The Social Security Fairness Act

The Social Security Fairness Act of 2023 was, confusingly, signed into law on January 5, 2025. More confusion: what the Act did was to eliminate Social Security’s Windfall Elimination Provision. Wait — it eliminated an elimination? Yes, that’s right.

At the same time, the new law also eliminated the Government Pension Offset. The WEP and GPO, together, had reduced Social Security payments for people who had paid into both Social Security and some other pension program.

Those provisions were intended to prevent workers from qualifying for two different pension amounts — but not because they didn’t deserve the payments. In fact, they clearly DID deserve their full payment amounts.

So now a lot of our clients suddenly see an increase in their Social Security pension amounts, plus sometimes sizeable back payments. In this podcast episode, we talk about the Social Security Fairness Act and how it affects beneficiaries.