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How SSA Reviews Work History When Deciding Social Security Disability Claims
Your Work History Is Important to SSA's Disability Decision
If you’re making a Social Security Disability claim, you may assume your medical records will be the key factor the Social Security Administration (SSA) looks at when deciding whether to approve you for benefits. But while medical evidence matters, your work history plays an equally important role in the SSA’s decision-making process.
The SSA looks at your past work to determine what kinds of jobs you’ve done, what skills you’ve developed, and whether you could return to any of those jobs, or transition to other work, even with your medical condition.
Understanding how the SSA evaluates your work history can help you present your employment background in the most accurate and strategic way. Chermol & Fishman can help you review your past employment information to develop a sound legal strategy for providing your work details. You can also read on to learn more about the SSA’s work history review process.
What Does the SSA Consider to Be Relevant Past Work?
The SSA doesn’t review your entire employment history. It focuses on what it calls past relevant work. This includes:
- Jobs you’ve held within the last 15 years
- Jobs you worked at long enough to learn the skills
- Jobs you performed at a level that constituted substantial gainful activity (which is defined as earning more than a set monthly amount).
If a job doesn’t meet these criteria, the SSA may not count it as past relevant work.
For each qualifying job, the SSA classifies it by exertional level (sedentary, light, medium, heavy, or very heavy) and by skill level (unskilled, semi-skilled, or skilled). These classifications come from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. They’re based on the physical demands and vocational requirements of the job as it’s generally performed in the national economy, not necessarily based on how you personally performed it.
This distinction matters. If you performed a physically demanding version of a job that’s classified as light work in the DOT, the SSA may still classify your past work as light work. Conversely, if you had accommodations in a heavy job that reduced its physical demands, SSA may still classify it at the heavy level based on how the job is typically performed.
Can You Return to Your Past Work?
The SSA uses a five-step process to determine if you can qualify for disability benefits. A review of your work history is step four.
The SSA reviews your work history after determining that you have a severe impairment and assessing your residual functional capacity (RFC), which refers to things you can still do despite your condition.
Based on your impairment level and your previous jobs, the SSA tries to determine if you can return to any of your relevant past work. If the SSA concludes that your RFC allows you to perform any of your past jobs, as they are generally performed or as you actually performed them, your claim will be denied at Step Four.
This is why accurately describing the demands of your past work is so important. When you complete the SSA’s work history report, the details you provide about lifting, standing, walking, sitting, and the mental demands of each job directly influence whether SSA believes you could return to that work. Understating the demands of your past jobs can hurt your claim by making it appear that you could still perform the work.
If your case progresses to a hearing, your SSDI attorney can present evidence and testimony about the actual demands of your past work and argue that your RFC doesn’t allow you to return to any positions you’ve held before. If you convince the judge of this, the case moves to Step Five, where the burden shifts to SSA to prove that other jobs exist that you can perform.
Can You Do Other Work?
In Step Five, the SSA considers whether the skills you developed in your past work could transfer to other, less physically or mentally demanding jobs.
If you have transferable skills, SSA may conclude that you could perform other skilled or semi-skilled work even if you can’t do your old jobs.
Transferability of skills is a complex issue that depends on the specific skills involved, the tools and processes you used, and whether those skills apply to jobs within your current functional limitations.
For older workers, the rules around skill transferability become more favorable — SSA recognizes that workers over age 50 have more difficulty adapting to new types of work.
An experienced disability attorney at Chermol & Fishman can analyze your work history for transferable skills issues and can try to challenge the SSA’s conclusions if the agency overstates your ability to transition to new employment. This is a nuanced argument that requires understanding both the legal framework and the occupational data.
How to Present Your Work History Accurately
When you complete the SSA’s work history forms, it’s important that you’re thorough and accurate. For example, you should:
- Describe the heaviest lifting your job required, not just the average.
- Note how long you were on your feet, how much sitting was involved, and any supervisory or skilled tasks you performed.
- If your job involves specific mental demands, such as maintaining concentration, meeting deadlines, or handling workplace stress, document those as well.
If you had accommodations in a past job, such as a modified schedule, reduced duties, or extra breaks, make sure to note this. These accommodations may show that you were already experiencing limitations that your employer was helping you manage, even in your past positions.
At Chermol & Fishman, we review every client’s work history report and, when necessary, help clients revise their descriptions to accurately reflect the demands of their past jobs. We also analyze transferable skills issues and develop arguments to present at hearings when SSA’s vocational analysis doesn’t match our client’s actual work experience.
With our knowledge and experience in representing SSDI claimants who are trying to demonstrate to the SSA they can’t work, we can help to maximize the chances of a successful outcome in your benefits claim.
Ready to Get Help? If you have questions about how your work history affects your SSDI claim, contact Chermol & Fishman, LLC for a free consultation. Call us at (888) 774-7243 or visit myphiladelphiadisabilitylawyer.com.