The trust fund runs dry in 2032. When it does, women who earn less, live longer, and lean on it hardest absorb the deepest cut.
The latest Social Security Trustees Report projects that the retirement trust fund—not the Social Security program itself—will be depleted in 2032.
Think of the trust fund as Social Security’s savings account. After the 1983 reforms, the program collected more payroll taxes than it needed and saved the surplus to help pay benefits after Baby Boomers retire. Today, payroll tax revenue alone no longer covers scheduled benefits, so Social Security has begun drawing down those reserves to make up the difference.
Each year, the Trustees Report evaluates Social Security’s finances. This year’s report projects that once the retirement trust fund is exhausted, incoming payroll taxes would cover about 78% of scheduled benefits, leaving retirees with roughly 22% less than promised if Congress takes no action.
For decades, many Americans have treated warnings about Social Security as background noise. The latest Trustees Report makes those consequences harder to ignore. If Congress still fails to act, the women with the smallest checks today could face the hardest choices tomorrow.
Why Women Have More to Lose
A 22% benefit reduction would affect every retiree, but not equally.
If you’re a woman, you face a triple challenge: You’re more likely to retire with a smaller benefit, rely on that benefit for longer, and be harmed more if it’s reduced.
The first challenge starts long before retirement.
“Women tend to have lower earnings, spend more time out of the workforce because of caregiving, and are overrepresented in lower-paying jobs,” said Amy Matsui, vice president for Child Care and Income Security at the National Women’s Law Center.
Social Security’s formula helps lower earners, but it can’t erase years of lower pay, caregiving, and time out of the workforce. As a result, women still retire with smaller benefits than men.
Women live longer than men, are more likely to outlive a spouse, and often rely on a single Social Security check for years. Divorced and never-married women depend on a single benefit throughout retirement.
Women also have less room to absorb a benefit cut because Social Security often isn’t a backup plan—it’s the plan.
According to the AARP Public Policy Institute, 45% of women aged 65 and older receive at least half of their income from Social Security, compared with 41% of men. For some, the program is even more essential: 22% of older women depend on Social Security for at least 90% of their income, compared with 19% of older men. That dependence helps explain why Social Security lifted nearly 11.4 million women aged 65 and older out of poverty in 2024.
Even women who feel financially secure today can become more dependent on Social Security. Retirement can last decades. A spouse may die, health care costs can rise, savings can shrink, and income that feels supplemental at 65 may become essential by 85.
As of December 2024, retired women age 65 and older received an average Social Security benefit of $1,808 per month, according to the National Women’s Law Center. A 22% reduction would lower that to about $1,410—a loss of nearly $400 every month. For women who rely on Social Security for most of their income, a smaller benefit doesn’t mean cutting extras from their budgets. It can determine whether they can afford the basics like housing, health care, food, transportation, and prescription medications.
Some retirees are already living that close to the edge. In 2024, NBC News profiled 71-year-old widow Lucy Haverfield, whose retirement savings had been depleted and who was living on $2,400 a month in Social Security benefits. Rising food, utility, and insurance costs had already forced her to rely on canned and frozen foods instead of fresh produce, turn off circuit breakers to reduce her electric bill, and sometimes skip paying one bill so she could afford food and gas.
If Social Security benefits were reduced by 22%, Haverfield’s monthly income would fall by about $528—from $2,400 to $1,872—reducing her income by $6,336 a year. For someone already making those kinds of tradeoffs, a cut that size could mean falling behind on her mortgage, going deeper into debt to cover emergencies, delaying needed medical or dental care, or having even less money for basic necessities.
What a Fix Could Look Like
Congress already knows how to fix Social Security. What’s missing isn’t math. It’s agreement over who pays for saving it—and who lawmakers decide to protect. Every year lawmakers delay, the eventual fixes become more painful.
Dr. Alicia Munnell, founder, former director, and current senior advisor at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, doesn’t believe there’s a silver bullet. Instead, she points to what she considers the most important recommendations from economist Wendell Primus’s broader proposal, which combines what she calls “tolerable benefit cuts and realistic revenue increases.” Rather than asking one group to shoulder the costs, the recommendations spread them across workers, employers, higher-income earners, and future beneficiaries.
Here’s what those recommendations would do:
Raise More Revenue
About one-third of the solution comes from raising more revenue.
Under the proposal, higher earners would pay Social Security taxes on more of their wages by gradually raising the payroll tax wage cap from $184,500 to about $300,000. It would also slightly increase the payroll tax rate—from 12.4% to 12.6%—which would add only a few dollars per paycheck for most workers.
It would also require higher-income retirees to pay taxes on all of their Social Security benefits and require active business owners to pay payroll taxes on all of their earnings instead of only a portion.
Reduce Future Benefits
Almost another third of the projected shortfall would be addressed through future benefit reductions by increasing the retirement age.
Asking people to work longer sounds reasonable because Americans are living longer. Critics call this “a benefit cut in a respectable suit” because delaying eligibility means many retirees ultimately receive fewer lifetime benefits.
The proposal takes a middle-ground approach by raising the retirement age only for higher earners while protecting lower-income workers—including many women who spent years caregiving or working physically demanding jobs such as lifting patients, cleaning hotel rooms, stocking shelves, or working factory lines.
Other recommendations would calculate benefits using your highest 40 earning years instead of 35 and gradually phase out the dependent spouse benefit while preserving survivor benefits for widows. That change could reduce benefits for people whose careers included extended caregiving or other interruptions.
Redirect Revenue and Expand Coverage
More than a third of the solution comes from changes that don’t directly cut benefits.
Those recommendations would send all taxes collected on Social Security retirement and disability benefits into the Social Security trust funds instead of splitting them with Medicare, increase legal immigration to bring more workers into the payroll tax system, and require newly hired state and local government employees who currently don’t participate in Social Security to begin paying into the program.
Munnell supports the package because she believes combining moderate benefit reductions with realistic revenue increases is more equitable than automatic across-the-board cuts if Congress fails to act.
The Retirement Women Were Promised
Social Security isn’t on the verge of disappearing. But if Congress continues to delay action, the benefits millions of Americans have been promised could be reduced automatically once the retirement trust fund reserves are exhausted.
The choices aren’t hidden. Lawmakers can raise more revenue, reduce future benefits, redirect existing tax revenue, expand the number of people paying into the system—or combine those approaches. Every option asks someone to give something up. The problem isn’t finding solutions; it’s getting lawmakers to agree on one.
By the time many women reach their late 70s and 80s, Social Security has become more important—not less. If a woman struggles to pay for housing, health care, groceries, or long-term care at 85, that isn’t simply “the economy,” poor personal choices, or bad luck. It’s the result of political decisions about how—or whether—to protect Social Security.
“You and I could figure it out in an hour,” Munnell said. “There’s no intellectual conflict here. All the thinking has been done. It’s a question of political will.”
If automatic benefit cuts happen, it won’t be because lawmakers lacked solutions. It’ll be because lawmakers failed to act.
For millions of women, those decisions won’t be measured in trust fund projections or actuarial reports. They’ll be measured in whether they can stay in their homes, fill prescriptions, buy groceries, or afford the care they need after a lifetime of caregiving and paying into the system.
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