social security benefit - chunhualiao/public-docs GitHub Wiki
Here are quick, plain-English explanations of the acronyms that popped up in the Social-Security discussion:
| Acronym | Stands for | What it is / why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| AIME | Average Indexed Monthly Earnings | Your lifetime earnings after each year is “inflation-adjusted” (indexed) to today’s wage levels, averaged over your 35 highest years, then divided by 12. It’s the starting number used to compute your benefit. |
| PIA | Primary Insurance Amount | The benefit you’d get at Full Retirement Age (FRA). SSA applies a three-tier “bend-point” formula to your AIME to arrive at this dollar figure. Almost every other Social-Security amount (early/late retirement, spousal, survivor) is a percentage of the PIA. |
| COLA | Cost-of-Living Adjustment | The annual inflation raise applied to benefits each January, based on the CPI-W index. Keeps your monthly check from losing purchasing power over time. |
| WEP | Windfall Elimination Provision | A rule that can reduce your PIA if you also earned a pension from work not covered by Social Security taxes (e.g., certain state/local or foreign jobs). It prevents “double dipping” into two retirement systems. |
| GPO | Government Pension Offset | If you receive a non-covered government pension and want to claim spousal or survivor benefits on someone else’s record, the GPO can offset (often eliminate) those benefits—roughly two-thirds of that pension is subtracted from the spousal/survivor amount. |
| FRA | Full Retirement Age | The age (between 66 and 67 for today’s retirees) at which you receive 100 % of your PIA. Claim earlier and benefits are reduced; delay past FRA and they increase. |
| POMS | Program Operations Manual System | SSA’s internal rulebook—thousands of pages that codify exactly how every benefit is calculated and adjudicated. Many open-source tools cross-reference POMS sections. |
| WASM | WebAssembly | A compact, fast-loading binary format that lets C/C++ code (like SSA’s “AnyPIA” engine) run inside a web browser. Projects such as anypia-js compile the official formulas into WASM so other apps can call them. |
These are the key abbreviations you’ll see whenever people dig into the mechanics of Social Security. If you spot any others that need decoding, just let me know!