Social Security reports digital service and claims gains in fiscal 2026

The Social Security Administration said its fiscal 2026 service measures improved across phone, online and in-person channels, while initial disability claims processing and the agency’s backlog also fell compared with fiscal 2024. In a release dated Oct. 23, SSA described the figures as results of a “digital-first” operating strategy. The announcement gives administrative service data and selected comparisons; it does not provide a full audited performance report, and several figures compare different periods or count different kinds of activity.

The agency reported an average answer time of 5.6 minutes on its National 800 Number in fiscal 2026, compared with 28 minutes in fiscal 2024, which it characterized as an almost 80% improvement. SSA said the busy rate was zero during the final six months of fiscal 2026, and that intelligent routing and expanded interactive voice response technology handled 40% of calls. These measures describe contact-center operations. The release does not give total call volume, the distribution of waiting times, or an independently assessed share of callers whose questions were resolved on the first contact.

For field offices, SSA reported average wait times more than 30% below fiscal 2024 while serving nearly 30 million visitors nationwide. It said every field office caller could use an automated self-service option in fiscal 2026, compared with no interactive voice response option in fiscal 2024. Online, the agency recorded more than 571 million transactions during fiscal 2026, a 30% increase from fiscal 2024, and reported more than 105 million registered my Social Security accounts, 20% above the earlier comparison. Transactions are activity counts, while registered accounts are a cumulative user base; neither number establishes how many distinct people used online services during the year.

Disability claim processing was another area of reported change. SSA said average processing time for initial claims was 40 days, or 17%, shorter than in fiscal 2024. It reported 911,000 initial claims in the backlog at the end of fiscal 2026, down 23% from nearly 1.2 million at the end of fiscal 2024. The release also said the annual average wait for a hearing had fallen by 72 days since fiscal 2024. These are separate stages of the disability process: initial claims and hearings should not be treated as one queue, and a backlog count is a point-in-time stock rather than the number of claims handled over the fiscal year.

The release also highlighted data integrity and collections. SSA said its database cleanup corrected nearly 15% of active Social Security numbers, added 17 million dates of death it said had been missing, and updated about 25 million records without citizenship information. The agency described these as database corrections and record updates; it did not say those record groups were mutually exclusive or explain the number of individuals represented. SSA also said it had returned $645 million in delinquent program debt to the trust funds since resuming the Treasury Offset Program in March 2025. The agency said it saved the public 200 million hours in fiscal 2025 through reduced waiting, a separate prior-year estimate from the FY2026 service measures.

SSA attributed its performance changes to technology, process management and expanded access, and said it would continue those efforts. Its release does not include a service-by-service cost analysis, independent verification, or a breakdown by state, age, disability status or channel. It also does not show whether changes in staffing, demand or case mix contributed to the comparisons. The numbers therefore provide an agency account of selected measures rather than a complete evaluation of service quality. Readers can distinguish the operational indicators—wait times, transactions, claims and data corrections—from the agency’s broader characterization of the results as its best overall performance.