Social security in Thailand: the Act asks who employs you, not what passport you hold
Every month a line on your payslip takes five per cent of your wage for the Social Security Fund, and most foreigners in Bangkok have been told one of two stories about it — that it does not really apply to them, or that the money is gone. Both are wrong, and the law says so in plain terms. Section 33 contains no nationality test at all. The one provision in the entire Act that does turn on your nationality works in your favour. And the wage ceiling that every English-language guide quotes was repealed on 12 December 2025.
The short version
- Section 33 has no nationality condition. An employee aged 15 to 60 is an insured person. That is the whole test.
- It is compulsory, not a perk. Your employer does not choose whether to enrol you.
- One employee is enough. A royal decree brought employers of one or more people into the Act on 1 April 2002.
- The only foreigner-shaped exclusion is about your employer — a foreign government or an international organisation. Embassies and UN agencies are out; Thai companies are in.
- The 15,000 baht ceiling is repealed. It is 17,500 from 1 January 2026, 20,000 from 2029 and 23,000 from 2032.
- So the maximum employee contribution is 875 baht, not the 750 you will read everywhere else.
- The five per cent is three slices, not one rate: 1.5% health and maternity, 3% old age and child allowance, 0.5% unemployment.
- The biggest slice is your old-age money. Three of your five per cent is retirement saving.
- But the regulation narrows that door. The Act grants the exit lump sum to any non-Thai; the 2017 regulation gives it to nationals of treaty countries — and we could not establish that any country qualifies.
- Leaving your job does not end cover that day — sickness, maternity, invalidity and death run on for six more months.
- Voluntary cover dies two ways. Three months in a row, or fewer than nine contributions in any rolling twelve.
- Cash benefits use your best three months of the last fifteen, divided by 90 — not your last salary, and not an average.
Which law you are actually under
The Social Security Fund is the creature of one Act and a small stack of subordinate instruments. The distinction matters here more than usual, because the numbers people argue about are almost never in the Act. They are in ministerial regulations, which can be changed without touching the statute — and one of them was changed in December 2025.
- Social Security Act B.E. 2533, Royal Gazette volume 107, part 161, 1 September 1990. Amended by No. 2 B.E. 2537 (volume 111, part 63 Kor, 30 December 1994), No. 3 B.E. 2542 (volume 116, part 22 Kor, 31 March 1999) and, most importantly for this page, No. 4 B.E. 2558 (volume 132, part 53 Kor, 22 June 2015, in force 120 days later).
- Royal Decree applying the Act to employers with one or more employees B.E. 2545, volume 119, part 26 Kor, 27 March 2002, in force 1 April 2002.
- Ministerial Regulation fixing contribution rates B.E. 2565, volume 139, part 60 Kor, pages 26–27, 30 September 2022 — the instrument that sets the rate today. Its schedule Kho has applied since 1 January 2023.
- Ministerial Regulation on the minimum and maximum contribution wage B.E. 2568, volume 142, part 81 Kor, page 5, 12 December 2025, in force 1 January 2026.
Two of those are the reason this page exists. The 2015 amendment rewrote the definition of an employee, deleted two exclusions and added the provision that gives a departing foreigner their old-age money. The December 2025 regulation repealed a figure that had stood since 1995 and that the English-language internet is still quoting.
The Act does not ask your nationality
This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth reading the section itself. Section 33, first paragraph:
An employee not below fifteen and not over sixty years of age complete shall be an insured person.
That is the entire coverage test. There is no nationality condition, no visa condition, no work-permit condition and no minimum-salary condition anywhere in it. If you are a luk chang — an employee — of an employer subject to the Act, you are an insured person by operation of law. The 2015 amendment made the definition of employee simpler still: a person who works for an employer in return for wages.
Nor is there an employee-count threshold any more. The old rule that only larger employers were caught was removed by royal decree: since 1 April 2002 the Act applies to employers with one or more employees, in every locality throughout the Kingdom. A foreigner working for a two-person Bangkok company is inside the system exactly as much as one at a bank.
So where does a foreigner fall out? Section 4 lists who the Act does not apply to, and only one of its four limbs has anything to do with foreigners:
This Act shall not apply to … (3) employees of a foreign government or of an international organisation.
