Paulette Amisano | July 15, 2025 | 5 minute read

In January 2025, the passing into law of the Social Security Fairness Act (SSFA) repealed the government pension offset and windfall elimination provisions in the Social Security Act. For employees of our agency, this eliminated restrictions from employees or employees’ spouses from collecting both State Employee Retirement benefits and Social Security benefits. Before the SSFA, if you collected a full pension from our retirement plan, you could not collect SS benefits that you or your spouse contributed. This provision may not affect all agency staff in retirement, but it could impact you.

Social Security is the federally managed retirement system to which most workers are required to contribute through payroll deductions. As employees of this agency, we contribute to the Massachusetts State Employees’ Retirement System (MSERS) in lieu of Social Security. Both are similar in that our employee withholdings are returned to us in the future, depending on the rules of the plan. 

The SSFA helps people who have worked and contributed to more than one mandatory retirement system during their career. It recognizes that many employees have multiple employers over the years and ensures they receive fair retirement income based on their total years of service, contributions, and age.

Before the passing of SSFA, if you contributed to Social Security before or after your work here, you could not collect Social Security income if you received your full pension from MSERS. If you were married and your spouse had passed away, you could not collect Social Security income benefits based on your spouse’s contributions to Social Security. The Social Security Administration considered collecting from both a government pension and Social Security as double dipping, and developed the Windfall Provision Act to prohibit such practice. With the SSFA, this is no longer the case.

For example, consider an employee who is 60 years old and has 20 years of service with our agency. This person started working for us 20 years ago, when they were 40 years old. This employee had worked for other companies prior to their time here, and they probably contributed to Social Security in that position. Now, as an employee gets closer to retirement, they can consider their full working career and contributions made to MSERS, Social Security, and other mandatory retirement programs over the course of their working career. 

When you think about and plan for retirement, you will want to understand your future earnings from MSERS from your time at this agency and from Social Security. Both systems can provide employees with an estimate of retirement benefits based on contributions over their working career.

Of course, there are age and service requirements that each organization sets for future distributions. With MSERS, the vesting period is 10 years. If you are with our agency (or another agency participating in the state retirement plan) for 10 years or more, you are eligible for retirement benefits. How much of a benefit depends on your age, length of service, and earnings at your planned retirement date. MSERS provides a helpful calculator to estimate your pension benefit. With Social Security, the general rule is that you must meet a minimum of 40 quarters of contributions to be eligible for Social Security. Again, how much you receive depends on your age, contributions, and planned retirement date.  You can see your Social Security estimated earnings by creating an account here.