A growing number of parents reach their early sixties while they are still packing lunch boxes and helping with homework. Some, like a sixty-one-year-old state worker with eleven year old twins, are ready to retire at sixty two. The surprise for many is that Social Security may not only pay the parent, it can also pay monthly benefits to eligible minor children.
That extra income will not fix every budget stress, but it can still help with groceries, sports fees, or even part of the electric bill.
When children qualify for benefits on a parent’s record
Social Security is usually thought of as a retirement check for older adults. Yet the program also pays benefits to dependents when a worker starts retirement or disability benefits. To qualify, a child must be unmarried and under eighteen, or eighteen to nineteen while attending elementary or secondary school full time. Children who became disabled before age twenty two can often keep receiving benefits into adulthood.
There is another key condition. The parent has to be receiving a Social Security retirement or disability benefit. If the parent has not filed yet, benefits for the children cannot start.
When those rules are met, each minor child can receive up to half of the parent’s primary insurance amount. That is the benefit the parent would receive at full retirement age, which is sixty seven for anyone born in 1960 or later.
How much a family can receive
At first glance, half of a parent’s full benefit for each child sounds generous. In practice, there is a ceiling on how much Social Security will pay to all family members on one worker’s record.
This limit is called the family maximum. For most retirement cases, it works out to roughly 150% to 180% of the worker’s full benefit.
If the combined checks for children and a current spouse go over that ceiling, Social Security trims the dependents’ amounts proportionally until the total fits under the cap. The worker’s own retirement benefit is not cut as part of this adjustment.
So in a family with two or three children, each child may receive less than a straight 50% share. The total support for the household is what matters, not the exact split between siblings.
Does a state pension reduce what children can get?
Many public employees also qualify for a state or local pension. For decades, special rules called the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset could reduce Social Security checks for people who also received a pension from work that did not pay Social Security tax. Those rules sometimes affected benefits for dependents as well.
That landscape changed in 2025. The Social Security Fairness Act ended both the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset for benefits payable from January 2024 onward.
For parents retiring today, that means a typical state pension no longer triggers those old penalties on their own Social Security retirement benefit. Because the child benefit is calculated as a share of that unreduced benefit, the pension itself does not separately cut the children’s payment.
The trade off when claiming at sixty two
There is still an important decision to make. To unlock benefits for minor children, a parent has to start their own Social Security retirement benefit. If they claim at sixty two, that retirement check is permanently reduced compared with filing at full retirement age.
For someone whose full retirement age is sixty seven, taking benefits at sixty two cuts their own monthly amount by about 30%.
On the other hand, waiting means the children may lose months or even years of potential payments. Most child benefits end at eighteen, or at graduation or shortly after nineteen if the child is still in high school.
So parents face a real balancing act. Higher income for the household while kids are still at home, or a larger check for the parent for the rest of their life.
Planning ahead for your family
In practical terms, this comes down to cash flow and priorities. Some parents choose to treat the children’s checks as money for present expenses. Others save part of that income in a college fund or long-term account in the child’s name, if their own budget allows.
A good first step is to open or log in to a personal account on the Social Security website and review the benefit estimates for different claiming ages. Then, families can run simple scenarios.
How much would the household receive each month if the parent claims at sixty two and the children qualify? How would things look if the parent waits until sixty seven, when the kids may no longer be eligible?
While these numbers will not make the decision for you, they do give a clearer picture before you hand in a retirement notice or walk away from that last shift.
The official statement was published by the Social Security Administration.
