“Social Security Won’t Let You Have a Nest Egg”: The Case for Updating Supplemental Security Income’s Asset Limit
By Katie Savin, Ford Fellow in Disability Policy Research
National Academy of Social Insurance
May 2025
Summary
The roughly 7 million older and/or disabled Americans who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) must adhere to numerous complex, rigid, and outdated program rules in order to keep their benefits, one of the most punishing of which is the asset limit. SSI recipients are limited to just $2,000 in assets (including cash, money in bank accounts, and the value of life insurance policies and burial funds) for individuals and $3,000 for married couples.
These limits were never indexed to inflation at SSI’s inception in 1972 and have not been updated since 1989. If the asset limit had been indexed to inflation in 1972, it would be approximately $10,000 for an individual today (Romig, et al., 2023). Recent polling by the National Academy of Social Insurance reveals strong, bipartisan support for increasing SSI’s asset limit, with two-thirds Americans in favor of raising it to at least $10,000 for individuals and $20,000 for couples (National Academy of Social Insurance, 2025).
On April 1, 2025, a group of bipartisan legislators took a vital step towards modernizing SSI in their re-introduction of the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act. The SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act would update the SSI asset limit to $10,000 for individuals and to$20,000 for couples, thereby bringing SSI into the 21st century and eliminating the marriage penalty (an asset limit reduction of 25 percent) embedded in current policy. The legislation would also index the asset limit to inflation, so that future generations of SSI recipients will not find themselves trapped in a policy designed for a decades-old economy.
This brief uses a secondary analysis of qualitative research with over 75 working-age, disabled, SSI recipients to describe the harmful impacts of SSI’s asset limits (Savin, 2021, 2023, 2024a, 2024b; Savin & Jones, 2025). Four main themes emerged: SSI asset limits 1) exacerbate financial precarity; 2) force ill-advised financial behavior; 3) prevent beneficiaries from planning for the future; 4) cause a psychological toll. The reflections from recipients of SSI below are clear: it’s time to update SSI’s asset limits.