The Five Month Waiting Period for SSDI

Disability applicants must wait five months after being accepted for Social Security disability insurance payments (also known as SSDI, SSD, and Title II disability benefits) before Social Security pays them disability compensation. This implies that before beginning monthly payments, the Social Security Administration (SSA) will withhold five months of benefits from an authorized applicant (or, more likely, before calculating back payments owed to the claimant, since it takes so long to get a disability approval).

SSI The waiting time of five months does not apply to SSI claimants who have been approved for disability benefits. After qualifying for disability, SSI claimants will be entitled to their first payment on the first of the month (albeit the first few months' payments will most likely be SSI back payments, as the SSA takes at least a few months to issue disability benefits).

Reinstatement If you were approved for SSDI benefits, went to work, stopped receiving benefits, and then became disabled again, you will not have to wait five months for payments if there are no more than five years between your first and second onset dates of disability. This is known as fast reinstatement.

Dependent benefits There is no waiting time if you apply for benefits as the child of a disabled worker. For more information, see our SSDI dependent benefits section.

When the Waiting Period Begins
The five-month waiting period begins on the claimant's determined onset date (EOD) of impairment. (This is the date the SSA claims the claimant became handicapped.) Thus, the date of entitlement to Social Security benefits (when the claimant begins to be entitled a monthly payment) does not begin until five months after the EOD.

What is the entitlement date in respect to the application date? The decided start date cannot be more than 17 months before the application date since the date of entitlement cannot be more than 12 months before the application date. The EOD is, of course, only set that far back if the SSA believes you were incapacitated for at least 17 months before to the application date. The EOD for some claims is set after the application date.

EXAMPLE: Lisa applies for disability due to spinal stenosis and is denied because the claims examiner believes her impairment is not severe enough (she does not have severely limiting motor, visual, or mental impairments). Lisa pursues an appeal, and an ALJ hearing takes a year. Her sickness worsened during this time, and the ALJ concludes during the hearing that she became medically eligible for disability six months after filing her application (this is both her medical onset date and her established onset date). Lisa receives SSDI compensation five months after her EOD. However, because that date was months after her hearing, she did not have to wait for benefits to be issued as a result of the ruling.

How a Protective Filing Date Affects the Waiting Period

If you have a protective filing date (the day you notified Social Security that you were planning to apply for disability benefits), that date qualifies as your application date for the purposes of the 17-month time limit stated above. The date of benefit eligibility might be 12 months before your protected filing date, suggesting that your established start date disability can be 17 months before the protective filing date.

For more information on the social security disability application waiting period, you can read our articles on disability backpay, disability closed benefits and onset date for disability. ​