The Unfortunate Truth About Claiming Social Security at Full Retirement Age

If you want to eliminate some money stress during retirement years, claiming Social Security at full retirement age may seem like the right move. After all, based on its title, full retirement age sounds like the age when Social Security wants you to retire. You also avoid early filing penalties if you wait until your FRA.

However, the unfortunate truth is that there are several big downsides to claiming at your FRA instead of waiting beyond it until 70. Those downsides include missed income and lost opportunities that could cost you big time for the entirety of your retirement years.

Keep reading to get more clarity on what your FRA is and the consequences of claiming Social Security at that time in your life.

When is FRA?

First things first: When is your FRA? If you were born in 1960 or later, it's 67. If you were born earlier, it's:

• 66 and 10 months if you were born in 1959
• 66 and 8 months if you were born in 1958
• 66 and 6 months if you were born in 1957
• 66 and 4 months if you were born in 1956
• 66 and 2 months if you were born in 1955
• 66 if you were born between 1943 and 1954

If you claim at exactly your full retirement age, you'll collect your primary insurance amount (PIA) or your standard benefit, as it's also called.

Claiming at FRA means giving up thousands

The first big downside of claiming at FRA is that doing so directly reduces your potential income. While it's true you won't get hit with early filing penalties, you pass up the chance to earn delayed retirement credits.

Those credits are worth two-thirds of 1% per month for each month you wait until age 70. That adds up to an 8% annual increase, leaving you with 24% more than your standard benefit if your FRA is 67 and you wait until 70, when your credits are maxed out.

If your standard benefit at FRA would've been $2,000 but you waited until 70 to get a 24% boost, you'd increase that amount to $2,480. Opting not to wait beyond FRA and accepting that standard benefit means you'll have $480 less every month for life.

Your future COLAs are lower

Your choice to pass up delayed retirement credits doesn't just affect you once. Your benefit is smaller, and so all of your future COLAs are as well.

Cost-of-living adjustments are built into Social Security to help ensure your money keeps pace with inflation, but they're awarded on a percentage basis based on your current benefit.

While every retiree gets the same percentage increase, you'll see a larger dollar-per-dollar increase if you've waited beyond FRA and have a bigger benefit because of it.

In 2026, for example, the COLA was 2.8%. If your benefits were worth $2,000, they would've increased by $56, while you'd have $69.44 extra coming if you'd been collecting $2,480.This difference really adds up over 20 or 30 years of cost-of-living adjustments.

You could shrink your lifetime benefits

Since you get less money each month and lower raises if you claim at FRA instead of later, it probably doesn't come as a surprise that your lifetime benefits are also probably going to be lower if you don't delay your claim.

The big question when it comes to figuring out how to maximize your lifetime income is how long you'll live. If you die young, you could end up better off with an early claim. But if you live long enough, you'll break even for missed benefits and potentially end up with more lifetime income if you delay.

If you wait to claim beyond your FRA until 70, you miss three years of $2,000 monthly benefits, or $72,000. You earn $480 per month extra for this delay. So, divide $72,000 by $480 to figure out how many months you must collect an extra $480 to add up to the $72K you missed. It ends up being around 150 months, or 12.5 years.

If you live beyond age 82.5, you end up better off. And odds are good that's going to happen, as the CDC's life expectancy table shows a 65-year-old statistically has 19.5 years left of life.

Survivor benefits are also affected

A claim at FRA also means that you'll likely lock in lower survivor benefits for your spouse.

If you were the higher earner, survivor benefits may be worth more than your spouse's own benefit would be. Survivor benefits total either the amount the primary earner was collecting at the time of death or the amount due at the time of death, including delayed retirement credits if the primary earner hadn't claimed benefits yet.

So, starting checks at FRA means giving up those delayed credits, not just for you, but for your widow or widower as well.

The IRS may get a bigger cut of your retirement income

Finally, there's one more factor to consider. Social Security benefits are taxed based on provisional income, which is half of all Social Security benefits plus all taxable and some non-taxable income.

Claiming Social Security at 67 while drawing from your retirement accounts could potentially push you into taxable territory. If that's happening to you, you may be better off waiting to claim benefits until after FRA and, during those gap years when your income is lower, doing some Roth conversions. That means converting traditional 401(k) or IRA accounts to Roth accounts.

While a Roth conversion is a taxable event, and there are restrictions on when you're eligible for tax-free withdrawal from a Roth account after a rollover (you may have to leave the money in the Roth for five years), this strategy could still sometimes be a favorable tax move since qualified distributions from Roths aren't taxable and don't count towards provisional income.

Bottom line

With so many issues with a claim at FRA, it's clear there's a huge cost to starting your checks at full retirement age. When you're making your retirement plan, you should think seriously about the benefits of delaying Social Security until 70.

While this may mean you need to work a little longer, or have more savings to rely on until you claim benefits, it's often worth doing to max out your lifetime income, protect your spouse, and keep more of your hard-earned retirement money for yourself.