If you taught in a Texas public school, someone warned you. Maybe the benefits office said it on your first day, or an experienced colleague mentioned it in the hallway. Don’t count on Social Security. Your Teacher Retirement System of Texas (TRS) pension will take most of it away.

For about forty years, that warning was correct. Two federal rules did the damage. The Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) cut the Social Security benefit you earned from any job that paid into the system, whether that was private-sector work before teaching, a summer job, or a second career. The Government Pension Offset (GPO) went after spousal and survivor benefits, reducing them by two-thirds of your TRS pension. For most teachers that offset was large enough to erase the benefit completely. Most Texas districts don’t pay into Social Security, so most Texas educators got caught by one rule or both.

So you planned around it. You wrote Social Security off, or you penciled in a small number and moved on. If you’re the one who runs the money in your house, that assumption is probably still sitting in your spreadsheet today.

The warning is now wrong.

The rules changed in 2024

The Social Security Fairness Act became law in January 2025 and repealed both WEP and GPO. The repeal reaches back to benefits payable from January 2024. Your TRS pension no longer reduces your own Social Security benefit, and it no longer touches a spousal or survivor benefit either. The reduction is over.

If you were already collecting a reduced check, the Social Security Administration recalculated it for you and sent the back payments. That piece happened on its own.

Here is where it stops happening on its own. If you’re a few years out from retirement, or you never filed for a benefit because someone told you it would be zero, nothing updates automatically. Three decisions deserve a fresh look, and none of them fix themselves.

1) A benefit you never claimed won’t claim itself

Easy to miss this one. If you never applied for a spousal or survivor benefit because GPO would have erased it, Social Security has nothing on file for you. There’s no reduced benefit to recalculate for those who never filed in the first place. The only way that money starts is if you go apply for it. And the date you file can affect when the benefit begins.

Widowed teachers are directly affected. A survivor benefit that used to be worth nothing may now be worth real money, and no announcement is coming. If you ever assumed a benefit on a spouse’s record was a dead end, that’s worth checking against the rules that exist today instead of the ones you heard about in 1995.

2) Social Security claiming-age math changed

Some teachers may have assumed since their benefit was tiny after WEP, waiting to claim Social Security would barely help. Why not just take it early? Makes some sense assuming a reduced benefit.

The full formula applies now. Waiting past your full retirement age adds delayed retirement credits, and those credits are working on a bigger base benefit than before, so the reward for waiting is larger than the version you may have anchored on years ago. The right claiming age still depends on your health, your other income, and how the whole picture fits together. So the point here is a narrow one. Any claiming analysis you did before 2025 used a benefit amount that no longer exists. It’s worth running again.

3) The survivor question

If you’re married, this is important.

GPO was hardest on the surviving spouse. A retired teacher who lost her husband often found that the survivor benefit she was counting on had been offset down to nothing, two-thirds of her pension quietly erasing it. That result is gone. A survivor benefit now pays in full next to a TRS pension.

So the question that sits under every retirement plan, what our income looks like if one of us passes first, has a different answer than it did two years ago. That can change how much life insurance the household actually needs. If you haven’t retired yet, it can change which TRS annuity option makes sense, since some of those options exist to protect a surviving spouse who no longer faces the same Social Security gap. At a minimum, both people in the household should know the new number, not only the one who usually tracks this.

What to do now

If any of this is landing, here’s the short list. Consult a professional advisor for help.

• Pull your earnings record at ssa.gov. Covered jobs show wages; your TRS years show zeros.
• Get a current benefit estimate while you’re there, because anything you saved before 2025 is out of date. One thing worth knowing: the estimate on the SSA website never applied the WEP reduction in the first place, so for teachers it always read a little high. Now that WEP is gone, that number is finally accurate, which surprises people who expected it to drop.
• If you or your spouse never filed for a benefit because of GPO, do so now.
• Use the new numbers to update your financial plan: Social Security claiming age, your annuity election, the tax on your combined income, and what the survivor is left with.

Planning around the old rules was right at the time. But things change, even decades-old retirement laws. The households that update their plan will retire on better numbers than the ones that neglect to.

I’m a fee-only advisor, CFA® charterholder and CFP® professional in McKinney, and I work with people in this exact situation. If you’re a Texas teacher with a TRS pension and want to see how your financial plan is impacted now that the rules moved, let’s talk. I don’t sell products or earn commissions. Schedule time that works for you using the calendar below.

Sources for further reading

• Social Security Administration, Social Security Fairness Act: https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/social-security-fairness-act.html
• Teacher Retirement System of Texas, Social Security: https://trs.texas.gov/pension-benefits/know-benefits/understand-benefits/social-security
• Texas Retired Teachers Association, The Government Pension Offset: https://trta.org/trta-legislative/the-government-pension-offset/

Financial Empowerment LLC is a fee-only registered investment advisor. This post is educational and is not individualized advice. Social Security benefits and filing procedures are administered by the Social Security Administration; confirm your situation at ssa.gov or 1-800-772-1213. CFA® and Chartered Financial Analyst® are registered trademarks owned by CFA Institute.