Data · Disability hearing waits
Disability hearing waits, office by office
How long Social Security disability claimants wait for a hearing before a judge at each of SSA's hearing offices, and how many cases each office has pending, straight from SSA's monthly public data files.
What is in this dataset?
How long Social Security disability claimants wait for a hearing before an administrative law judge, office by office, from the Social Security Administration's own public data files: the average months from the hearing request to the hearing for cases closed in the month, and each hearing office's fiscal-year-to-date receipts, dispositions, cases pending and average days from request to decision, with SSA's rank among 159 offices. Each record is one hearing office, with the state it sits in. Counts and averages only: no judge, claimant, lawyer or firm is named.
Use it to see how long SSDI and SSI claimants in a market wait for a hearing, and how loaded the local hearing office is, before you plan disability intake and advertising there. A long wait means more claimants still looking for representation and a longer time before a fee is paid. Compare an office with the national median and with its neighbors. The averages are SSA's own; they describe cases already closed, not how long a new claimant will wait.
- Records
- 159
- Look up by
- 48
- state
- Primary source
- 159
The letters are explained in what P, S, D and U mean.
Where does the data come from?
SSA's three hearing-office tables (average wait until hearing held, hearing office workload, and average processing time ranking) are read logged out in a browser, because ssa.gov refuses scripts, and saved with a SHA-256 of the rows computed on ssa.gov. The build checks the hashes, joins the tables by office name, requires the workload and ranking tables to agree on every office's processing time and region, and assigns each office to a state from its name.
- Period covered
- September 27, 2025 to August 31, 2026
- Places
- The whole US and states
- How often we refresh it
- Every month
- Records read
- October 28, 2026
Official sources
- U.S. Social Security Administration, by official web pages. U.S. government work, public domain.
- U.S. Social Security Administration, by official web pages. U.S. government work, public domain.
- U.S. Social Security Administration, by official web pages. U.S. government work, public domain.
The sources the records cite most
What does a record look like?
-
Albany, NY hearing office: cases closed in August 2026 waited 9.0 months on average from the hearing request to the hearing. In fiscal year 2026 through August 28, 2026 it received 4,226 cases, disposed of 2,841 and had 3,146 pending; its average time from request to decision was 312 days, ranked 149 of 159 (1 is fastest).
Status P · checked October 28, 2026 · source: SSA, Average Wait Time Until Hearing Held Report, August 2026
-
Phoenix Downtown, AZ hearing office: cases closed in August 2026 waited 9.0 months on average from the hearing request to the hearing. In fiscal year 2026 through August 28, 2026 it received 1,880 cases, disposed of 1,665 and had 1,621 pending; its average time from request to decision was 280 days, ranked 123 of 159 (1 is fastest).
Status P · checked October 28, 2026 · source: SSA, Average Wait Time Until Hearing Held Report, August 2026
-
Chicago, IL hearing office: cases closed in August 2026 waited 10.0 months on average from the hearing request to the hearing. In fiscal year 2026 through August 28, 2026 it received 3,807 cases, disposed of 3,073 and had 3,198 pending; its average time from request to decision was 301 days, ranked 144 of 159 (1 is fastest).
Status P · checked October 28, 2026 · source: SSA, Average Wait Time Until Hearing Held Report, August 2026
-
Dallas Downtown, TX hearing office: cases closed in August 2026 waited 8.0 months on average from the hearing request to the hearing. In fiscal year 2026 through August 28, 2026 it received 3,979 cases, disposed of 3,005 and had 2,712 pending; its average time from request to decision was 254 days, ranked 67 of 159 (1 is fastest).
Status P · checked October 28, 2026 · source: SSA, Average Wait Time Until Hearing Held Report, August 2026
The full records add the dates, the quoted source text and every field in the CSV and JSON files below.
What each of the 14 main columns means
jurisdiction- Two-letter state code of the office (ours, from its name); US for the national Special Review Cadre
office- SSA's site code for the hearing office
officeName- The office's city or name as we print it
ssaName- The office name exactly as SSA prints it
region- SSA region number
waitMonths- Average months from the hearing request to the hearing, for cases closed in the month
aptDays- Average calendar days from the hearing request to the disposition, fiscal year to date
aptRank- SSA's rank of the office by average processing time (1 is fastest; ties share a rank)
aptOf- How many offices SSA ranked
receipts- Cases received in the fiscal year to date (negative when more cases were transferred out than came in)
dispositions- Cases disposed of in the fiscal year to date
pending- Cases pending at the end of the period
month- The month of the wait-time report (YYYY-MM)
fyThrough- The last day of the fiscal-year-to-date period
How do I use it in my own tools?
ssahearings_lookup- For one state (two-letter code, DC or PR, or US for the national Special Review Cadre): each Social Security hearing office there with its average wait in months from hearing request to hearing, its fiscal-year-to-date receipts, dispositions and cases pending, and its average processing time in days with SSA's rank.
ssahearings_compare- The same hearing-office waits, workloads and processing times side by side for up to 10 states.
ssahearings_search- Hearing-office records whose text matches the words given, such as a city (Phoenix, Chicago) or a state name.
How to cite this dataset
You can reuse, adapt and republish this data, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). The only condition is that you credit Probative and link to the source.
- Version
- 1.0.0, released October 28, 2026
- Every version
- 10.5281/zenodo.23741883 (always points to the newest)
- License
- CC BY 4.0
Download the data
- CSV: disability-hearings.csv 164 KB · one row per record (columns in README.txt)
- JSON: disability-hearings.json 320 KB · every record with its sources
Free, no email or login. The files are hosted on this site and Zenodo, a public research archive.
Suggested citation
Probative. (2026). Social Security disability hearing waits and workloads by hearing office (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23741884
Credit line for a chart, table or article
Source: Probative, Social Security disability hearing waits and workloads by hearing office, version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23741884, licensed CC BY 4.0.
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Not legal advice. These are the Social Security Administration's published hearing-office statistics, kept for marketing planning. An average wait describes cases already closed, not how long any claimant will wait. Check SSA's current reports.
What changed recently?
- 2026-10-28 · First release: 159 hearing offices, wait times for cases closed in August 2026 and fiscal-year-2026 workloads through August 28, 2026. (source)
The full log is in changes.json.
What are the limits?
- An average wait describes cases already closed in the month. It is not a forecast of how long a new claimant will wait.
- The workload counts run from the start of SSA's fiscal year to the date SSA prints. A negative receipt count means more cases were transferred out of the office than came in.
- SSA lists each office by name and region. The state is ours, read from the office's name and city.
- The Special Review Cadre is a national unit that SSA lists with the hearing offices. It serves no one place, so it is kept under US and left out of the office comparisons.
- ssa.gov refuses automated downloads, so each month's tables are read in a browser and saved with a checksum of the rows. The data can trail SSA's site by a few weeks.
- Counts and averages only. No judge, claimant, lawyer or firm is named.
- Records older than 60 days since their last check are marked
stalein the files until we re-check them. Every confirmed error we fix is listed in the data corrections log.
Found a wrong value? Report an error with the record id and the source that shows the right value.
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