Social Security abroad has become an $8.39 billion annual line in the federal record of Americans living beyond the United States.
The Social Security Administration counted 711,778 Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance beneficiaries in foreign countries in December 2024, including 463,480 retired workers. OASDI is the formal program behind Social Security retirement, survivor and disability benefits.
The agency reported $682.8 million in monthly payments to foreign countries that month. Retired workers accounted for $493.1 million of that total.
That doesn’t count Americans abroad. It maps something narrower.
It shows where the U.S. government sends Social Security payments outside the country, one of the few federal datasets that attaches a recurring dollar figure to life overseas.
Japan and Canada top the foreign table
Japan had the largest foreign-country count, with 108,161 beneficiaries receiving Social Security payments in December 2024. Canada followed closely with 106,904.
Mexico ranked third with 58,067 beneficiaries. The United Kingdom followed with 39,343, then Germany with 37,659, Poland with 36,062 and the Philippines with 31,850.
The list doesn’t line up neatly with the usual countries with the most American expats story. Portugal had 14,813 beneficiaries, Spain had 13,975 and Thailand had 8,642.
Those countries matter in relocation coverage. In this dataset, they sit behind older migration corridors, military ties, family migration patterns and countries with larger long-term links to U.S. workers.
Europe receives the largest regional total
Europe had 267,895 beneficiaries, more than any other region in the foreign-country table. Asia had 195,483, while North America outside the United States had 165,275.
The money followed the same broad pattern. SSA reported $244.7 million in monthly payments to Europe, $179 million to Asia and $153.5 million to North America outside the United States.
For Social Security abroad, the country ranking also shows how different datasets answer different questions. Host-country immigration data tends to show current residence permits, nationality registrations or visa categories.
SSA data shows benefit checks.
That distinction matters. A beneficiary in Japan may be a retired worker, a spouse, a survivor, a child or a disabled worker.
The table does not say whether that person moved recently, holds U.S. citizenship or identifies as an American emigrant.
Retired workers are the main group
Retired workers made up about 65% of foreign-country beneficiaries, with 463,480 people in December 2024. Their average monthly benefit was $1,063.98, while the median was $887.
That median is low compared with many state-level figures. It suggests the foreign-country table includes many partial work histories, spouse and survivor relationships, lower lifetime earnings records or beneficiaries whose U.S. benefits sit alongside another pension system.
The table does not explain why. It only reports the payment record.
Still, the retirement signal is clear. Foreign countries accounted for 657,492 beneficiaries age 65 or older, or more than nine in 10 of all foreign-country beneficiaries in the SSA table.
The data has hard limits
Social Security abroad data should not be treated as an overseas American census. It is not one.
SSA pays benefits based on eligibility, earnings records, family relationships, citizenship status, residence and country-specific restrictions. U.S. citizens can generally receive benefits while living in most foreign countries, but noncitizens face additional rules, including a general cutoff after six consecutive calendar months outside the United States unless an exception applies.
The dataset also excludes people who moved abroad before claiming benefits, younger workers, students, digital nomads, wealthy emigrants without current benefits and Americans who don’t interact with SSA while overseas.
That makes the number too narrow for a total population estimate. It is still valuable because it comes from administrative records, not survey responses, embassy registration or passport demand.
Those sources already point in different directions. The State Department has historically used a figure near 9 million U.S. citizens abroad, while other datasets produce lower counts depending on whether they measure citizenship, birthplace, residence permits or voter eligibility.
American Emigration has documented that problem in official counts of Americans abroad, passport data and country-level residence records such as Americans moving to Brazil.
What this tells us about Americans abroad
The strongest story in the SSA table is not that 711,778 Americans retired overseas. That would overstate the data.
The stronger finding is that a large U.S. benefit system now sends hundreds of millions of dollars each month to foreign countries, with Japan, Canada, Mexico and Europe sitting near the center of the map.
For researchers tracking Social Security abroad, the table gives a cleaner view of older and benefit-connected populations than most public datasets on Americans overseas. It also shows why the broader count remains hard.
The United States does not have one clean number for Americans abroad. It has fragments.
This is one of the sturdier ones.
