The Social Security Administration announced its best overall performance on record for fiscal year 2026, driven by technology upgrades and process improvements that it said produced double-digit gains across service metrics.
The agency reported significant improvements in customer service. The average wait time on its 800-number fell to 5.6 minutes in FY 2026, compared with 28 minutes in FY 2024—a reduction of nearly 80 percent. The agency maintained a zero percent busy rate over the previous six months and achieved its highest answer rate in more than a decade. Intelligent call routing and interactive voice recognition handled 40 percent of calls.
Online services expanded sharply. The agency completed over 571 million online transactions in FY 2026, a 30 percent increase from FY 2024. Registered users of my Social Security accounts grew to 105 million, a 20 percent increase from FY 2024, making SSA the nation's largest digital financial services provider, the agency said. The agency also reported eliminating 29 hours of weekly website downtime, enabling uninterrupted access to personal accounts.
Processing times for disability claims improved. The agency reduced the average processing time for initial disability claims by 40 days—or 17 percent—compared to FY 2024. The initial disability claims backlog fell by 23 percent, from nearly 1.2 million at the end of FY 2024 to 911,000 at the end of FY 2026. The average wait time for a hearing shortened by 72 days since FY 2024.
In other announcements, SSA said it returned $645 million in delinquent programmatic debt to Trust Funds since resuming a collection authority in March 2025. The agency also completed what it described as the most comprehensive Social Security number database cleanup in its history, correcting nearly 15 percent of all active SSNs, adding 17 million previously missing dates of death, and updating approximately 25 million records that lacked citizenship information.
The agency said productivity improved at historic levels over the last two years—a 10 percent increase year-over-year in FY 2025 followed by an 8 percent year-over-year increase in FY 2026.