If you Google “when should I claim Social Security,” the answer is generally the same for most: wait until 70.
Provided you plan to live into your early 80s, the cost of delaying is offset by the additional benefit you earn by waiting.
That advice is fine, but what gets lost in the simplicity is that it’s built on an assumption that doesn’t always hold — that both spouses are roughly the same age.
However, when there’s a real age gap between spouses, the question isn’t “which claiming age gets me the biggest check?” It’s “which claiming strategy results in the highest combined benefits for us both?”
Those are two very different questions, and they can lead to two very different answers.
Key Takeaways
- When spouses have a meaningful age gap (6+ years), waiting until 70 to maximize one spouse’s Social Security benefit can come at the expense of maximizing the years of income both spouses receive together.
- Waiting until 70 produces a substantially larger individual benefit, but that increase doesn’t necessarily make it the best claiming strategy for a household with a 6+ year age gap.
- When you model every claiming age against a wide range of possible lifespans, claiming at 62 may be a more favorable strategy across many potential outcomes, while delaying becomes optimal only when the older spouse lives well into their 90s.
- The best claiming strategy isn’t just the one with the highest potential lifetime benefit. It’s also the one that limits how much you stand to lose if your assumptions about longevity turn out to be wrong.
- Although claiming the lower benefit earlier can increase the years of overlapping income, delaying the higher earner’s benefit may still provide valuable longevity insurance because that larger benefit eventually becomes the survivor benefit.
- Delaying Social Security while relying on traditional IRA withdrawals can create an unnecessary tax burden because Social Security at worst is only 85% taxable as ordinary income while IRA distributions are 100% taxable.
- The right Social Security claiming strategy depends on the household’s unique ages, income sources, taxes, cash flow, and longevity risks—not simply on following the general rule to wait until 70.
The Overlap Problem: Why “Maximize the Benefit” Isn’t the Right Goal
Under today’s Social Security rules, the case for delaying can be compelling. Once you reach full retirement age, your monthly benefit grows by about 8% annually for every year you wait to claim, up until age 70.
And if you live long enough, those larger monthly checks can eventually make up for the years of benefits you gave up by waiting, leaving you with more Social Security income over your lifetime.
But when you introduce a meaningful age gap, another variable starts to matter: how long both spouses are alive and collecting benefits at the same time.
Consider our friends, Paul and Dani:
- Paul is 70 and recently started collecting his maximum Social Security benefit.
- Dani just turned 62 and plans to wait until 70, just as Paul did.
- Both are healthy and have other income, so delaying seems like a prudent decision.
Now fast forward eight years.
Paul dies at 78, just as Dani turns 70. As a surviving spouse, Dani can keep only the higher of their two benefits. If Paul’s is larger, her own benefit effectively disappears from the equation.
By waiting eight years to maximize her check, Dani gave up eight years of Social Security income for a benefit she may never meaningfully collect.
This is a grim outcome that can catch surviving spouses by surprise. Years of planning around a larger future benefit can suddenly become irrelevant.
And it exposes the weakness in the straightforward “wait until 70” recommendation. With a large age gap, the better question is which claiming strategy holds up best across the widest range of outcomes, not simply which one produces the largest possible benefit.
How Much Does Waiting Actually Buy You?
One of the reasons “wait until 70” has become such common advice is because the increased payments give you a permanent raise on every future payment you’ll receive.
Assuming a Full Retirement Age (67) benefit of $3,500 per month, the payments at various ages adjust as follows:
Viewed in isolation, it’s easy to conclude that waiting until 70 is the optimal choice. After all, a benefit that’s both 24% larger than your Full Retirement Age (FRA) amount and roughly 47% larger than claiming at 62 can be too good to ignore.
But that comparison assumes you’re evaluating one person’s benefit in isolation. For couples with a meaningful age gap, that becomes a misguided priority.
The goal isn’t simply to maximize one monthly check. The goal is to maximize the amount of Social Security the household collects over both spouses’ lifetimes.
Once you shift the objective from maximizing a benefit to maximizing years of overlapping household income, the optimal claiming age can look very different.
Running the Numbers: Modeling an 8-Year Age Gap
We modeled every claiming age from 62 through 70 against every plausible longevity outcome for the older spouse — 306 separate combinations in all.
Instead of asking which strategy wins under one assumption, we looked for the strategy that held up across the widest range of possible outcomes for clients Paul (70) & Dani (62).
Below is a table summarizing the optimal claiming age for Dani that comes out on top, depending on the duration of Paul’s life:
Reducing Paul’s well-earned retirement years to the term “duration of life” comes off a bit heartless, but a clear contrast jumps out immediately. Across the entire range of outcomes, Dani claiming at 62 is the optimal timing for all outcomes between Paul’s age 70-85.
And just like that, Dani’s waiting until 70 to claim her benefit can be misconstrued as a rather risky gamble with a higher power that Paul will live to age 94+.
Now don’t call me superstitious, but that’s a bit like uttering the word “no hitter” at the top of the 6th inning. Or if you’re another sorry Charger fan like me, it’s like reminding everyone that Nate Kaeding was the best regular season field goal kicker right before a playoff game started in the first decade of the 2000’s.
At first glance, those inflection points at different ages can seem arbitrary, but they’re simply the result of two competing forces. Every year the older spouse survives increases the value of delaying, because there’s another year for the larger delayed benefit to “pay back” the income that was forgone by waiting.
Eventually, those additional years outweigh the early payments that were sacrificed. The optimal claiming age doesn’t suddenly change because of a magic birthday — it changes because the economic trade-offs gradually shift as longevity expectations improve.
If you isolate two scenarios, one where Paul lives to 90 and one where Paul lives to 78, the numbers look like this:
A few things takeaways from these three scenarios.
