Six years of President Trump’s publicly released federal tax returns tell the tale.
For most retirees, Social Security income is indispensable. Although the average monthly retired-worker benefit to kick off 2025 was a modest $1,975.34, 88% of surveyed retirees in April 2024 told national pollster Gallup that their payout is needed, in some capacity, to cover their expenses.
Furthermore, recently updated estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities show that 22 million people were pulled above the federal poverty line by Social Security in 2023, 16.31 million of which were adults aged 65 and above.
Any American citizen who amasses 40 lifetime work credits (of which a maximum of four can be earned annually), and is at least 62 years old, meets the requirements to receive a monthly Social Security retired-worker benefit — and this includes President Donald Trump.
President Trump addressing reporters. Image source: Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour, courtesy of the National Archives.
Does President Trump receive a monthly Social Security check?
Whereas federal and/or state tax filings tend to be a personal matter, it’s become something of a tradition for presidential candidates and sitting presidents to release their federal tax returns to the public, with key personal information redacted. This began with President Richard Nixon more than a half-century ago and has continued with few interruptions until the present.
Although Donald Trump is the only sitting president not to make any aspect of their federal tax returns public since Nixon was in office, some of Trump’s tax returns (tax years 2015 through 2020) were eventually released by vote of the House Ways and Means Committee in December 2022.
All six of President Trump’s Form 1040 filings with the Internal Revenue Service show no income claimed in line 6a (“Social Security benefits”). In other words, even though the president qualifies for a monthly Social Security check, he hasn’t filed to collect benefits.
The same isn’t true for former President Joe Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden. The Bidens file their taxes jointly and are currently collecting respective benefits from America’s leading retirement program.
The Bidens’ 2023 Form 1040 shows the couple collected $64,254 in benefits, or $5,354.50 per month. A separate Social Security benefits worksheet made publicly available breaks this down to $42,842 to Joe Biden in 2023 and $21,412 to Jill Biden. The fact that the former first lady’s annual payout is roughly half that of her husband demonstrates that she’s receiving spousal benefits.
Monthly Social Security benefits are capped for well-to-do workers
Although Donald Trump has, thus far, passed on collecting his Social Security benefit, he and Biden would share a common trait: the capping of monthly benefits for high-earning workers.
To calculate what you’ll receive monthly, the Social Security Administration (SSA) takes four variables into account:
A workers’ full retirement age represents the age they become eligible to receive 100% of their retired-worker check. It’s determined entirely by the year you’re born and is therefore the only variable that you have no control over.
Your claiming age can wildly swing the payout pendulum. While retired-worker payouts can begin as early as age 62, there’s a financial incentive to remain patient. For every year a worker waits to collect their payout, beginning at 62 and continuing until age 70, their benefit can grow by up to 8%.
Lastly, work history and earnings history are intertwined. The SSA will use your 35 highest-earning, inflation-adjusted years when calculating your monthly payout. For President’s Trump and Biden, their adjusted gross incomes are high enough that they, more than likely, reached the respective earnings tax cap in all 35 years that would be used in their benefit calculation.
What this means, in simpler terms, is that even if Donald Trump and Joe Biden were consistently generating millions in average annual income, their monthly benefit would be capped by the program at full retirement age. In 2025, the maximum monthly payout at full retirement age is $4,018.
Image source: Getty Images.
Social Security income can be taxed, too!
The other trait President Trump would share with his predecessor, if he eventually chooses to collect a Social Security check, is the taxation of benefits.
In 1983, the asset reserves of Social Security’s trust funds were running on fumes. Without significant reform, sweeping benefit cuts would have been necessary to sustain payouts. This time crunch gave birth to the bipartisan Social Security Amendments of 1983.
This last major overhaul of Social Security gradually increased the payroll tax on workers as well as the full retirement age. More importantly, it introduced the taxation of benefits.
Beginning in 1984, up to 50% of Social Security benefits became taxable at the federal level if provisional income (adjusted gross income + tax-free interest + one-half benefits) topped $25,000 for single filers and $32,000 for jointly filing couples. In 1993, a second tier was introduced that allowed up to 85% of benefits to be taxed if provisional income surpassed $34,000 for single filers and $44,000 for couples filing jointly.
These line-in-the-sand income thresholds were only expected to impact higher-earning households when they were introduced. But since none of these thresholds have been adjusted for inflation over multiple decades, an increasingly larger percentage of senior households are affected by this tax each year.
The Bidens had $54,616 of the $64,254 collected in 2023 subject to federal taxation. Although President Trump has indicated that he’d prefer to do away with taxing Social Security benefits, he would also be subject to this tax if he were collecting a monthly check.
