Social Security disability / FY2025

Every hearing office, judge by judge

Two judges down the hall from each other, drawing from the same queue, can be more than thirty points apart on how often they say yes. These are the FY2025 numbers for 1,019 judges across 148 hearing offices.

1,019

judges

148

hearing offices

8.8% to 92.8%

allowance rate range

32.6 pts

median gap inside one office

Widest spreads in the country

Every figure comes from disposition data the Social Security Administration publishes itself. The full working paper, with the method and the robustness checks, is the judge lottery, and there is a shorter write-up if you want the findings without the statistics. The dataset and the code are public too, so you can recompute any of it: dataset, code.

Judges with fewer than 100 decisions in the year are left out, and so are offices the SSA does not report separately. An allowance rate is a record of what a judge decided, not a prediction of what happens in any one case.