‘No vote, no warning, just plain math’: Social Security is six years from an automatic 22% cut—and most Americans have no idea

More than one in five Americans don’t know that their Social Security checks could be cut by roughly 20% in about six years, according to a recent TIAA survey on Social Security.

The program’s retirement trust fund, which pays benefits to retirees and survivors, is projected to run out of reserves in the fourth quarter of 2032, according to the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report. After that, incoming payroll taxes would cover only 78% of scheduled benefits. The resulting 22% cut would apply across the board, including to people already collecting.

“Insolvency is a slightly misleading word for what the Trustees are projecting,” says Martin Mulyadi, YHB Endowed Chair in Accounting and Professor of Accounting at Shenandoah University. Payroll taxes keep flowing after 2032, he notes: “Social Security is not running out of money in 2032. It is running out of savings.”

The stakes are large. Social Security pays monthly benefits to more than 71 million people, and it provides the majority of income for 43% of seniors, according to AARP. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) estimates that a 22% cut would cost a typical dual-income couple retiring in 2033 about $16,900 a year.

CRFB has warned that the program is “on a collision course toward insolvency,” and Fortune has reported that its finances haven’t looked this bad since 1983. The alarm grew louder after the trustees confirmed the 22% cut in June.

“America has a 25 trillion dollar problem,” says Michael Liner, a disability attorney and founder of Liner Legal, a law firm that specializes in Social Security disability benefits. “The gap between what Social Security has promised and what it can actually afford to pay.”

The trustees now put that 75-year gap even higher, at $29.3 trillion in present value, up from $25.1 trillion in last year’s report. If nothing changes, Liner says, the cut arrives automatically: “No vote, no warning, just plain math.” For many retirees, he adds, it will be “the difference between getting by or not.”

Social Security is funded mainly by payroll taxes. For decades, those taxes exceeded what the program paid out, and the surplus built up reserves in two trust funds: the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) fund for retirees and survivors, and the Disability Insurance (DI) fund.

That changed in 2021, when the retirement fund’s costs began exceeding its total income, according to the Congressional Research Service. Reserves have been covering the difference ever since.

“In 2025, Social Security took in about $1.45 trillion and paid out about $1.61 trillion, and reserves covered the gap,” Mulyadi says.

The disability fund is in better shape; the trustees don’t project it running dry at any point in the next 75 years. If Congress legally merged the two funds, combined reserves would last until 2034 and then cover 83% of benefits, according to CRFB. That would require a change in law, and it wouldn’t close the underlying shortfall.

The public has noticed. In a June 2025 survey, just 36% of Americans told AARP they were confident in Social Security’s future, the lowest level since 2010.