Social Security Trivia
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85 free Social Security trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every trivia fact about Social Security seems to come with a twist: the first payout was 17 cents, the first monthly check went to a Vermont legal secretary who paid in $24.75 and drew out nearly $23,000, and a sample card in a Woolworth wallet became the most misused number in history. This quiz collects fifty of them. It covers the 1935 Social Security Act and Frances Perkins, the Townsend Plan that pushed Roosevelt to act, the Supreme Court cases that upheld the program, Medicare's 1965 arrival, the Greenspan Commission and the 1983 retirement-age changes, how benefits are calculated, payroll tax rates, COLAs and the trust funds. Useful for civics classes, retirement seminars and anyone curious about where the FICA line on a pay stub goes.
30 of 85 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which president signed the Social Security Act into law?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it on August 14, 1935, but retirees had to wait: payroll taxes began in 1937 and the first monthly checks went out only in 1940.
Q 02What does the acronym OASDI, the formal name of Social Security, stand for?
Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance
Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance: the title grew with the program, which began in 1935 as an old-age pension for the worker alone.
Q 03Social Security's first payout went to retired motorman Ernest Ackerman in January 1937: a one-time lump sum of how much?
17 cents
17 cents. Ackerman retired one day after the program began, with a single nickel withheld from his pay, so he more than tripled his money.
Q 04The payroll tax that funds Social Security appears on American pay stubs under which acronym?
FICA
FICA stands for the Federal Insurance Contributions Act, and every dollar withheld is matched by the employer, so workers see only half of what is paid in for them.
Q 05Which president opened his second term by campaigning to let workers divert Social Security taxes into private investment accounts?
George W. Bush
George W. Bush made it a top priority after his re-election and pushed it hard through 2005, yet the idea never became law.
Q 06For decades, Social Security cards carried a printed legend ruling out their use for what purpose?
Identification
Identification. 'Not for identification' was printed on new cards from 1946 until 1972, yet the number became America's de facto national ID anyway.
Q 07Ida May Fuller paid $24.75 in Social Security taxes; how much did she collect by age 100?
About $22,900
About $22,900, more than 900 times what she paid in. Fuller, from Ludlow, Vermont, received the first monthly check in 1940 and went on drawing them until she died at 100.
Q 08Which New Deal cabinet member chaired the committee that drew up Social Security?
Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins, the first woman in a US cabinet, had been set on her reforming path by witnessing the Triangle factory fire of 1911.
Q 09The Townsend Plan promised over-60s $200 a month on what condition?
Spending it all
Spending it all, and within 30 days: forcing the money back into shops was meant to end the Depression, and the idea drew a mass following.
Q 10What was Francis Townsend's profession before he launched his pension movement?
Physician
Physician. Out of work at 66 with no savings, the Long Beach doctor set out his pension idea in a letter to the local paper and was stunned by the flood of support.
Q 11Which two large groups of workers were left out of Social Security when it began in 1935?
Agricultural and domestic workers
Agricultural and domestic workers were left out after the Treasury said it could not collect payroll taxes from farms and private homes; Congress began bringing them in from 1950.
Q 12The Supreme Court upheld Social Security in 1937, months after the president proposed what?
Adding up to six justices
Adding up to six justices. The court-packing plan failed, but that spring the Court swung behind the New Deal and upheld the old-age program 7 to 2 in the Helvering case.
Q 13Ephram Nestor paid Social Security taxes for 19 years, then lost his benefits when what happened?
Q 21The Social Security Administration publishes a yearly list, drawn from its card applications, of the most popular what?
Baby names
Baby names. Parents now routinely apply for a number when a child is born, a habit that took hold after a 1986 tax law required numbers for dependents, so each year's newborn names reach the agency.
Q 22By law, the money in Social Security's trust funds can be invested only in what?
US Treasury securities
US Treasury securities, mostly special bonds issued only to federal trust funds, so the program's reserves are in effect lent to the rest of the government.
Q 23Before its first monthly check, Social Security was widened in 1939 to cover whom?
Workers' families
He was deported
He was deported, for having been a Communist in the 1930s, and the Supreme Court ruled in Flemming v. Nestor that workers have no contractual right to the benefits they paid for.
Q 14A Social Security number's first three digits once showed what?
Issuing state
Issuing state: numbers were handed out from the Northeast westward, so the lowest of all, 001-01-0001, went to a woman in New Hampshire.
Q 15The most misused Social Security number ever, 078-05-1120, came from a sample card sold where?
In wallets at Woolworth
In wallets at Woolworth: the maker slipped in a sample card bearing his secretary's real number, and over 40,000 people went on to report it as their own.
Q 16In June 2011, what change did the government make to the way Social Security numbers are assigned?
Randomized them
Randomized them. Scrambling the digits was meant to protect the number's integrity and to stretch the supply of nine-digit numbers available in every state.
Q 17Which number, like 000 and the 900s, never begins a Social Security number?
666
666 has never been issued in that position, and the Social Security Administration kept it off the list even when it released previously unused numbers in 2011.
Q 18In 1936, Social Security relied on which federal agency to register America's workers?
The Post Office
The Post Office. Applications went out through 45,000 local post offices, 1,074 of which doubled as typing centers that made up the cards on the spot.
Q 19The Social Security Administration is headquartered just outside which city?
Baltimore
Baltimore. Washington had no building able to hold the mountain of paper records in 1936, so the files went to a harborside building there, and the agency later settled in suburban Woodlawn.
Q 20Starting in 1984, which group lost its exemption from Social Security taxes, despite a lasting myth that it still doesn't pay?
Members of Congress
Members of Congress have paid in since January 1984, along with the president, federal judges and all newly hired federal workers, who until then had a separate pension system.
Workers' families. The 1939 amendments added benefits for wives, children and survivors, turning a worker's pension into family insurance a year before the first monthly checks.
Q 24President Eisenhower signed which major addition to Social Security in 1956?
Disability benefits
Disability benefits. At first they went only to workers aged 50 to 64, but the age limit was dropped in 1960, opening them to disabled workers of any age.
Q 25Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965 at whose presidential library?
Harry Truman's
Harry Truman's library in Independence, Missouri, hosted the signing: he had pushed for national health insurance twenty years earlier, and Johnson handed him the first Medicare card.
Q 26Which Medicare component covers hospital, skilled nursing and hospice services?
Part A
Part A, the hospital insurance, is the piece most people get without a premium because they paid for it through payroll taxes while working; Part B, for doctors' bills, charges a monthly premium.
Q 27Retirement planners long called Social Security one leg of a "three-legged stool"; what were the other two legs?
Pensions and personal savings
Pensions and personal savings. The image, traced to a 1949 speech by an insurance actuary, was meant to stress that Social Security alone was never supposed to be enough.
Q 28Before 1975, how were Social Security benefits raised?
Acts of Congress
Acts of Congress, passed irregularly: beneficiaries waited a full decade for the first general increase, in 1950, and raises became automatic only in 1975.
Q 29Social Security's annual raise is tied to the change in what?
Consumer prices
Consumer prices, as tracked by the CPI-W, the index for urban wage earners and clerical workers; the raise can only go up, so in a year when prices fall, checks simply stay the same.
Q 30Which economist led the 1981 commission formed to rescue Social Security's finances?
Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan. His bipartisan panel reported with the retirement fund reckoned to be only months from running dry, and its rescue plan became law that same year.