Can you get Social Security disability for Hearing Loss?

Indiana Social Security disability claimants with hearing loss may qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits if they meet the criteria set out in Social Security’s Listing of Impairments. The relevant criteria are in Section 2.00, Special Senses and Speech.

Many Indiana residents experience some degree of hearing loss. Social Security has programs that provide disability benefits to people with permanent impairments such as hearing loss, and there are two listings that may apply depending on your situation.

Listing 2.10 sets out the criteria for people who have hearing loss and do not have a cochlear implant. Listing 2.11 sets out the criteria for people who have had a cochlear implant.

What listing 2.10 requires if you do not have a cochlear implant

There are two ways to meet listing 2.10, and you only need one of them.

2.10A, audiometric thresholds. An average air conduction hearing threshold of 90 decibels or greater in your better ear, together with an average bone conduction hearing threshold of 60 decibels or greater in your better ear. Both parts are required, not one or the other.

2.10B, word recognition. A word recognition score of 40 percent or less in your better ear, determined using a standardized list of phonetically balanced monosyllabic words.

It is worth being straightforward about these numbers. An average air conduction threshold of 90 decibels describes profound hearing loss. Because the listing looks at your better ear, complete deafness in one ear will not meet it if the other ear hears reasonably well. A great many people with genuinely disabling hearing loss will not reach these thresholds, and the section below on residual functional capacity is where their claims are decided.

What listing 2.11 requires if you have a cochlear implant

If you have a cochlear implant, Social Security will consider you disabled until one year after the initial implantation. This applies regardless of how much your hearing improves during that year.

After that period, Social Security needs word recognition testing performed with any version of the Hearing in Noise Test, known as the HINT, to determine whether your impairment still meets the listing. A score of 60 percent or less keeps you within listing 2.11.

The HINT must be conducted in quiet, in a sound field. Your implant must be functioning properly and adjusted to your normal settings, the sentences should be presented at 60 decibels hearing level, and no visual cues may be given.

The evidence Social Security needs

Social Security needs evidence showing that you have a medically determinable impairment causing your hearing loss, along with audiometric measurements of its severity.

Generally the agency requires both a complete otologic examination and audiometric testing to establish the medically determinable impairment. Once that is established, Social Security can use audiometric testing alone to assess severity, without repeating the full otologic examination.

There are specific rules about who must perform each of these, and they are different for the two examinations:

• The complete otologic examination must be performed by a licensed physician, meaning a medical doctor or a doctor of osteopathy. An audiologist cannot perform this part.
• Audiometric testing must be performed by, or under the direct supervision of, an otolaryngologist or an audiologist.

This distinction matters practically. Testing carried out entirely by an audiologist, without a physician’s otologic examination, may not establish the impairment on its own.

The otologic examination must include:

• Your medical history
• A description of how the hearing loss affects you
• The physician’s description of the appearance of your external ears
• Evaluation of the tympanic membranes
• Assessment of any middle ear abnormalities

Audiometric testing when you do not have a cochlear implant

Social Security generally needs the following:

• Pure tone air conduction and bone conduction testing
• Speech reception threshold (SRT) testing
• Word recognition testing

The testing must be conducted in a sound-treated booth or room, and each ear must be tested separately. You must not wear hearing aids during the testing. The audiometer used must meet the standards of the American National Standards Institute.

To determine whether your hearing loss meets the air and bone conduction criteria in 2.10, Social Security averages your thresholds at 500, 1000, and 2000 Hertz.

Two further points are worth knowing. If you cannot tolerate word recognition testing at the usual level of 35 to 40 decibels above your speech reception threshold, the tester should report your score at your highest comfortable level of amplification rather than abandoning the test. And if Social Security considers your results inconsistent, for example where your bone conduction results do not match your pure tone results, it may ask for auditory evoked response testing, which measures brainwave responses to sound rather than relying on your reported responses.

If your test results do not meet the listing

Falling short of the thresholds does not end your claim. Social Security will then assess your residual functional capacity, meaning what you can still do despite your impairment, and whether that leaves any work you could perform. As with any claim decided this way, your condition also has to have lasted, or be expected to last, at least twelve months.

Hearing loss limits work in ways that are specific to it and are often left undocumented:

• Communication in a workplace. Understanding instructions, participating in meetings, and handling telephone work all become difficult or impossible well before the listing thresholds are reached.
• Safety. Many jobs depend on hearing alarms, reversing vehicles, machinery faults, or verbal warnings. This rules out a great deal of industrial, construction, warehouse, and driving work outright.
• Background noise. Word recognition in a quiet test booth can be considerably better than in a real workplace. If you can follow a conversation in a silent room but not on a factory floor or in an open office, say so, because the testing environment does not capture it.
• Fatigue. Lip reading and straining to follow speech all day is exhausting, and the resulting fatigue affects concentration and stamina across a shift.
• Your past work and transferable skills. If your hearing loss rules out the work you have always done, your age, education, and work history all bear on whether Social Security expects you to adjust to something else. A claimant of 50 or older with no transferable skills is in a considerably stronger position than a younger claimant with identical limitations, and at 55 the vocational rules shift again in the claimant’s favor. Since June 22, 2024, Social Security also looks only at work performed in the previous five years rather than fifteen.

Your other conditions count too. Social Security must consider the combined effect of all your impairments, and hearing loss frequently accompanies other problems that on their own would not be disabling.

If you are denied, appeal rather than starting a new application. Appealing protects your original filing date and the back pay attached to it, and you generally have sixty days from the date on the notice. Claims that turn on residual functional capacity rather than on the listing are frequently refused at the first two levels and allowed at a hearing.

Related conditions and other listings

Some symptoms and conditions that accompany hearing loss are evaluated elsewhere in Section 2.00, and it is worth knowing which listing fits your situation:

• Vertigo and balance disturbance. Disturbance of labyrinthine-vestibular function has its own listing at 2.07. It covers a history of frequent attacks of balance disturbance, tinnitus, and progressive hearing loss, established by testing.
• Meniere’s disease, characterized by unpredictable attacks of vertigo, tinnitus, and fluctuating hearing loss, is evaluated under that same listing rather than under the hearing loss listings alone. If vertigo is a significant part of your condition, this matters, because the criteria are different.
• Loss of speech is addressed separately at listing 2.09.

Vertigo can also bring dizziness, nausea, light-headedness, and confusion, all of which affect the ability to work and none of which appear on an audiogram.

What causes hearing loss

Aging is the most common reason people experience some degree of hearing loss, and heredity plays a part as well, with some genetic factors making a person more susceptible to hearing damage.

Occupational noise exposure is a major cause. Farming, factory work, construction, and other jobs involving noisy heavy machinery can all damage hearing over time. Other loud noises, including firearms, fireworks, headphones, and motorcycles, can do the same.

Where your hearing loss is work-related, it is worth mentioning to your representative. It does not change the disability criteria, but it may be relevant to other claims you have.

Talk with an Indiana disability attorney about your hearing loss claim

Knowing Social Security’s testing requirements is a large part of submitting medical evidence that actually supports your claim. If hearing loss is preventing you from working, contact my office for a free consultation.