How divorced spouses can claim Social Security on an ex-partner’s record

You can collect Social Security on an ex-husband's or ex-wife's earnings record. You do not need their permission, you do not need to tell them, and they will never find out from the agency.

I have said that sentence across a desk to women who looked at me as though I had made it up. It is real, it has been real for decades, and it is one of the most consistently missed benefits in the whole system.

The conditions

The marriage must have lasted at least ten years. Not nine years and eleven months. Ten.

You must currently be unmarried. If you remarried, you generally cannot claim on the ex, though there is an exception if that later marriage ended by death, divorce or annulment.

You must be at least 62.

And your ex must be entitled to benefits. Here is the useful wrinkle: if you have been divorced for at least two years, they do not have to have actually claimed. They only have to be old enough to be eligible. Somebody who is 65, still working, and delaying their own claim to 70 cannot block you.

What you get

Up to half of your ex's full retirement age benefit, if you claim at your own full retirement age. Claim earlier and the amount is permanently reduced. Full retirement age is 67 for anyone born in 1960 or later.

It is not half of what they actually receive. It is half of their figure at full retirement age, which is a different number if they claimed early or delayed.

You do not get both this and your own retirement benefit stacked. You get the higher of the two. If your own benefit is larger, the spousal amount is irrelevant and nobody will mention it to you.

Claiming it takes nothing away from your ex. Their check is not reduced by one cent, and their current spouse's benefit is not affected either. If they have remarried and the new wife is also claiming a spousal benefit, both of you can. There is no queue and no dividing up of a fixed amount.

I say this because the fear of causing trouble stops people from filing, and there is no trouble to cause.

The survivor benefit is the bigger one

If your ex-spouse has died, the rules change and they change in your favour.

A surviving divorced spouse can claim up to one hundred percent of what the ex was receiving, not fifty. You can claim as early as 60, or 50 if you are disabled. And remarriage after 60 does not disqualify you, which is a genuinely important detail that catches people out in both directions.

The ten year rule still applies.

This is where the real money sits, and it is also where the ignorance is deepest, because nobody thinks to check whether an ex-husband they have not spoken to since 1998 is still alive.

What you need to bring

Your marriage certificate and your divorce decree. Both of them, and the decree needs to show the dates clearly enough to establish the ten years.

Their Social Security number if you have it. If you do not, bring their full name, date of birth, place of birth, and parents' names. The agency can usually find the record from that. It is slower, but it works.

Your own birth certificate and Social Security number.

Plenty of people no longer have a decree from a marriage that ended thirty years ago. Order a certified copy from the county court where the divorce was granted. It costs a small fee and takes a couple of weeks, and it is worth starting before you make the appointment.

The part I want to be blunt about

Nobody is going to contact you about this. There is no letter. The agency does not cross reference divorce records and write to people telling them they may be eligible.

I met a woman in her seventies who had been divorced at 34 after twelve years of marriage, had worked low paid jobs her whole life, and was collecting a very small benefit on her own record. She was eligible for roughly double on his. She had been eligible for eleven years and had never been told, because she had never asked, because she had no reason to imagine it was possible.

Six months of back pay was all she could recover. The rest was gone.

If you were married ten years or more and that marriage ended, go and ask. It costs you one appointment.