For Medicare brokers
The Social Security question your Medicare clients are already asking you
When Social Security comes up, I hear one of two answers from Medicare brokers.
The first: “I don’t get involved with that with my clients. Plus I wouldn’t want to charge them for advice.”
The second: “Why wouldn’t you want to charge for it? It’s a lot of work.”
Both of them are right. That is the whole article, and the rest of it is why.
Say it louder for the people in the back. If you can help a client decide when to file as part of what you already do for them, at no charge, that is a genuinely good way to run a practice. Nobody should talk you out of it.
The second answer is right too. It is real work, and it creates real value for the client. Work that creates value can be charged for. Whether you do is a business decision, not a moral one.
So set the charging question aside for a minute. The question underneath it is bigger: is this yours to answer at all?
Every client you enroll at 65 who has not yet claimed Social Security is making a second permanent decision in the same twelve months. Medicare enrollment and Social Security claiming are keyed to the same birthday. Same client, same year, same kitchen table.
They are not asking a stranger about it. They are asking you, because you are the one in the room.
Here is the part the first answer skips. When you say “I don’t get involved with that,” the client does not stop deciding. She goes and decides with somebody else, or on her own, on a feeling. Go read the public Q&A boards where licensed agents answer consumer questions under their own names. Dozens have answered this exact question, honestly and kindly, and the replies nearly all end the same way: talk to your financial advisor, call Social Security, there’s a calculator on ssa.gov. Three destinations. None of them is the agent.
That is the moment the relationship leaves the room. Whoever walks her through the biggest income decision of her retirement is who she calls next year, and the year after that.
This is not a plan comparison she can redo next October.
File at 62 and the check is permanently reduced, up to 30% for anyone born in 1960 or later. Wait past full retirement age and it grows 8% a year in delayed retirement credits, on a larger base that every cost-of-living adjustment then grows on top of, until 70. A United Income study (2019) found only 4% of retirees made the financially optimal claiming decision, and that the average household left about $111,000 on the table over a lifetime.
Once she files, it is effectively permanent. There is a twelve-month window to withdraw an application. It requires paying back every dollar the household received, including anything paid to a spouse or child on that record and any Medicare premiums withheld along the way. You get one chance at it in your lifetime.
For a married couple there is a bigger number still. When one spouse dies, the household keeps the larger check and the other one stops. For most couples that is about a third of their Social Security income, gone. For two-earner couples it is often close to half. The higher earner’s filing date sets the floor the survivor lives on, potentially for decades. Most households have never been shown that number.
If you fold this into what your clients already get from you, here is what the research says you are doing.
Keeping a client is the most profitable thing a practice does. Harvard Business Review puts the cost of winning a new customer at five to 25 times the cost of keeping one, and Frederick Reichheld’s work at Bain found that lifting retention by 5% can lift profit anywhere from 25% to 95%. Those are cross-industry findings, which is the point. They hold everywhere, including a Medicare book that renews with the same clients every year.
There is a catch, and it has nothing to do with competence. The Alliance for Lifetime Income’s 2024 study, fielded by LIMRA, asked financial professionals and their clients at the same time. 92% of the professionals said they help clients decide when to claim. 22% of the clients said their professional was the one who helped most. The work gets done. It just leaves nothing behind. A claiming conversation that happens out loud, next to nine other things, is forgotten by the time a brother-in-law asks who handled it.
The fix is to leave something behind: an analysis with her name on it, every filing month from 62 to 70, a recommended date with the dollars beside it. Something that goes in a drawer and comes back out. That is the difference between “we discussed it” and “my agent handled that.”
Now the second answer.
Your Medicare commissions are capped. CMS sets the number and it does not move no matter how good you are. Your book is not capped. A Social Security claiming analysis is a separate advisory service: an analysis of a federal benefit decision, delivered on its own terms, alongside your book and engaged separately from any plan enrollment.
There is a calendar reason too. Annual enrollment runs October through early December, and the open enrollment period carries you into March. From April through September, volume drops. Aging-in clients and special enrollment periods keep you selling, but the book is quieter, and it is sitting there asking you this question anyway.
One more thing the first answer might be hiding, because another broker said it to me plainly: when you mention Social Security and ssa.gov, it gives her pause. She is in the business of protecting health care.
Fair. So here is the line worth holding. You never touch a client’s Social Security account. You never see a Social Security number, and nothing is typed in by hand. The client connects her own earnings record, once, in one click, and the analysis runs from that.
It is familiar ground, too. Up to 85% of a Social Security benefit can be taxable, and those thresholds were set in 1983 and 1993 and never indexed. So when a client claims, it changes her taxable income, and her income sets her Medicare premium two years later. IRMAA, the income-related monthly adjustment amount, works on a two-year lookback. The 2026 premium reads the 2024 tax return, and the surcharge starts above $109,000 single or $218,000 joint and steps up from there. Roughly 8% of people with Medicare Part B pay it. The claiming decision can raise the premium you just quoted her. That is your product, moved by a decision nobody modeled. Widowhood moves it again: filing status changes, and the joint threshold becomes the single one on an income that just dropped. The death of a spouse is a qualifying life-changing event on Social Security’s own form, and that is a phone call you can make for someone in the worst month of her life.
Three steps, whether you bill for it or fold it in.
You invite the client. She connects her own Social Security record. You run the analysis and get a client-ready dashboard and a printed report: what each claiming age is worth, how the answer changes if she lives longer or shorter than average, and what the household looks like when one spouse is gone.
Then you have the conversation. That is the part where you already shine.
You do not have to become a Social Security expert. When a case is complicated, a divorce, a survivor situation, a client still working, a credentialed Registered Social Security Analyst® is available to work it with you, as a service you choose when you need it. A subject matter expert in your pocket.
To charge or not to charge? Either answer is a good one. Charge for it as its own engagement, or fold it into the relationship your clients already pay you for with their loyalty and their referrals. The business case is the same: a client who stays, a referral at a dinner party, and somebody at 71 who says “my agent handled everything.”
What is not a good answer is “I don’t get involved with that.” Your client is going to make this decision with somebody, this year. The only open question is whether that somebody is you.
Charge for it. Or don’t. Be the one who ran it.
Sources
Educational material, not tax or legal advice.
