Receiving a Social Security Disability Award Letter

When you should expect to receive your first disability payment.


How long does it take to receive an award letter?

Just how long does it takes to receive a Social Security disability or SSI award letter, depends upon the level at which your disability claim is approved. For instance, if you receive an approval for SSD or SSI at the initial claim (meaning the disability application level) or reconsideration appeal level, you may receive your disability award letter within three months.

However, if you do not receive your disability approval until the disability hearing level, you will first receive a letter from the hearing office stating you have been approved. This letter is a Notice of Decision. However, your actual award letter or Notice of Award, that spells out how much money you will receive--and when--may take another six weeks or so to arrive.

Why does the social security disability award letter take so long to arrive when a case is at the hearing level? This is because the hearings offices send all of their allowances to regional payment centers to be processed. These payment processing centers have huge volumes of cases to process and are understaffed. This, of course, means that the time required for receiving an award letter will be longer.

But in some instances, the system is fairly unpredictable. For example, it happens fairly regularly that a claimant who has been approved may even receive their first Social Security benefits before they have received their official Social Security award letter.














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