Disability Judge Approval Ratings: How to Check and Why They Vary

Approval ratings for Social Security disability judges vary enormously: in the most recent federal data, individual Administrative Law Judges granted benefits in as few as 8.7 percent and as many as 93.5 percent of their decided cases, around a national average of roughly 58 percent in fiscal year 2024.¹ The judge assigned to your hearing can meaningfully affect the outcome, and you can look that judge’s history up before you walk in.

How to Look Up Your Judge’s Approval Rate

You generally find out which ALJ has been assigned to your case before the hearing. The primary source for that judge’s track record is the Social Security Administration’s own ALJ Disposition Data page, which publishes raw numbers for every judge each fiscal year through the Office of Hearings Operations. The current dataset covers FY 2025, running from September 28, 2024, through September 26, 2025.²

The SSA reports totals rather than percentages. For each judge you’ll see total dispositions, total decisions, awards (both fully and partially favorable), and denials. To get the approval rate, divide awards by decisions. Dismissals, which happen when a hearing request is withdrawn or thrown out before a merits ruling, are excluded from that calculation because they aren’t decisions on the claim.³

Several third-party sites do the arithmetic for you and add context. DisabilityJudges.com searches by judge name or state and lists approval percentages, average wait times, and state-level rankings.⁴ DisabilityJudges.org offers similar lookups along with user-posted comments on individual judges.⁵ Atticus publishes yearly national trends and judge-by-judge data back to 2018.⁶

What the Number Can and Cannot Tell You

A judge’s historical approval rate is informative, not predictive. Several factors beyond the judge’s own tendencies shape the statistic: the mix of cases that arrive at that office, how many claimants show up with lawyers, the strength of available medical records, and local healthcare access. A higher approval rate does not necessarily mean a judge applies a looser legal standard; it may reflect the kinds of cases on that docket.¹ The SSA cautions that its raw data also doesn’t account for part-time schedules, management duties, special assignments, union work, extended leave, or retirements, all of which affect how many cases a given judge handles.²

You also cannot shop for a judge. Assignments are made on a rotational basis tied to your geographic location. The hearing rules allow you to object to the assigned ALJ, but disqualification requires specific grounds such as a financial conflict of interest, a personal relationship with a party, or demonstrated prejudice. A low approval rate is not grounds.⁷ If the judge declines to withdraw after your objection, the Appeals Council decides the issue.⁸

Why Rates Differ So Much

No single factor explains the spread. Several overlap.

Judicial Subjectivity

Most claims turn on subjective testimony. Musculoskeletal conditions account for roughly 41 percent of claims and mental impairments for about 26 percent, and both categories depend heavily on a claimant’s own description of pain, limitations, and daily functioning.⁹ Each judge weighs that testimony and the surrounding medical evidence through their own lens. The SSA’s Inspector General attributed much of the rate variation to how individual ALJs interpret medical evidence, and the agency does not treat a high or low approval rate as evidence of erroneous decision-making.¹⁰

Claimant Populations and Healthcare Access

The demographics of a hearing office’s service area matter. Claimants in regions with limited healthcare access often submit thinner medical records, and disability prevalence itself varies dramatically by geography: county-level participation in disability programs ranged from under 1 percent to 21 percent in one SSA-funded study, driven primarily by actual disability prevalence and socioeconomic factors rather than inconsistent administration.¹¹ The Inspector General’s 2025 report listed claimant healthcare access and service-area demographics among the key drivers of rate differences.¹⁰

Legal Representation

Whether you bring a representative is one of the strongest predictors of outcome. The GAO found that represented claimants were granted benefits at a rate nearly three times higher than unrepresented ones.¹² A study for the Administrative Conference of the United States found a similar gap: an expected allowance rate of 64 percent with a representative compared to 47 percent without one.⁹ Representation rates differ across offices, which feeds back into geographic variation.

Caseload Pressure

ALJs work under an SSA target of 500 to 700 case dispositions per year.⁹ A 2015 Mercatus Center study argued that high caseloads create an incentive to approve claims, because writing a denial requires more documentation than writing an approval. The authors identified a correlation between high approval rates, high case volume, and lower decision quality, and estimated that outlier judges with unusually high approval rates cost taxpayers more than $72 billion in potentially unwarranted awards between 2005 and 2014.¹³ The SSA has historically disputed the idea that approval rates alone indicate poor quality.

Just How Wide Is the Spread

In FY 2023, among the 1,062 ALJs who each issued more than 200 dispositions, approval rates ranged from 6 percent to 95 percent. A September 2025 Inspector General report profiled the 12 highest-rate and 12 lowest-rate judges that year. The top group approved between roughly 88 and 95 percent of claims, in offices from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Honolulu, Hawaii, to Queens, New York. The bottom group approved between about 6 and 21 percent, in offices including Orland Park, Illinois; Newark, New Jersey; and Colorado Springs, Colorado. In one striking example, a judge with a 91-percent approval rate worked in the same hearing office as a judge with a 21-percent rate.¹⁰

Nationally, the overall hearing-level approval rate has stayed within a narrow band, between about 52 and 58 percent since 2018, ticking upward from 52 percent in 2021 to 58 percent in 2024.⁶ Over the same stretch the active ALJ corps shrank from more than 1,700 to about 1,220, and total decisions fell from roughly 640,000 in 2019 to around 207,000 in 2024.

Are Outlier Judges Getting It Wrong

The GAO’s 2017 report estimated that for a typical claim, the expected approval rate could vary by as much as 46 percentage points depending on which judge drew the case, even after controlling for claimant characteristics, judge experience, and local economic conditions. That gap had narrowed by about 5 percentage points between 2007 and 2015, which officials credited to better training and quality assurance.¹⁴ The GAO recommended that the SSA publish performance measures addressing the accuracy and consistency of ALJ decisions, not just speed and volume. As of January 2026, the agency still had no public metric for decisional accuracy or consistency.¹²

The 2025 Inspector General review of the 24 most extreme outliers found that the SSA’s Appeals Council agreed with their decisions more than 70 percent of the time, concluding those decisions were “generally accurate.” Of 314 complaints the SSA received about ALJs in FY 2023, none against the 24 studied outliers were substantiated. The SSA did take disciplinary action against nine other ALJs that year for issues tied to performance, policy adherence, behavior, or outside misconduct.¹⁰

If Your Judge Denies the Claim

You can request review by the SSA’s Appeals Council, which can affirm, modify, or reverse the ALJ’s decision, or send the case back for a new hearing. The Council also pulls a random sample of unappealed decisions on its own to monitor quality.¹⁵ If the Council denies review or rules against you, the next step is federal district court. Federal courts have historically remanded roughly half the disability cases appealed to them, and most remanded cases eventually result in an approval.⁹

Expect a Long Wait

Whichever judge you get, you’ll likely wait a while to see them. Pending disability hearings grew from about 272,000 in February 2025 to roughly 344,000 in February 2026, an increase of more than 73,000 cases.¹⁶ Average processing time stood at 268 days in February 2026, slightly down from 277 days a year earlier. Office-level waits run from about 6 months in Fargo and Fort Myers to 11 or 12 months in Las Vegas and Springfield, Massachusetts.¹⁷ Between January 2025 and January 2026 the SSA lost 13 percent of its ALJs, the largest single-year drop on record, along with hundreds of attorneys and paralegals who support hearings. The agency also stopped publishing detailed monthly hearing data in September 2025.¹⁸

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