Updated August 7, 2026. Quick answer: from full retirement age you can switch payments off and let the benefit grow at two-thirds of one percent a month — eight percent a year — until 70, when it switches back on automatically. Nothing is repaid. 🔴 But since 2015, nobody else can collect on your record while it is suspended.
How it works
The regulation allows a voluntary request once “you attain full retirement age”. Suspension begins “the month after the month in which you voluntarily request” it — not the month you ask. And it ends by itself: payments resume “the month following the month in which the individual attains the age of 70.”
What you gain is the delayed retirement credit. The regulation’s own table sets it for anyone born after 1 January 1943 at two-thirds of one percent per month, and the statute confirms the same rate. Credits stop accruing at 70, which is why suspending past 70 is not a thing — delayed retirement credits stop at 70.
🔴 The 2015 change that broke the old strategy
Suspension used to be half of “file and suspend”: you suspended your own payments while a spouse kept collecting on your record. The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 ended that, and the statutory language is blunt:
no monthly benefit shall be payable to any other individual on the basis of such individual’s wages and self-employment income; and … no monthly benefit shall be payable to such individual on the basis of another individual’s wages and self-employment income
Both directions are closed. While your benefit is suspended, a spouse cannot collect on your record, and you cannot collect on theirs. The change applies to requests made from at least 180 days after 2 November 2015 — the statute’s own wording, which we quote rather than converting to a date.
⚠️ So suspension is now a single-person decision with a household consequence. If a spouse is drawing on your record, suspending stops their payment too — which is exactly the arithmetic the old strategy existed to avoid.
Timing this changes what else you draw on
Changing when benefits start changes what the rest of the money has to cover in the meantime, and an adviser can work through that part with you before anything is filed.
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Two things we will not overstate
Honest gap. That suspension requires no repayment and carries no once-per-lifetime limit is a reading of what the rules do not impose — neither appears as an affirmative statement in the text we verified. They are the settled understanding, and they are not quotable the way the withdrawal conditions are.
Second gap: Medicare. Where a benefit is suspended, the rule we found provides that “the enrollee is billed for direct remittance” for Part B — but that provision’s own example concerns a different kind of suspension. Expect to pay Part B directly, and confirm it before you suspend, because a missed premium has consequences a suspended benefit does not.
The comparison against the true do-over: withdraw or suspend, and the once-per-lifetime route at withdrawing your application.
Sources
Voluntary suspension, start month and the age-70 resumption: 20 CFR §404.313 and 42 U.S.C. §402(z)(1)(A). Delayed retirement credit rate and its cessation at 70: 20 CFR §404.313(b)(2) and (c)(2), and 42 U.S.C. §402(w). The 2015 change: 42 U.S.C. §402(z)(3), added by Pub. L. 114-74 §831. Part B direct billing: 42 CFR §408.10. All read 7 August 2026. General information about the rules, not advice on your record. Confirm anything decision-critical with the Social Security Administration directly.