Social Security

County data on Supplemental Security Income (SSI) are a measure of the local impact of the program. This report is a resource for Social Security Administration (SSA) staff in formulating policy and for local service providers and economic planners.

The SSI program is a cash assistance program that provides monthly benefits to low-income aged, blind, or disabled persons in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the Northern Mariana Islands. The states and other jurisdictions have the option of supplementing their residents' SSI payments and may choose to have the additional payments administered by the federal government. When a state chooses federal administration, SSA maintains the payment records and issues the federal payment and the state supplement in one check. The data presented in this document are for federal and federally administered state payments only. State-administered supplementation payments are not included.

The tables present SSI data by eligibility category (aged, blind, and disabled) and age. State data on the number of recipients and amount of payments are shown in Tables 1 and 2, respectively. SSI recipients who also receive Social Security (Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance) benefits are shown in Table 1 and also in Table 3, which presents data at the county level.

Stella M. Coleman in the Division of SSI Statistics and Analysis programmed and compiled the data for this report. Staff of the Division of Information Resources edited the report and prepared the Web version for publication.

Manuel de la Puente
Associate Commissioner for Research, Evaluation, and Statistics
May 2009

The data in this report are drawn from the Supplemental Security Record, the principal administrative data file for the Supplemental Security Income program.

State and county payment amounts are rounded to whole dollars. A state payment amount may not equal the sum of the county payment amounts because the state total is derived by adding unrounded county payment amounts.

To avoid disclosure of information for particular individuals, the following county-level detail is suppressed:

• The number of recipients by age group, eligibility group, and receipt of Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) for a county with fewer than 15 recipients;
• The total number of recipients and the amount of payments if the number in a county is smaller than a predetermined threshold;
• The number of recipients within an age or eligibility group or within the group receiving OASDI if the table cell within the group contains a number smaller than a predetermined threshold;
• The amount of payments if the amount is smaller than a predetermined threshold.

Not all cell suppression is due to numbers being smaller than a threshold value. To prevent derivation of suppressed table cells by subtracting from totals, additional cells may be suppressed regardless of their value.

State totals include all county numbers, regardless of whether individual county numbers are suppressed.

Maryland, Missouri, Nevada, and Virginia contain at least one independent city that is not part of a county. For these states, the counties are listed in alphabetical order, followed by the independent cities in alphabetical order.