What is the continuation rate on a continuing disability review?

It is the share of CDR determinations where the state disability agency decides the person is still disabled and benefits carry on. The opposite outcome is a cessation. Across the 45 states that decided at least 3,000 of them, 77.55 percent of the 1,592,655 determinations made between January 2023 and May 2026 were continuations.

Which states are hardest on continuing disability reviews?

Georgia, by a distance, at 61.9 percent. Then Mississippi at 68.5 and Texas at 69.4. The easy end is Missouri and Iowa at 86.8 percent and Rhode Island at 86.5. Puerto Rico hits 97.0 percent but sits eleven points clear of the top state, so it is reported separately rather than ranked.

Does a cessation mean the person has lost their benefits?

No. This is the state agency's determination, which is the first decision in the sequence and not the last. It can be appealed to a disability hearing officer and then to an ALJ, and benefits can keep running through the appeal if the person elects that in time. Plenty of cessations get reversed.

Is the gap just that strict states are strict about everything?

Partly, and not mostly. A state's initial allowance rate and its CDR continuation rate correlate at 0.49 across the 45 states, so about a quarter of the spread tracks general strictness. Georgia allows 34.7 percent of initial claims against a national 37.5, which is tight and nothing like a 25 point outlier.

Where does this data come from?

SSA's State Agency Monthly Workload file, at ssa.gov/disability/data/SSA-SA-MOWL.csv, updated monthly. The window, the inclusion threshold and the two defects in the file are all in the post.

CDR continuation rates by state: a 25 point gap

Georgia's state disability agency continues 61.9 percent of the continuing disability reviews it decides. Missouri's continues 86.8 percent. Same statute, same medical improvement standard, and 25 points between them.

That comes out of SSA's own monthly workload file: 1,592,655 CDR determinations across 45 states, January 2023 through May 2026. Nationally 77.55 percent of them were continuations, which puts cessations at the state agency level somewhere around 105,000 a year. It's a big docket. Almost nobody works it.

What the file is counting

Worth being precise, because a cessation here is narrower than it sounds. This is a state Disability Determination Services office deciding a case, which is the first decision in the sequence and not the last one, and it can be appealed to a hearing officer and then to an ALJ with benefits running through the appeal if the person elects it in time. So none of this is a count of people cut off. Plenty get reversed later.

The method

One file: SSA-SA-MOWL.csv, which SSA updates monthly. I took every row from January 2023 on, summed determinations and continuations per state, and kept the 45 states that cleared 3,000 CDR determinations in the window, which drops five small ones. Puerto Rico continues 97.0 percent and I left it out of the ranking entirely, since it's eleven points above the top state and isn't in the same distribution. Note that the file carries 57 codes rather than 50, four of which aren't jurisdictions at all, and group by that column without looking and they land in your national total. Two defects to know about: the May 2026 rows have a duplicated subtype column, and monthly volumes collapse across every state at once in mid 2024 and again in September 2025, which reads like a reporting gap rather than a summer nobody reviewed anyone, and dropping those months moves the national rate by a tenth of a point.

The distribution

Median state is 79.8 percent. Here's all 45, worst to best.

