Roughly one in three Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 say they do not believe Social Security will exist by the time they retire, according to surveys tracked by the Social Security Administration. That statistic sat in my notebook when I drove to Nashville earlier this month to meet Brittany Holloway, a 25-year-old dental assistant who had been asking her own version of that question every payday for the past two years.
Brittany works full-time at a dental practice in the Germantown neighborhood, earns $17 an hour, and takes home a paycheck that looks noticeably smaller than what she calculated in her head. She is the first person in her family to finish any college coursework. She carries $8,000 in community college loans and $3,000 on a credit card she opened at 19. Nashville’s rent market, which has seen median one-bedroom prices climb past $1,600 a month, leaves her very little room to maneuver.
The line item that bothers her most, she told me, is not the rent. It is the FICA box.
What Brittany Sees on Her Pay Stub — and What She Does Not Understand
When I sat down with Brittany at a coffee shop a few blocks from her practice, she pulled out her phone and showed me a photo of her most recent pay stub. The numbers were precise. Working approximately 40 hours a week at $17 an hour, she grosses around $2,946 a month before taxes. The Social Security deduction — technically the OASDI withholding — comes to $182.68. The Medicare deduction adds another $42.72. Together, that is $225.40 leaving her check every single month before she pays for anything else.
“I watch these TikToks where people are saying max your Roth IRA, pay off your debt first, invest in index funds,” Brittany told me, sliding her phone back into her pocket. “But nobody talks about the money that just disappears before I even get to make a choice about it.”
She is not wrong that the money leaves before she decides anything. Under current law, employees pay 6.2 percent of wages toward Social Security and 1.45 percent toward Medicare, with employers matching both amounts. Brittany’s employer contributes an equal $225.40 on her behalf each month — a fact that genuinely surprised her when I mentioned it.
How Social Security Credits Actually Accumulate at Her Income Level
The mechanics of Social Security eligibility are straightforward, but almost nobody explains them to workers at the start of their careers. To qualify for any retirement benefit at all, a worker needs 40 credits — the equivalent of roughly ten years of covered employment. In 2025, one credit required $1,810 in earnings. Workers can earn a maximum of four credits per year.
At Brittany’s current income — approximately $35,360 annually — she is earning all four available credits every single year. She entered the workforce in a meaningful way around age 22. That means she is already several credits into her accumulation, building a record that the SSA tracks through her Social Security number regardless of how many jobs she holds.
As Brittany explained, no one at her high school or during her community college program ever walked her through any of this. “My mom worked retail for 30 years and never talked about Social Security as something that was actually for her,” she said. “It was just something that got taken out.”
The Question Brittany Really Wanted Answered: Will It Still Exist?
This is the part of the conversation that got quieter. Brittany had done some reading — the kind of reading that starts on TikTok and ends in a spiral of dread. She had seen headlines about the Social Security trust funds running short, about benefit cuts, about the program becoming insolvent. She wanted to know whether those deductions on her pay stub were, in her words, “going into a black hole.”
The honest answer, based on the most recent Social Security Trustees Report, is that the combined trust funds are projected to be depleted around 2035 if Congress takes no action. At that point, ongoing payroll tax revenue would still cover approximately 83 percent of scheduled benefits — not zero, but a significant reduction. That is not a secret the SSA hides; it publishes the projection openly on its actuarial summary page.
“That’s actually less scary than what I thought,” Brittany said when I walked her through the numbers. “I thought it was going to zero. But 83 percent is still a big cut if you don’t have savings on top of it.” That observation — unsolicited and uncoached — struck me as exactly the right anxiety to have. She is not wrong. For workers at her income level, Social Security is projected to replace a meaningfully higher share of pre-retirement earnings than it does for high earners. But 83 percent of a smaller number is still a smaller number.
What Brittany Walked Away Knowing — and What Still Worries Her
By the time we finished our conversation, Brittany had a clearer picture of what she was actually paying into. She knows that her credits are accumulating, that her full retirement age under current law is 67, and that the SSA provides a free online account — my Social Security — where workers can track their earnings record and get a projected benefit estimate. She had never set up an account. She pulled out her phone and started the process at the table.
The projected monthly retirement benefit the tool showed her — based on her current earnings trajectory — was modest. Somewhere between $1,100 and $1,400 in today’s dollars, depending on assumptions. The national average retirement benefit in early 2026 sits around $1,927 per month, but that figure reflects the full careers of workers who earned substantially more than Brittany does now. Her number, if her wages stay flat, would fall below that average.
She also asked me something I did not have a clean answer for: whether the COLA adjustments she had read about would help her keep up with the cost of living in a city like Nashville. The 2025 COLA was 2.5 percent — the smallest adjustment in several years after the inflation spikes of 2022 and 2023. Whether future COLAs keep pace with housing costs in high-growth metros is genuinely uncertain. The COLA is tied to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners, which does not always match the specific basket of goods that affects young, renting workers in cities with fast-climbing rents.
What lingers with me after leaving Nashville is that Brittany’s confusion is not a personal failure. She never received a single lesson about payroll taxes, Social Security credits, or retirement projections at any point in her formal education. She is doing what millions of young workers do — trying to reverse-engineer the system from social media while a quarter of her disposable income goes to debt service and a mandatory retirement program she does not yet fully understand.
She told me the one thing she was going to do differently after our conversation: log into her my Social Security account once a year and check that her earnings are being recorded correctly. That is a small habit. It is also, for someone in her position, a genuinely consequential one — because errors in the SSA earnings record do happen, and disputing them gets harder the further back you go.
“I feel like I should’ve known all of this years ago,” she said as we walked out. “But at least I know it now.”
Related: The Social Security Claiming Age That Could Cost You $100,000 Over Your Lifetime
Leave a Reply