What is the max benefit from social security?
The max benefit is $3,345 per month if retiring at full retirement age in 2022.
To get max benefit, you need to average $147K over your 35 highest years (with some indexing for inflation). I think this is based on income that is taxed by social security. Anyone know for sure? In that case a windfall year wouldn't bump up the average much because it only counts the amount taxed by social security.
Our friends over at gobankingrates offer some additional details.
There are a few sites with benefit calculators. Interesting that they ask for annual salary and not 'average annual salary for 35 highest earning years'.
SSA has a quick calculator as well, https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/quickcalc/index.html
I didn't find it anywhere, but would like to see a graph of benefits vs income. Looks like they smooth out the benefits curve. First bracket of income has 90% replacement factor, then 32% and finally 15%. So, after a certain salary additional income doesn't increase your benefits much.
Wonky write up here: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R42035.pdf