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 write-up is the judge lottery, and the paper, dataset and code are public so you can recompute any of it: paper and 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.