Are Increased Disability Claims Contributing to Low Unemployment?

Peter St Onge, an economic research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, recently tweeted that disability claims are increasing, the effect of which contributes to a low unemployment rate.

But the graph St Onge cited shows the number of individuals identifying as disabled, not numbers of disability claims.

In reality, the total number of disabled workers and dependents collecting disability benefits actually fell from 9.2 million in 2021, to 8.8 million in 2022 (the last year for which data is available), according to the Social Security Administration. The decline isn’t a new trend: Disability claims have been falling every year since 2013.

Moreover, the total number of applications for both Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the two programs through which people can collect disability, have been declining consistently since 2012. In fact, disability awards as a percentage of applications for SSDI and SSI hit a 20-year low of 27.7 and 30.8 percent, respectively, in 2020, based on data from the Social Security Administration.