Read that limb carefully, because it is the single most useful correction on this page. It excludes people by reference to who employs them, not by reference to who they are. A Thai national working at a foreign embassy in Bangkok is outside the Act. A British, Filipino or Burmese national working at a Thai company is inside it. Your passport is not the variable. Your employer is.
The other three limbs are civil servants and permanent government employees; students who are employees of their own school, hospital, college or university; and any undertaking or class of employee excluded by royal decree.
What the 2015 amendment deleted from section 4 is as telling as what it kept. The old version also excluded daily- and hourly-paid temporary government staff, and employees of a Thai-office employer posted to work abroad. Both of those exclusions are gone.
The number that changed on 1 January 2026
Your contribution is not five per cent of your salary. It is five per cent of your contribution-base wage, which is your salary clamped between a floor and a ceiling. For thirty years that ceiling was 15,000 baht a month, fixed by Ministerial Regulation No. 7 of B.E. 2538, and it is the figure behind every “maximum 750 baht a month” sentence you have ever read about Thai social security.
It is no longer the law. A ministerial regulation published in the Royal Gazette on 12 December 2025 repealed Regulation No. 7 outright and replaced it with a three-step schedule.
| Period | Floor | Ceiling | Maximum employee contribution at 5% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Until 31 December 2025 | 1,650 | 15,000 (repealed) | 750 |
| 1 January 2026 – 31 December 2028 | 1,650 | 17,500 | 875 |
| 1 January 2029 – 31 December 2031 | 1,650 | 20,000 | 1,000 |
| From 1 January 2032 | 1,650 | 23,000 | 1,150 |
The floor is unchanged at 1,650 baht throughout, which matters if you are paid very little: your contribution is calculated as though you earned 1,650 even if you earned less.
The regulation's own explanatory note says why it was made, and it is not the reason you might expect. The stated purpose is to make the base fit current economic conditions so that insured persons receive increased benefits in line with the contribution base. That is the government explaining that the point of raising the ceiling is to raise what the fund pays out, not merely what it takes in — which follows, because almost every cash benefit in the Act is computed from the contribution-base wage rather than from your actual salary.
A note on how we read this one. The Royal Gazette PDF of this regulation is built with an embedded subset font that carries no character map, so it does not extract as text at all — copy it and you get gibberish. We rendered the gazette page to an image and read the printed Thai directly. That is why we are confident about the figures, and it is also why you should not trust a text search of that file if you go looking yourself.
What your five per cent is actually made of
No instrument anywhere says “five per cent”. The figure is the sum of three separate lines in a schedule, each funding a different set of benefits. Pulling them apart is worth the two minutes, because it tells you what you are buying and — more usefully — which part of it you can get back.
| Benefits funded | Employee | Employer | Government |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sickness and injury, invalidity, death, maternity | 1.5% | 1.5% | 1.5% |
| Child allowance and old age | 3% | 3% | 1% |
| Unemployment | 0.5% | 0.5% | 0.25% |
| Total | 5% | 5% | 2.75% |
Three of your five per cent — the largest slice by a distance — is old-age and child allowance. That is retirement saving with your name on it, and it is the part of the arrangement that a foreigner leaving Thailand has the clearest claim to.
Why the rate is harder to cite than it looks
If you go looking for the regulation behind that table you will find a trail of repealed ones, and this is worth a paragraph because it is the same lesson as the ceiling.
Until 2020 the rate lived in two separate instruments — one for the main benefits and a second, from B.E. 2546, for unemployment. On 30 December 2020 a new regulation repealed both of them and folded all three categories into a single schedule. That one was amended in February 2021, replaced in September 2021, and replaced again by the regulation now in force, made on 30 September 2022. Four instruments in under two years.
All of that churn was the pandemic. Each instrument set a reduced rate for a named window and a restored rate afterwards, which is why they kept expiring and being remade. The current regulation is built the same way, and its clause 3 is the one that closed the era: from 1 January 2023 the ordinary rates in schedule Kho apply. That is the schedule in our table.
One caveat on the rate. Section 46/1, added in 2015, lets the Minister with Cabinet approval reduce contributions where a locality suffers a serious disaster — but for not more than six months at a time, and by ministerial notification rather than regulation. Every pandemic cut was made under it, and all of them have expired. So has the most recent use of the power, a nine-province southern flood measure covering the wage months December 2025 to May 2026 at three per cent a side. As this page is written, no reduction of any kind is in force and the rates in the table are what you pay. But the power is live and the notifications are short-lived, so if a cut is running when you read this, the notice at the office beats this page.
