Social Security Disability Onset Date

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“Hi, my name is attorney Andrew Kinney. I work at Hoglund law office. I practice Social Security disability law and supplement security income law, otherwise known as SSI.

Today I wanted to talk about onset date, what it is, and how it plays into your social security claim.

Social security is deciding whether you could work fulltime despite your medical problems. One of the ways they do that is looking at your medical evidence. Understandably, when you look at medical evidence you want to know what’s wrong. Sometimes it’s easy to know what is wrong and when it started because it might have been a car accident or some trauma that you can identify. That’s called an onset date. That actually can be pretty easy because the day before you were working and the day after you weren’t able to. The only question left is, from that day forward, is it disabling enough?

Now another problem though with onset date is when it’s not so easy. Let’s say someone has dementia, and it slowly progresses over time.  You can see that in those situations there is probably be a date when social security will be convinced that you are unable to work, but it isn’t so obvious when you couldn’t.  In those situations what we do is we try to be conservative, but yet, we need to be able to identify a date in the front end of the social security claim so that there is a working date to evaluate going forward. 

Social security is not locked into an onset date, and in fact, at a social security hearing I routinely tell my clients that the social security judge decides: are you disabled, but also when.  And it may not be the date you think you were first disabled.

 A common question for social security claims when is: when did they last work?  That usually becomes an onset date in and of itself.  Now think about this though, it may not be a medical reason that you first weren’t able to work.  If you were laid off from work that doesn’t necessarily mean that you were medically unable to work.  So keep in mind that when you apply for social security benefits that social security will need to know when you were medically unable to work, and that may not be when you were laid off due to a shut down of a factory, and it may actually be when you were incidentally laid off but over time you had depression or anxiety or some other disabling impairment. 

If you have more questions about onset date and social security claims, feel free to go to our website at Hoglundlaw.com.  We try to write things on there to help you. If you have questions you can talk to our office at 1-800-850-7867. Also feel free to go to our website or call our office, anything that would help you.  Thank you”