A new report from the Urban Institute highlighted a significant – but unexplained – increase in denials for disability at the initial application stage.
So far in 2025, the Social Security Administration has processed 8 percent more claims than the previous year, an increase that amounts to 159,000 more applications.
Despite the higher number of applications, SSA still only approved around 812,000 applications. That means the actual percentage of applications approved decreased from 38.7 percent to 36 percent.
There’s not an entirely clear reason for this either.
Historically, disability applications increase and denials during recessions as those experiencing job loss pursue disability with less medical evidence than many other claimants. While there are some concerns about the current state of the economy, the U.S. is not actually in a recession as of September 2025.
Another explanation could be a change in Social Security regulations. However, this also doesn’t really make sense.
There haven’t been any recent changes to the law that should have significantly impacted approval numbers. If anything, a recent change that considers less past work should have increased the number of approvals.
While the approval rate has fluctuated by a few percentage points over the past few decades, Urban suggests that the sudden drop in approvals may be the result of agency cuts.
Fewer people are working at Social Security, but are still under pressure to process claims, and a denial is quicker to process than an approval.
Further analysis by the agency could better explain what’s going on here, though so far there seems to be little interest into looking into the issue from the administration.
