Income of new retired workers by social security benefit levels: findings from the New Beneficiary Survey.

This article, based on New Beneficiary Survey (NBS) data, examines the sources and amounts of income available to newly retired workers by the level of their primary insurance amount (PIA). For this analysis, the PIA distribution was divided into quartiles. Retired workers with high PIA's were found to be more likely to have private pensions or asset income and thus to have the highest total income. When a spouse's income is taken into account, married retired workers at all PIA levels have higher total income than do the unmarried retirees. The difference between the income of married and unmarried retirees is greatest for those with PIA's in the lowest quartile, where the median total income of the married retirees is roughly three times as high as that of the unmarried group. New retirees with PIA's in the lowest quartile were a mixed group: Many had additional important sources of income; others did not and had income that was quite low. About 21 percent of those with PIA's in the lowest quartile had pensions and their median total income was about $19,100. An additional 55 percent were married women without pensions of their own who, together with their husbands, had a median total income of $15,900. The remaining 24 percent were married men and unmarried retirees without a pension and with much lower median income--$7,100 for the married men and their wives, and $5,000 for the unmarried men and women.