#	State	CDR determinations	Cessations	Continuation rate
1	Georgia	23,315	8,893	61.9%
2	Mississippi	22,300	7,022	68.5%
3	Texas	84,030	25,731	69.4%
4	Louisiana	28,328	8,019	71.7%
5	South Dakota	4,365	1,213	72.2%
6	Nevada	11,963	3,288	72.5%
7	Florida	101,341	27,725	72.6%
8	California	145,084	36,802	74.6%
9	Ohio	79,368	19,929	74.9%
10	Pennsylvania	87,142	21,757	75.0%
11	Alabama	37,178	9,083	75.6%
12	Arkansas	44,959	10,889	75.8%
13	New Mexico	6,601	1,580	76.1%
14	Massachusetts	39,837	9,307	76.6%
15	Arizona	20,729	4,815	76.8%
16	Virginia	27,215	6,257	77.0%
17	Montana	3,657	818	77.6%
18	Kentucky	41,634	8,967	78.5%
19	South Carolina	31,335	6,707	78.6%
20	Wisconsin	19,291	4,116	78.7%
21	Maine	9,798	2,005	79.5%
22	West Virginia	6,328	1,289	79.6%
23	Indiana	40,390	8,149	79.8%
24	New York	134,814	27,189	79.8%
25	North Carolina	60,808	12,245	79.9%
26	Colorado	15,346	3,077	79.9%
27	New Jersey	40,679	8,151	80.0%
28	Tennessee	37,444	7,472	80.0%
29	Michigan	64,290	12,719	80.2%
30	Illinois	59,905	11,837	80.2%
31	Maryland	11,890	2,347	80.3%
32	Utah	8,543	1,677	80.4%
33	Vermont	4,667	828	82.3%
34	New Hampshire	9,239	1,619	82.5%
35	Kansas	10,232	1,791	82.5%
36	Connecticut	18,248	3,113	82.9%
37	Minnesota	19,640	3,174	83.8%
38	Nebraska	7,616	1,220	84.0%
39	Oklahoma	29,337	4,564	84.4%
40	Washington	34,903	5,429	84.4%
41	Idaho	12,031	1,768	85.3%
42	Oregon	18,906	2,643	86.0%
43	Rhode Island	8,815	1,193	86.5%
44	Iowa	23,098	3,059	86.8%
45	Missouri	46,016	6,066	86.8%

On the SSDI-only column, which is the docket a fee earning practice actually cares about, the national rate is 84.84 percent and Georgia is still last at 74.0 against Missouri's 89.4. So it isn't one state simply reviewing more SSI cases than another.

I tried to make it go away

Strict states being strict everywhere is the obvious answer and it's about a quarter of an answer. Initial allowance rate and CDR continuation rate correlate at 0.49 across the 45 states, and Georgia allows 34.7 percent of initial claims against a national 37.5, which is a little tight and nowhere near a 25 point outlier.

Region doesn't do it either. Georgia's neighbours in the Atlanta region all sit between 78.5 and 80.0 percent, and the closest state to Georgia on this measure is Mississippi, six and a half points away.

And it isn't one strange year. Rates in 2023 and 2025 correlate at 0.82, Georgia never once got out of the sixties, and Missouri never left the mid eighties. The gap is widening, if anything.

There's a clock on this

In March 2026 SSA started moving medical CDR work off the state agencies and onto a federal Disability Case Review site. In phases. No published completion date.

That's the more interesting fact in this post, and I nearly buried it. For as long as anyone has been able to measure it, which state office got your file decided how hard your review was going to be, because a state employee applied the standard the way that office applies it. Georgia has been doing that to its own claimants for at least three and a half years. Now the whole arrangement is being unwound one workload at a time, quietly, with nothing published that would let anybody outside SSA compare before against after.

So this table is the baseline, and it's slightly less clean than I'd like: the last two months in the window are the first two months of the handoff. It's about as clean as a baseline is going to get now. I'll rerun it in a year. My guess is the gap narrows and doesn't close, but it is a guess and I'd rather say so than dress it up.

What it's worth to a firm

Georgia produced 8,893 cessations in 41 months. At the national continuation rate it would have produced about 5,234. Call it 3,600 extra, a bit over a thousand a year, which is what the state costs its own claimants before anybody argues a single case.

The demand isn't theoretical. Somebody on r/SSDI asked outright, in a thread that ran to 420 comments, for a list of attorneys who take CDR cases.

Firms skip this work for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits. A cessation lands on a deadline nobody scheduled, the election to keep benefits running has a short fuse on it, and the notice arrives buried in the same SSA mail stream that already swamps most disability practices. Unpredictable inbound with hard dates attached is a workflow problem well before it's a legal one, which is roughly why we build operations systems for disability firms.

Check it

The CSV is at ssa.gov/disability/data/SSA-SA-MOWL.csv, documented here. Filter Formatted Date from 2023-01, sum Determinations (All CDR) and Continuations (All CDR) by state, keep the states above 3,000. Excluded: DC and Puerto Rico as non-states, the four service codes, and Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, North Dakota and Wyoming on volume. About an hour of arithmetic.

We ran the judge level version of this question too, across 1,019 ALJs and 317,462 hearing decisions. Same shape, one floor up.