Social Security’s not key to retirement savings---prefer new data.

To what extent do America's seniors rely on Social Security benefits for their retirement income? For many years, policy analysts and the SSA itself relied on the Current Population Survey (CPS) alone to answer that question. According to these data, Social Security represented by far the largest component of seniors' incomes, and for nearly a quarter of that population, more than 90% of their income. Doubts about the accuracy and completeness of this survey data, however, have mounted over the years. Under my direction, researchers at the SSA completed a lengthy, painstaking project of supplementing the CPS data with SSA and IRS administrative records. These new data, which represent the state of affairs in 2015, show a substantially lower share for Social Security in seniors' income and a much higher share for pensions and retirement accounts. Using the CPS data only, Social Security accounted for nearly 35% of total senior income, while pensions and retirement accounts represented only 22%. With the new data, the reality is almost flipped: Social Security makes up only 30% of total senior income, while pensions and retirement accounts represent 36%. (The other main sources of income include earnings and asset income.) Similarly, using the CPS data alone, fewer than half of senior families had pension- and retirement-account income. But according to the new data, nearly 70% do — in range of the 85% to 90% of those with Social Security income. Finally, whereas according to the CPS data, more than 50% of the senior population relied on Social Security for at least half of their income (and 25% relied on it for 90% or more), the new, more accurate, and more inclusive data reduce those rates to 40% and less than 15% of the senior population, respectively.