The one place in the Act where your passport does matter
Having said that the Act is nationality-blind, here is the exception. The 2015 amendment added a third paragraph to section 77 bis:
An insured person who does not hold Thai nationality, when insured status ends — whether or not contributions have been paid for one hundred and eighty months — and who intends not to reside in Thailand, shall have the right to receive the old-age lump sum, in accordance with the criteria, methods and conditions prescribed in a ministerial regulation.
Read on its own, that is a door. It is worth being precise about what it adds, because the paragraph above it already does some of this work: under section 77 bis paragraph two, anybody at all whose contributions fall short of 180 months and whose insured status has ended is entitled to the lump sum rather than a pension. What paragraph three adds, for a non-Thai who is leaving, is that they need not wait until fifty-five to collect it.
But the sentence ends by handing the detail to a ministerial regulation, and that regulation is where the door narrows.
What the regulation did to the right
The instrument is the Ministerial Regulation on payment of the old-age lump sum to insured persons who do not hold Thai nationality B.E. 2560, published in the Royal Gazette on 17 January 2017. Its first clause is the whole story:
An insured person holding the nationality of a country that has concluded a social security agreement with Thailand in respect of old age, whether or not aged fifty-five years complete, shall be entitled to receive the old-age lump sum.
Compare the two sentences. The Act says an insured person who does not hold Thai nationality. The regulation says a national of a country that has an agreement with Thailand. The implementing instrument is narrower than the provision it implements — and it is the instrument the counter works from.
Which raises the obvious question: which countries have such an agreement? We could not establish that any does. The Social Security Office's own circular transmitting this regulation to its provincial offices, dated 3 March 2017, ends by saying that if the Office concludes a social security agreement on old age with any country, further notice will be given. At the moment the regulation was circulated, on the Office's own account, there were none. We found no later gazetted instrument naming one.
We are not going to turn that into a flat assertion that no foreigner can ever claim. What we can say is this: the entitlement in the Act is real, the condition in the regulation is real, and we could not find the list that would connect them. What would settle it is a notification from the Ministry of Labour or the Social Security Office naming a country, or the foreign ministry's treaty register. If somebody tells you your contributions are refundable on departure, that is the document to ask them for.
This matters because the flat claim is everywhere. A great deal of English-language expatriate writing states that the old-age refund is available to foreign workers generally. That is what the Act's paragraph three says in isolation, and it is not what the regulation that governs the claim says.
What it pays, if you get through the door
The same regulation does answer the amount, and the answer has a threshold in it worth knowing before you take a short posting:
| Contributions paid | You receive |
|---|---|
| Fewer than 12 months | Your own old-age and child-allowance contributions |
| 12 months or more | Your own and the employer’s, plus the return the Office announces |
Twelve months is where the employer’s half starts coming back to you. Below it you get back only what came out of your own pay.
What the regulation does not say. It requires you to declare, on a form annexed to it, that you are leaving and will not reside in Thailand — and the form’s evidence section is three blank lines. The instrument never says what evidence counts. It says nothing about cancelling a visa, sets no claim deadline of its own, and says nothing about payment to a foreign bank account. We print the silence rather than filling it, but note that the two-year claim limit below still applies.
Leaving the job without leaving the system
Cover does not stop on your last day, and the two things that happen next run on different clocks.
The six-month tail
Under section 38, second paragraph, a person who stops being an employee keeps entitlement under Chapters 2 to 5 — sickness, maternity, invalidity and death — for a further six months, and a royal decree may extend that to a maximum of twelve. Section 41 does the same job for someone leaving voluntary cover. Note what is missing from the list either way: child allowance, old age and unemployment are not in it.
Section 39, and the six-month door
If you paid at least twelve months as a section 33 insured person and your cover ended by leaving employment, you may elect to continue voluntarily under section 39 — but you must say so within six months of the day your insured status ended.
Both clocks start on the same day, and that is the trap. The six-month grace period on your old benefits and the six-month window to convert to section 39 both run from the day you stopped being an employee. They do not run one after the other. It is easy to assume you have six months of cover and then six months to decide; you have one six-month period to do both. Section 84/1 allows an extension where an unavoidable necessity prevented you applying, but the application must be made within fifteen days of that necessity ending and only if the Secretary-General sees fit.
