and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), the other disability benefit administered by Social Security. Without SSI, “I would be homeless,” she says.
To avoid losing the payments, Mather set up automatic daily balance notifications from her bank. “That helps relieve some of my stress,” she says. If she finds herself getting too close to the $2,000 cap, she withdraws money from her savings and spends it, even if she doesn’t have an immediate need. That makes it hard for her to build up any real financial cushion.
SSI’s stringent asset limits are getting fresh attention from disability and aging advocates and from lawmakers in Washington. The $2,000 and $3,000 thresholds haven’t been updated in more than 35 years, and some members of Congress say the current law discourages recipients from saving or working.
A broad coalition, including AARP, is backing bipartisan legislation that would raise the asset cap to $10,000 for individuals and $20,000 for married couples and index those thresholds to inflation. The SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act has been endorsed by more than 200 advocacy groups, from the Paralyzed Veterans of America to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Bill Sweeney, AARP’s senior vice president for government affairs, says SSI’s current asset limits are outdated and punitive.
“We punish people for doing the exact thing we tell them to do, which is to save, to work, to try to get ahead,” he says. “We need to make it so that people can save a little bit of money for an emergency [and] they can try to get back on their feet. That should be the goal of the program.”
Sweeney says the bill appeals to lawmakers across the political spectrum because “it’s both a conservative idea and a progressive idea at the same time — helping people to work and helping people to save while protecting people from the most dire financial straits.”
Lifeline to health care
Congress established SSI in 1972 to create a uniform, national safety net benefit for financially vulnerable older adults and people with disabilities, replacing a hodgepodge of state programs. As of June 2026, it was serving more than 7.3 million Americans, 2.5 million of them age 65-plus.
In 2026 the maximum federal SSI payment is $994 a month, or $1,491 a month for a couple in which both spouses are beneficiaries. Recipients can work and collect other government benefits, but there are strict limits on income, and exceeding them can reduce SSI payments or end eligibility. The average SSI payment in June 2026 was $738 for all beneficiaries, but considerably lower ($611 a month) for those 65 and older.
If SSI’s asset limits had been updated annually for inflation since the program’s inception, the cap today would be $11,891 for an individual and $17,836 for a couple, according to calculations by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based think tank.
Mather calls SSI a “lifeline.” Out of her $1,014 per month from SSI and SSDI, she must cover her car insurance, car payment, groceries, utility bills and other basic expenses. “It doesn’t go very far in today’s damn prices,” she says. But she manages, in no small part because SSI also serves as her connection to health insurance: In Ohio and most other states, SSI recipients are automatically eligible for Medicaid.
SSI can link low-income individuals with other assistance as well, such as food aid or affordable housing, says Katie Savin, an assistant professor in the division of social work at California State University, Sacramento.
“It’s sort of like a set of dominoes that depend on each other, and SSI is where it starts,” says Savin, who has studied the burden recipients face in meeting the program’s eligibility requirements.
That makes the prospect of being disenrolled particularly frightening — if you lose SSI, you may also lose health coverage, in-home health support and other services that are vital for people living with physical or mental impairments.
“I’ve seen clients who go through health crises [because they lose SSI]. I’ve seen clients whose housing is in jeopardy,” says Robyn Griffin, a senior legal aid attorney with Legal Counsel for the Elderly, an AARP charitable affiliate that serves older residents with low income in Washington, D.C.
“It impacts not only their financial health but their mental health,” she says. “Not having that income come in is very scary.”
‘Structurally enforced poverty’
Beneficiaries often feel stuck “in this very precarious spot,” says Savin: Their SSI payments may keep them afloat — barely — but they can’t move toward self-sufficiency. One of Savin’s study participants said she couldn’t get a ramp installed in her home because saving up for it would put her over the $2,000 limit.
“She had people lifting her in and out of her home … which is such a safety hazard,” Savin says.
Kerrie Popa, a 26-year-old Michigan resident who has a disability that affects her speech, mobility, and other activities, wants to save up to buy a house and get a decent job. But those things feel next to impossible, particularly since she recently got married.
Before the wedding, her husband, who has chronic health problems but is not on SSI, was not subject to any savings limits. Now the couple faces a combined asset limit of $3,000.
“Pretty much all of our savings will have to go towards paying down debt we are encouraged to accumulate because we can’t save,” says Popa, whose monthly SSI payment is the federal maximum of $994.
“Losing it would be catastrophic for me,” but staying on it is “basically structurally enforced poverty,” she says. “I can barely exist as it is.”
Popa got married despite what disability advocates call SSI’s “marriage penalty” — rather than being able to have double the assets of a single beneficiary, a couple can have only 50 percent more (and, if both spouses qualify for SSI, only 50 percent more in benefits). As an advocate herself, she says, she doesn’t want to hide the relationship or play by SSI’s “unjust rules.”
“Money is not worth more than love,” she adds, “and it’s so cruel to make people with disabilities choose between the two.”
SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano has taken steps recently to help streamline the SSI reporting and verification process, including creating an “improvement team” tasked with making it easier for recipients to comply with the program’s requirements. (While SSI is administered by the SSA, it is a needs-based public assistance program funded by general revenue, not the dedicated payroll taxes that primarily fund Social Security.)
“For the first time in the agency’s history, I named a lead executive and established the SSI Improvement office to transform the service we provide to SSI recipients,” Bisignano said in a statement accompanying a July report to Congress on SSI. “We have made the program better for the people who rely on it and the SSA employees who support them.”
A Social Security advisory board said there’s still room for improvement, noting that beneficiaries can’t view their SSI records to verify whether they’re accurate, complete or up to date.
“There is no mechanism to support recipients in making complete and accurate reports, and online tools remain limited to monthly wage submissions,” the advisory board said.
Small changes can have big effects
Legal aid attorneys say small changes in a person’s life can trigger SSI termination. A birthday check from a relative. A loan from a friend for home repairs. A small inheritance.
Beneficiaries who receive a little unexpected cash often think, “I can breathe. I can get ahead,” Griffin says. Instead, they land in a financial and bureaucratic mess.
“We’re seeing clients who have dementia or other cognitive impairments and other mental health issues [like] schizophrenia that prevent them from fully understanding the rules,” Griffin says.
Allison Jones, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands, says she frequently sees cases in which SSI recipients have lost their monthly payments because a life insurance policy has ticked up in value, putting them over the asset limit.
“That cash value is creeping up over time, and the person may not be tracking that,” she says. The fix? Cash out the policy and either spend the money or potentially convert it to a burial fund, which under SSI rules can contain up to $1,500 that doesn’t count against the asset cap.
“They're off SSI in the meantime, then they have to go back to [the SSA] within 12 months, ask for their payments to be reinstated and provide proof that they’ve spent down or converted the resource,” Jones says. “It’s just a lot of administrative work, both for the participant and for the agency.”
Lawmakers sponsoring the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act say raising the asset limits is a long-overdue, common-sense reform.
“We shouldn’t punish people who are working hard, saving their money and planning for the future,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) said in a statement when the bill was introduced.
In a statement to AARP, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), another sponsor of the measure, said the “SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act rewards Americans who save responsibly. This should be part of a larger reform package which ensures that benefits are protected for everyone by addressing [Social Security] trust fund insolvency.”
Mather says a higher asset limit would be transformative. “It would make a huge difference because we could save a little bit more money,” she says, “and not have to worry about having our only income ripped out from underneath of us.”
The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.
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