Job patterns of disabled beneficiaries

This article presents basic findings about the job patterns of disabled-worker beneficiaries covered under the Social Security Administration Disability Insurance (DI) program as reported in the New Beneficiary Follow-up survey. Beneficiaries are asked retrospective questions about labor-force participation from the time of their first entitlement to disability benefits to the time of the interview. Twelve percent of those persons who enter the DI program as nonworking beneficiaries start a job during their entitlement to benefits. The mean time to the start of the job was 3.4 years. Of those who start a job, 50 percent end the job before the end of their entitlement. Most of these persons leave the job for health-related reasons and, for most of them, the employer does not play a major role in their decision to stop working. For those who end the first job and are employed in subsequent jobs, the percentage who recover while still in the job decreases as the number of jobs increases.