Two things about section 39 that are widely misstated:
- It does not include unemployment benefit. Section 54(7) lists the seven benefits and excludes section 39 insured persons from the unemployment one in terms.
- The contribution is not a percentage of your old salary. The base is fixed by a ministerial regulation of B.E. 2538 at 4,800 baht a month, and it has not moved since 1995 — note that the December 2025 regulation raised the ceiling for employed members but left this one alone.
- And you pay both halves. Under section 46 paragraph three the government contributes one times, and the insured person two times, the rate each side would otherwise pay. There is no separate section 39 rate instrument; the monthly figure is arithmetic off the 4,800 base.
The nine-in-twelve rule
Everybody knows that missing three consecutive payments ends section 39 cover. Far fewer people know about section 41(5).
| Provision | Trigger | When termination takes effect |
|---|---|---|
| s.41(4) | Fails to pay contributions for three consecutive months | Retroactively, from the first unpaid month — not the third |
| s.41(5) | Within any twelve-month period, has paid fewer than nine months | In the month the ninth contribution failed to complete |
So you can be scrupulous about never missing three in a row and still lose your cover, by missing a fourth month scattered across a rolling year. And because termination under (4) backdates to the first unpaid month, a claim you thought was covered may turn out not to have been.
One piece of good news to set against that. Section 42 requires that every spell of section 33 and section 39 insurance be counted together for the purpose of establishing entitlement. Moving between jobs, or between employment and voluntary cover, does not reset your clock.
What you have to have paid in
Each benefit has its own qualifying period, set in its own section, and they are the provisions that catch people who arrive or leave mid-year. These are statutory — they sit in the Act, not in a regulation that can move.
| Benefit | Contributions required |
|---|---|
| Sickness or injury (s.62) | 3 months within the 15 before treatment |
| Invalidity (s.69) | 3 months within the 15 before the invalidity |
| Death (s.73) | 1 month within the 6 before death |
| Maternity (s.65) | 5 months within the 15 before the medical service, and not more than two confinements per insured person |
| Child allowance (s.74) | 12 months within 36 — the only 36-month window in the Act |
| Unemployment (s.78) | 6 months within the 15 before unemployment — plus registration with a state employment office and reporting at least monthly, plus dismissal not for the misconduct grounds in s.78(2), plus you must not already be entitled to old-age benefit |
| Old age (s.76) | 180 months — and they need not be consecutive |
Three of those deserve a second look. The death benefit needs only one qualifying month, which is why it reaches people who had barely started. The 180 months for old age need not run consecutively, which together with the aggregation rule above means a career broken up by departures and returns still counts. And the child allowance is the only benefit measured over 36 months rather than fifteen.
Unemployment carries two further traps that are in the Act rather than in a regulation. Section 79 imposes a seven-day waiting period — entitlement runs from the eighth day, not from the day you stopped working. And the condition that you must not already be entitled to the old-age benefit quietly closes unemployment cover to anyone who has passed 180 months of contributions.
We print the qualifying months and not the amounts, because the months are in the Act and most of the amounts are not. Sickness pays at fifty per cent of the section 57 wage under the Act. Invalidity is different and often misstated: since 2015 the rate and the duration are set by the Medical Committee with the Board’s approval, capped at fifty per cent, with a separate tier at the full fifty per cent where the loss is severe. Fifty per cent is the ceiling, not the entitlement. The funeral grant, the child allowance and the unemployment percentages and durations are all left to ministerial regulations, and those are exactly the figures that go stale.
How the money is actually calculated
Cash benefits are not computed from your last salary, and not from an average either. Section 57, as replaced in 2015:
Take the highest three months of contribution-base wage within the fifteen months before the month entitlement arises, add them together, and divide by ninety.
Highest, not last. If your income moved around, the formula picks your best months out of the window for you. It is a more generous rule than the one most English summaries describe, and it is the reason the ceiling rise matters: the ceiling caps the wage that goes into this calculation, so a higher ceiling feeds a higher daily rate.
Two clocks that can take the money away
Section 56 sets a two-year limit for making a claim from the date the right arises. But the second paragraph lets the Secretary-General accept a late claim where the applicant shows sufficient reason and necessity, so the two years is not the absolute bar it is usually described as.
The second clock is the dangerous one, and it is separate. Once a cash benefit has been awarded and you have been notified, if you do not collect it within two years of the notification the money falls to the Fund. A person who has already left Thailand is exactly who this catches.
