By Aliss HighamShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberThe Social Security Administration (SSA) has outlined a series of upgrades to its services in a letter to Congress, reporting faster payments, shorter wait times and a reduction in its disability claims backlog during Fiscal Year 2025.
Backpayments Sent Early
In his update, Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano touted the agency’s progress on distributing benefits tied to recent legislation. Lawmakers passed a bipartisan bill—the Social Security Fairness Act—in January under the Joe Biden administration, which repealed two provisions that limited retirement benefits for certain workers, including teachers, firefighters, and police officers, some federal employees, and their spouses.
“In July, we announced that we completed sending over 3.1 million payments, totaling over $17 billion, to beneficiaries eligible under the Social Security Fairness Act (SSFA), 5 months ahead of schedule.”
24/7 Online Access and Increased Use
Bisignano also pointed to improvements to the SSA’s online portal. He said he discovered shortly after taking office that the website was routinely offline for more than a full day each week, leaving beneficiaries without immediate access to their information.
He said that prior to his tenure as commissioner, which began in May, the SSA’s online portal, my Social Security, had a "scheduled downtime of 29 hours a week, leaving Americans without instant access to their benefit information."
"As a result of the quick actions taken by my leadership team this past summer, Americans now have 24/7 access to their Social Security information online," Bisignano wrote.
...Shorter Waits by Phone and in Office
The commissioner said the agency also made gains in customer service, including faster response times and increased use of automated tools.
“Through the use of technology and proper allocation of resources, we have been able to reduce the year-over-year average speed of answer from 28 minutes in Fiscal Year 2024 to 15 minutes in Fiscal Year 2025, while serving 65 percent more callers than the previous year. In addition, nearly 90 percent of calls are now resolved via self-service or convenient callbacks, methods Americans frequently use when contacting organizations in both the public and private sector.”
Office visits saw similar improvements, he said.
“In-office wait times are down almost 27 percent to 22 minutes from 30 minutes at the end of last year. Visitors who had a scheduled appointment only waited around 6 minutes on average to receive assistance. This has been made possible with changes to the field office phone systems now allowing for nearly 30% of calls to be handled instantaneously through technology, which gives our teams more time to focus on customers needing help in-person.”
Earlier this year, the SSA's acting inspector general launched a review into call center wait times and the agency’s broader capacity to deliver services.
The inquiry followed a request from Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who raised concerns about the agency’s performance after a Department of Government Efficiency-led (DOGE) reorganization earlier this year. Warren also questioned whether the public is receiving reliable information, noting that Social Security this year removed several performance indicator trackers from its website.
Disability Backlog Reduction
The update also addressed one of the SSA’s most pressing problems: the disability claims backlog. The number of pending cases had reached a record high in mid-2024 but has since dropped significantly.
“The disability claims backlog was at an all-time high in June of 2024 with over 1.26 million pending claims," Bisignano wrote. "I am proud to share that we have reduced the backlog this year by over 25 percent to 865,000, a level that hasn’t been seen since 2022. We also decreased the initial claim average processing time by 13 percent to 209 days, down from 240 days in January 2025, and maintained historic lows of disability hearings pending, with average wait times reduced by nearly 60 days since the last fiscal year.”
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