- We can chase the optimal age but where we should be focusing is quantifying the difference between the best and worst outcomes.
- The difference between the best outcome and the worst outcome with Paul passing away at 78, is $228,964 (Age 62 vs. 70) or -8.18% over Dani’s lifetime.
- The difference between the best outcome and the worst outcome with Paul passing away at 90, is $37,268 (Age 62 vs. 68) or -1.13% over Dani’s lifetime.
- The difference between the best outcome and the worst outcome with Paul passing away at 100, is $268,294 (Age 62 vs. 70) or -6.81% over Dani’s lifetime.
While that’s real money in each scenario, it’s perhaps just a bit more than a rounding error relative to $2.8M – $3.9M range of lifetime household Social Security income. Said another way, the focus should be on identifying the outcome that gives Paul and Dani the most peace of mind.
The “Peace of Mind Premium”
There’s a more precise way to describe the differences between the best and worst case scenarios, and it’s worth naming because it shows up in every Social Security claiming decision, not just this one.
We don’t have a crystal ball to perfectly time Social Security claiming with some known future date of death. But we can compare the best-case and worst-case outcome for any claiming age, across every plausible lifespan.
The gap between guessing right and guessing wrong is what we call the “peace of mind premium.”
This is the cost of insuring yourself against an uncertain lifespan, rather than anchoring ourselves to just one guess.
Claiming earlier doesn’t potentially protect against a shorter-than-expected lifespan, it can also create more certainty. When certainty can be paired with an opportunity cost, we can make a more informed decision.
The chart below illustrates this concept that for every possible age Paul could pass away, there’s a different optimal claiming age for the Dani. In modern portfolio theory, this optimal risk-reward relationship is known as the efficient frontier.
We want our claiming strategy to closely align with the edge of each step to maximize our risk-reward trade-off across all potential outcomes.
Assumptions Used In This Analysis
COLA rate: 1.5% (default) • Analysis base year: 2026 • Paul death age: 90 • Dani death age: 100
Paul’s and Dani’s death ages above are used only to calculate the single “best strategy, both lifetimes” dollar amount shown for illustration. The chart and scenario matrix themselves test every claiming age against every possible death age from the current age through 100 — no single assumed lifespan drives the output.
Framed this way, claiming early is not only the optimal answer for Dani in a majority of scenarios, but also the choice least likely to leave her regretting the decision in hindsight.
And if it does turn out to be the wrong choice, she can quantify exactly what that peace of mind cost her.
The Tax Wrinkle That Rarely Gets Mentioned
There’s a second reason early claiming can make sense for the younger spouse in an age-gap household, and it has nothing to do with life expectancy: taxes.
Only up to 85% of a Social Security benefit is ever included in your federal taxable income. The other 15% (at minimum) comes to you federally tax-free. For most states, Social Security benefits are completely tax-free.
Compare that to a traditional IRA distribution, where 100% of the withdrawal counts as ordinary taxable income for the Feds and for most states.
If a couple delays Social Security and instead funds their spending from IRA withdrawals in the meantime, they’re deliberately choosing the more heavily taxed income source over the more lightly taxed one — for years, potentially over a decade.
That extra tax drag doesn’t show up in a simple “which age gets the bigger check” comparison, but it shows up on the tax filing every single year.
It also affects Medicare. Higher taxable income from IRA withdrawals can push a household into a higher IRMAA (Medicare Part B & D premium surcharge) tier faster than a comparable amount of partially tax-free Social Security income would.
It’s a small, quiet cost that compounds the longer a household leans on retirement account withdrawals instead of turning on a benefit that’s already sitting there, partially tax-free, waiting to be claimed.
What About Delaying the Higher Earner’s Benefit?
This is the other half of the puzzle, and it’s where the answer can flip. For a variety of reasons, one spouse’s benefit can be meaningfully larger than the other’s. It’s important to understand that the larger benefit is the one that will continue as a survivor benefit at the death of the first spouse.
That survivor benefit dynamic is exactly why the higher earner’s claiming decision often deserves more caution than the lower earner’s. Delaying the larger benefit protects the surviving spouse for the rest of their life, however long that turns out to be. This becomes a form of longevity insurance than simply just “maximizing a number.”
What emerges a balancing act of potentially claiming the smaller benefit earlier to maximize the years both checks overlap, while also protecting the larger benefit by delaying it. This of course depends on the couple’s health, other sources of income, and cash flow needs.
The Real Lesson: Run the Analysis, Don’t Default to the Rule of Thumb
The “Wait until 70” rule isn’t wrong, it’s just imperfect… like every other planning rule of thumb. It’s a rule of thumb built for the average case, and an age gap of even 5 to 10 years is enough to move a household away from the average case and into unique planning territory.
The couple we modeled this for had spent years assuming they’d delay as long as possible, simply because that’s what they had always read. Running the actual numbers — factoring in their specific ages, their pension timing, their tax bracket, and their guardrails — pushed them to consider claiming earlier than they expected, with the data to back it up.
That’s the difference between a rule of thumb and a plan. A rule of thumb tells you what usually works. A plan tells you what works for your household, given your ages, your income sources, and the range of outcomes you’re actually willing to plan around.
Final Thoughts
The Social Security timing decision gets treated like a math problem with one right answer. In reality, it’s a risk-management decision dressed up as a math problem and the right answer depends heavily on something no calculator can tell you for certain: how long each spouse will live.
What a complete analysis can do is show you the full range of outcomes and put a real number on the peace of mind premium you’re paying (or saving) with any given choice.
The peace of mind premium helps you make an informed trade-off instead of betting against a higher power with your future income sources. For couples with a 5+ year age gap between spouses, the claiming strategy can look completely different than the general rules of thumb otherwise indicate.