If your employer does not pay
This is the question behind a lot of anxious searching, and the Act answers it cleanly.
- You are deemed to have paid from the day your wages fell due. Section 47 requires the employer to deduct your contribution every time wages are paid, and provides that the insured person is treated as having contributed from the wage due-date — whatever the employer subsequently does with the money. Your record is not hostage to their remittance.
- The employer pays a surcharge of 2% a month on what they failed to remit — capped, since 2015, at the amount of the contribution itself. The 2015 amendment applied that cap retroactively to employers already in arrears.
- Failing to file the contribution return on time is an offence carrying up to six months' imprisonment or a fine of up to 20,000 baht, or both.
One more provision worth knowing, added in 2015: claiming or receiving a benefit under this Act does not cut off any right or benefit you have under another law. Taking social security money is not a waiver of your labour-law entitlements. If you have just lost a job, the companion question is what severance and final pay you are owed, which is a different statute entirely.
What this fund does not cover
An injury at work is not a Social Security Fund matter, and the Act says so in an unusual way — not in one exclusion clause, but inside the entitlement condition of each benefit. Sickness, invalidity and death all carry the same phrase: not arising from the work. Three sections, three times, in the three places where it decides an outcome.
Work injury belongs to the Workmen’s Compensation Fund, under a separate Act, and the difference that matters on a payslip is who pays. Contributions to that fund are defined as money the employer pays in; there is no employee contribution among the sources the Act lists, and the employer’s rate is capped at five per cent of annual payroll, experience-rated by industry. Social security is tripartite and comes out of your wages. Workmen’s compensation is employer-only and never appears on them.
That Act is nationality-blind too, and the proof is sharper than mere absence. The word foreigner appears nowhere in it, and nationality appears exactly twice — both times requiring Thai nationality of people sitting on the fund’s board and its medical committee. It demands Thai nationality of those who govern the fund and of nobody it covers.
One asymmetry worth checking if you work for a mission. Both Acts exclude foreign governments and international organisations, but not in the same words. Social security excludes employees of a foreign government or of an international organisation, flatly. The Workmen’s Compensation Act, as amended in 2018, excludes them only for employees whose employment is not employment in Thailand. On the face of the two statutes a locally-hired embassy or UN-agency employee in Bangkok is outside social security but inside the Workmen’s Compensation Fund. That is what the texts say; whether an administration applies them that way is another question, and not one we can answer from the law.
And they are not alternatives. Each Act now carries the same sentence saying that claiming under it does not cut off rights under any other law. Neither fund is an exclusive remedy, and taking social security money is not a waiver of anything.
Questions people actually ask
- I am on a work permit. Am I in or out?
- In, if your employer is subject to the Act — which since April 2002 means essentially any employer with at least one employee. The work permit is a separate regime with separate duties; it does not decide your social security position. The work permit rules are here.
- My employer says foreigners cannot join. Is that right?
- Not as a statement about the Act. Section 33 has no nationality condition and enrolment is not optional for either side. The only exclusion that turns on foreignness is section 4(3), and it is about foreign governments and international organisations as employers.
- Is the maximum really 750 baht a month?
- It was, when the ceiling was 15,000. From 1 January 2026 the ceiling is 17,500, so five per cent of it is 875.
- I am leaving Thailand for good. What happens to my contributions?
- The Act grants it; the 2017 regulation that governs the claim grants it only to nationals of a country with a social security agreement with Thailand on old age, and we could not establish that any country qualifies. Ask the Social Security Office to name the agreement and the instrument that lists it — and do not budget on the refund until somebody shows you that document.
- Does the six-month continuation apply if I am deported or my visa ends?
- The Act ties the six-month tail to the ending of insured status, not to your immigration position, and we found nothing making it conditional on remaining in Thailand. But whether you can present yourself at a hospital to use it is a practical question the statute does not answer.
- Can I join if I am self-employed here?
- Section 40 exists for people who are not employees, but the qualifications for it are set by royal decree, and that decree is where any nationality restriction would sit. We have not read it, so we are not going to tell you whether a foreigner can join section 40.
