The Social Security Administration (SSA) recently announced it reduced its backlog of new applications for both Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income benefits.

As of July 2025, the number of people waiting for an initial determination on their claim totaled approximately 940,000. This marks a reduction from an all-time high of 1.26 million people waiting in May 2024.

Despite the decrease, the current backlog is still higher than at any point during the Great Recession or COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting years of underfunding and understaffing at the SSA.

During and following the pandemic, the SSA experienced a period of extremely high turnover that reduced productivity by about 20 percent. In 2023 and 2024, the agency invested in hiring and training staff to get back to full productivity. This earlier investment in staffing is now bearing fruit at the agency—but it doesn’t fully explain the reduction in the backlog.

At the same time, two surprising and concerning trends in disability claims in state-level data have emerged: a decrease in new disability claims and an increase in initial denials. It’s unclear what’s driving these developments, and the SSA has not acknowledged them. On the one hand, fewer new claims and more denials could mean fewer people need supports. On the other hand, it could mean people with disabilities are facing more barriers to applying for benefits.

To better understand what’s driving the decrease in claims, increase in denials, and reduction in the backlog, the SSA could invest more in the research and staff needed to study these trends.

Fewer people are applying for disability benefits

Recently released state-level data reveal that disability applications are down 7 percent in fiscal year (FY) 2025, compared with FY 2024. Over the past 10 months, 163,000 fewer applications for benefits have been submitted.

A small decline in applications is not unusual. Application rates have gradually declined over the past decade but began to increase in 2023 and 2024, and the SSA Office of the Chief Actuary forecasts (PDF) a modest increase in their long-term projection. Demographic factors, such as more people reaching near-retirement age, can also affect the number of applications, but these changes are relatively small from year to year. Similarly, improved health and job prospects could be causing fewer people to seek benefits. However, these factors would result in gradual decreases in the number of people applying.

Other more-concerning factors that could be driving fewer people to apply for disability benefits are the SSA’s large claims backlog and long wait times. In recent years, underfunding and pandemic-related staffing disruptions caused the average time someone spends waiting for an initial disability determination to more than double—from 3.7 months in 2017 to a peak of 7.7 months in August 2024. Even now, wait times remain above 7 months. Research shows longer wait times and field office closures correlate with fewer applications.

This would be a cause for concern, as people with severe and long-term disabilities could be deterred from applying for critical benefits and health care because of the SSA’s failure to fully process claims it receives in a timely manner.

The SSA is denying more disability claims at the initial stage

State-level data show the SSA processed 8 percent more initial disability claims in 2025, an increase of 159,000 decisions. However, over the same period, the share of claims the SSA approved fell by nearly 3 percentage points, from 38.7 percent in FY 2024 to an average of 36.0 percent in FY 2025. (To assess the SSA’s denial rates in FY 2025, we use state-level data through July 2025; for the remaining two months of the fiscal year, we use levels in 2024.)

The drop in the approval rate means that while the number of approved claims remained flat at about 812,000 from 2024 to 2025, denials account for the entire increase in the total number of decisions. If the approval rate remained at 38.7 percent, an estimated 61,000 more people would have been approved in 2025.

It’s unclear why the denial rate has increased, and it’s unusual that the rate is up, given the concurrent decline in applications. Typically, application numbers and approval rates don’t move in the same direction together. For example, during periods of recession, applications typically increase while approval rates fall. Recession-driven job loss or increased labor market difficulties often lead more applicants with less-clear eligibility to apply for benefits.

The speed with which the approval rate has recently dropped is also atypical. Though the annual approval rate has fluctuated by about 5 percentage points over the past 25 years, such changes are usually quite gradual. The current drop—from an average of 38.3 percent over the past four years to 36.0 percent—is sharper than usual.

The quick drop in approval rates is likely cause for concern. There’s no evidence of any policy or program changes that would reduce approvals nationally. However, the SSA has recently seen reductions in staffing and funding. Conversations with people involved with the disability claim approval process suggest claim reviewers could be experiencing pressure to make decisions more quickly to achieve the agency’s claims-processing goals. They also suggest staff know a denial is faster to process than an allowance.

To better understand the drop in approval rates, the SSA could analyze claim decisions across states and among claim reviewers.

How more data could help the SSA reduce the backlog in claims while ensuring fairness and access to critical benefits

Despite the recent backlog reduction, the SSA still faces historically high numbers of people waiting for a decision on their disability benefit claim. Many will have to wait years to see their claim fully resolved. As the SSA works to reduce the disability claims backlog and wait times, the agency can use data to monitor and ensure faster decisions don’t come at the expense of accurate decisions.

Under the Trump administration, the SSA has moved to push out roughly 7,000 employees, including many of the staff who would have been responsible for analyzing these potentially concerning trends in higher denial rates and reduced applications. In light of this, the SSA needs to engage in a thorough review of the disability determination process to ensure accurate decisions are being made at the initial and reconsideration stages. This will result in disability programs that are as accessible as they were intended to be without imposing unnecessary hardships on applicants and relying on a costly appeals process to get to the right decisions.