Short answer: about $4,020 a month for Joe Biden in 2027, and about $6,030 a month for Joe and Jill together, by our estimate.
Social Security’s 2027 raise is official: 3.6%, the biggest cost-of-living adjustment since 2023. For the typical retired worker, the Social Security Administration estimates that adds about $75 a month, lifting the average retirement check to roughly $2,170 in January.
About 76 million Americans get that raise. One of them is a former president. Joe Biden has collected Social Security since 2008, and his tax returns show exactly how much.
I’ve had a small taste of Biden’s world myself. A while back, I had dinner at a country club near Dewey Beach, Delaware. The people there told me this was Biden’s neighborhood. It was swanky and very nice, the golf was great, and Dewey Beach itself was amazing. The Bidens’ beach house is a few miles up the coast in Rehoboth Beach. They bought it in 2017 for $2.7 million.
Dewey Beach, Delaware, in August 2021. Photo: Alex BaronThe pizza at the Kings Creek Country Club restaurant. I’d give it a 5.1 on the Dave Portnoy scale. Photo: Alex Baron
That’s the thing about Social Security: it goes to everyone who paid in, beach house or not.
What Joe and Jill Biden actually collect
The Bidens file jointly, and line 6a of Form 1040 is where Social Security benefits go. On their most recent publicly released return, for 2023, the couple reported $64,254 in Social Security benefits. That works out to about $5,354 a month.
The worksheet attached to that return splits it up: $42,842 was Joe’s and $21,412 was Jill’s. Jill’s share is almost exactly half of Joe’s. That’s the size of a spousal benefit, which is capped at 50% of the worker’s amount, though the return doesn’t say which kind of benefit she gets.
The trend over time:
2021: $54,665 ($4,555/month)
2022: $58,465 ($4,872/month)
2023: $64,254 ($5,354/month)
Most of that growth is COLAs, including the 5.9% raise in 2022 and the 8.7% raise in 2023.
Readers of that story kept asking the same two things. How could he collect while drawing a salary? Once you reach full retirement age, Social Security doesn’t reduce your check, no matter how much you earn. And do politicians even pay in? They do. Members of Congress, the president and the vice president have paid Social Security tax since 1984.
What the Bidens’ check looks like in 2027
Biden left office in January 2025, and his 2024 and 2025 returns haven’t been made public. Because both Bidens are long past full retirement age, though, their benefits now change only with each year’s COLA. Applying the raises since 2023 (3.2% in 2024, 2.5% in 2025, 2.8% in 2026, and 3.6% in 2027) gives a good estimate:
Joe: about $48,300 a year, or roughly $4,020 a month
Jill: about $24,100 a year, or roughly $2,010 a month
Together: about $72,400 a year, or roughly $6,030 a month
Joe’s check alone is nearly double the average retiree’s $2,170. The 2027 COLA by itself gives the couple roughly $2,500 more for the year. These amounts are before Medicare premiums, which are higher for high earners.
Why it isn’t even bigger
The Bidens’ adjusted gross income has topped $200,000 every year since 1998. It hit about $11 million in 2017 and $4.6 million in 2018, after his vice presidency. Social Security didn’t care.
Benefits are based on your 35 highest-earning years, but only on pay up to the annual taxable maximum, which is $192,300 in 2027. Earn $200,000 or $10 million and the result is the same: your check is capped.
The Bidens pay tax on it, and you might too
Of the $64,254 the Bidens collected in 2023, $54,616 was taxable. That’s 85%, the most the law allows.
Since 1984, part of your benefit has been taxable if your “combined income” tops $25,000 (single) or $32,000 (married filing jointly). A second tier added in 1993 lets up to 85% be taxed above $34,000 (single) or $44,000 (joint). Those thresholds have never been adjusted for inflation. Every COLA, including this year’s 3.6%, pushes more ordinary retirees over them.
The new senior deduction helps most retirees, but not the Bidens
The 2025 tax law added a temporary $6,000 deduction for people 65 or older, for tax years 2025 through 2028. A married couple who are both 65 or older can deduct up to $12,000, and you get it whether or not you itemize.
It doesn’t change the rules for taxing Social Security. But by lowering your taxable income, it can shrink or wipe out the tax many retirees pay on their benefits.
The deduction also shrinks as income rises, starting at $75,000 of modified adjusted gross income for single filers and $150,000 for couples. With income in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Bidens would get little or nothing from it.
Could the Bidens’ check, and yours, be cut?
The Social Security trustees’ June 2026 report says the retirement trust fund will run short in late 2032. If Congress doesn’t act before then, every check would be cut by about 22%, because incoming payroll taxes would cover only about 78% of scheduled benefits.
In today’s dollars, that would be about $1,300 a month less for the Bidens and about $480 a month less for the average retiree. Lawmakers have fixed shortfalls before, most recently in 1983, but there’s no fix in place yet.
The money isn’t missing, as one popular comment on our 2022 story claimed. By law, Social Security lends its reserves to the U.S. Treasury in exchange for interest-paying bonds, about $2.56 trillion of them, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. The real problem is simpler: more money is going out than coming in.
The pension cut many of you wrote about is gone
Several readers of our 2022 story, including a retired firefighter and a retired civil servant, wrote that a government pension cut their Social Security. That rule is gone. On January 5, 2025, Biden signed the Social Security Fairness Act, which ended the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset, starting with benefits for January 2024.
Social Security sent more than 3.1 million back payments, totaling $17 billion, by July 2025. If you have a pension from a job that didn’t take out Social Security tax and your check never went up, call Social Security at 1-800-772-1213.
What about President Trump?
Donald Trump, who turned 80 in June, has been eligible to claim Social Security since he turned 62 in 2008. His released tax returns for 2015 through 2020 show no Social Security income.
He hasn’t released returns since then, so it isn’t public whether that has changed. If he still hasn’t claimed, he’s leaving money on the table: checks stop growing at 70, so waiting longer only means fewer of them.
Many readers of our 2022 story pointed out something else: Trump has donated his $400,000 presidential salary since his first term. In August 2025, he said he had given the first paycheck of his second term to the White House Historical Association.
What this means for your check
Many of you compared your own checks with the Bidens’. “My wife and I are collecting a similar amount as the Bidens. And feel fortunate to do so,” one reader wrote in 2022. Both had worked 42-plus years at the same employer. Another reader, 72, started at $985 a month and now gets $1,225, but wrote: “Each time I get a raise my rent goes up.”
You don’t need a presidential pension to take a lesson from the Bidens’ tax return:
Your 2027 raise is 3.6%. It shows up in January payments (December 31 for SSI). Your exact new amount appears in your my Social Security account in early December.
Taxes can eat part of the raise. If your income is near the $25,000 or $32,000 thresholds, a bigger COLA can make more of your benefit taxable. If you’re 65 or older, the new $6,000 deduction can offset some of that through 2028.
Medicare Part B is projected to rise less than the COLA in 2027. The projection is $209.50 a month, up from $202.90, or about 3.3%. That would be the first time since 2023, so more of the raise should actually reach your bank account. The official premium comes out in November.
Claiming age matters more than income past the cap. Waiting until 70 is the biggest lever most people control.
How does your check compare to the Bidens’? Tell us in the comments.
Figures for 2021 through 2023 come from the Bidens’ publicly released federal tax returns. The 2027 amounts are retire.ly estimates that apply each year’s official COLA to the couple’s 2023 benefits.