How we made this
We are a small English-language reference desk. We are not in Bangkok, we are not Thai lawyers, and we do not process social security claims. What we do is read the primary text, in Thai, and write down what it says — particularly where it has changed and the English-language consensus has not caught up. Everything on this page was read in a Royal Gazette text or in the Social Security Office's own published copy of one. Where a figure lives in a ministerial regulation rather than in the Act, we say which regulation, because that is the figure most likely to move.
Where this came from
- Social Security Act B.E. 2533 — the Social Security Office's consolidated print, consolidated through Amendment No. 3, read for sections 4, 33, 39, 41, 42, 46, 47, 49, 54, 56, 57 and 77 bis. Royal Gazette volume 107, part 161, 1 September 1990.
- Social Security Act (No. 4) B.E. 2558 — the full Royal Gazette text, volume 132, part 53 Kor, 22 June 2015, in force 120 days after publication. This is the amendment that replaced sections 4, 39, 40, 44, 47, 49, 54, 56, 57, 65, 71, 73, 75 ter and 77 quater, added a third paragraph to section 77 bis, and inserted sections 46/1, 54/1 and 79/1. Where the consolidated print and this text differ, this text governs.
- Royal Decree applying the Act to employers with one or more employees B.E. 2545 — volume 119, part 26 Kor, 27 March 2002, in force 1 April 2002, read for the removal of the employee-count threshold.
- Ministerial Regulation fixing contribution rates B.E. 2565 — Royal Gazette volume 139, part 60 Kor, pages 26–27, 30 September 2022, read in full. Its schedule Kho, applying from 1 January 2023, is the source of every rate in our table, and its clause 3 is what ended the pandemic reductions. Its predecessors were read far enough to establish the chain: the regulation of 30 December 2020 (volume 137, part 103 Kor, page 9) repealed both the unemployment regulation of B.E. 2546 and the rate regulation of B.E. 2556, and was itself amended in February 2021 and then twice replaced. We set this out because the rate is still widely cited to the regulation of B.E. 2545, which has not been the operative instrument for many years.
- Ministerial Regulation on payment of the old-age lump sum to insured persons who do not hold Thai nationality B.E. 2560 — Royal Gazette volume 134, part 7 Kor, pages 5–6, 17 January 2017, signed 11 January 2017. Its gazette PDF is an image-only scan with no text layer; we rendered it and read it visually. Read with the Social Security Office’s circular transmitting it to provincial offices of 3 March 2017.
- Ministerial Regulation No. 6 (B.E. 2538) — the section 39 contribution base of 4,800 baht a month, still in force; and No. 7 (B.E. 2538), the 1,650/15,000 wage base, repealed with effect from 1 January 2026.
- Workmen’s Compensation Act B.E. 2537 (volume 111, part 28 Kor, 30 June 1994) and its amendment No. 2 B.E. 2561 (volume 135, part 80 Kor, 10 October 2018), with the Council of State consolidated text, read for the contrast drawn above only.
- Ministerial Regulation on the minimum and maximum contribution wage B.E. 2568 — volume 142, part 81 Kor, page 5, 12 December 2025, signed 11 December 2025, in force 1 January 2026. Its PDF carries a subset font with no character map and cannot be extracted as text; we rendered the gazette page as an image and read the printed Thai.
What we deliberately left out. No benefit amounts beyond the two the Act fixes itself: the funeral grant, the child allowance and the unemployment percentages and durations all sit in ministerial regulations or with the Medical Committee, and those are the figures that go stale fastest. No pension or lump-sum accrual formula, because section 77 leaves it to a regulation we did not read end to end — the 180-month line is statutory and the arithmetic around it is not. No unemployment benefit percentages or durations: the dismissal and resignation rates everyone quotes are delegated to a ministerial regulation we did not obtain, and they have no primary backing here. No answer on whether a foreigner may join under section 40, because that section hands the qualifications wholly to a royal decree whose eligibility clause we did not read — and since section 40 is the only route in for a foreigner who is not an employee, we would rather flag that hole than guess at it. Nothing about how migrant workers admitted under a memorandum are registered in practice, which is administration rather than statute. And no account of what evidence the Social Security Office actually accepts for a departure claim, because the regulation’s own form leaves that blank.
Town Wire News is an English-language reference desk. This page describes published law; it is not advice about your own entitlement, your employer's compliance or your immigration position, and anybody whose position depends on a specific contribution record or a specific claim should be talking to the Social Security Office or to somebody who can see those documents. Last verified October 2026 — if something here has moved, please tell us on our corrections page.