Your position with the City of St. Cloud participates in Social Security. Social Security tax comes out of your plan salary — the 6.2% deduction your paystub labels SOC SEC TAX — and the job earns you Social Security credits, the same as any covered employment. Your W-2 shows it too: Box 3 (Social Security wages) and Box 4 (Social Security tax withheld) carry amounts for this job. At retirement, a Social Security benefit is a separate layer of income on top of your pension.
Adding Social Security to your projection
This tool does not assume a Social Security amount for you — you opt it in and the projection layers it on top of your pension:
- enter the number from your Social Security statement at ssa.gov/myaccount, or
- estimate it from your covered-earnings history, using years of covered work and average earnings.
Credits from covered work outside the City — earlier jobs, a second job, work after you retire — count toward the same benefit; the Social Security Administration keeps one earnings record per person.
"Social Security Option" on your benefit estimate
Estimates prepared by the plan's actuary list a Social Security Option to Age 67 and to Age 64 among the payment forms. Despite the name, this line is not a Social Security benefit — it is a way of shaping your pension payments: a higher monthly amount until the age you select, and a lower one after, designed to level your total income around the date your Social Security benefit is assumed to begin. The estimate's own footnote states the amounts are payable regardless of actual Social Security benefits. This tool models the plan's normal form only — there's more in the payment form behind your numbers.
About WEP and GPO
You may have heard that public-safety pensions reduce Social Security. The Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO) only ever applied to pensions from non-covered employment — and because your City position is covered, they did not apply to a St. Cloud pension. Both provisions were repealed anyway by the Social Security Fairness Act, signed in January 2025 and retroactive to benefits payable after December 2023. This tool applies no WEP or GPO reduction anywhere.
What this tool does
- Opt-in: Social Security enters your projection when you add it — as the number from your statement or as an estimate from your earnings history.
- Layered, not blended: the projected benefit sits alongside your pension and any DROP or supplemental savings as its own income line.
- No reductions: WEP and GPO are repealed, so none are modeled.