Section 218 coverage by state

Here is a question that stops a lot of public employees cold, usually far too late to plan around it: *is my job even in Social Security at all?* For most American workers the answer is an automatic yes — Social Security tax comes out of every paycheck and nobody thinks about it. But if you're a teacher, a firefighter, a police officer, or another state or local government worker, the honest answer is maybe not — and the only way many people find out is when they open their Social Security Statement near retirement and see years of $0 earnings staring back. Two fears usually sit under this. One: *how would I even know?* Two: *if my job isn't covered, what does that do to my retirement?* We'll answer both — plainly — before teaching anything.

The reassuring part is that you don't have to guess. Whether your job is in Social Security isn't a mystery buried in a statute — it's something you can check in about ten minutes from your pay stub, your Statement, and a call to your HR office, and we'll walk each one. And the bigger fear — *what does non-coverage cost me?* — has a genuinely better answer than it did two years ago. If your public job is non-covered, you still earn no Social Security credits from those years, so the coverage question really does matter. But the two old penalties that used to punish non-covered workers on their *other* Social Security — the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO) — were repealed at the start of 2025. The landscape is materially kinder now, and this lesson maps it.

Our guide is someone who has lived every inch of this: Linda Nakamura — 67, a retired public-school teacher in Sacramento, California, whose pension comes from CalSTRS (the California State Teachers' Retirement System) in a district that was never in Social Security. Linda spent 12 years in covered private-sector work earlier in life, then roughly three decades teaching in a non-covered position. Under the old rules, WEP shrank the small Social Security benefit she'd earned from those 12 years, and GPO nearly wiped out the widow's benefit she should have received when her husband — a covered engineer — died. Both were restored in 2025, and she got a retroactive payment. Her story carries the whole lesson: how coverage is decided state by state, and what it means when your job lands on the non-covered side.

Start with *why* there's a state-by-state picture at all, because it's the key that unlocks everything else. When Social Security began in 1935, it deliberately left state and local government jobs out — the federal government wasn't sure it could tax states. So a bridge was built: the Section 218 agreement, a voluntary agreement between a state and SSA (available since 1951) that a state can use to bring its public employees into Social Security, group by group. Deep mechanics — how the agreements are written, modified, and administered — are Lesson 96; here we need just enough to read the map.

Three features of that framework explain the entire by-state landscape. First, a Section 218 agreement covers positions, not individuals — the state (through its State Social Security Administrator) decides which *groups* of jobs are brought in and when, so two people in the same state, even the same city, can be on opposite sides of the line depending on their position. Second, coverage differs from state to state — each state negotiated its own agreement over decades, which is exactly why *"am I covered?"* has no single national answer. Third, since a 1990 law took effect on July 2, 1991, there's a backstop: if a public position isn't covered by a Section 218 agreement and the employee isn't a qualified member of a public retirement system, then Social Security coverage is mandatory anyway. That backstop is why the non-covered workers who remain are, overwhelmingly, people with a public pension *instead of* Social Security — like Linda.

So the logic reduces to a short chain you can actually walk for your own job: Is my position covered by my state's Section 218 agreement? If yes, you're in Social Security. If no — am I a qualified member of a public retirement system (a CalSTRS, a STRS Ohio, a Teacher Retirement System of Texas)? If yes, you can be non-covered — your pension takes the place of Social Security for that job. If you're in neither, the 1991 mandatory rule pulls you into Social Security regardless. A public pension in place of Social Security is the signature of a non-covered job — and it's the situation this whole lesson is about.

Now the size of it, because it surprises people how *common* non-coverage is. According to the SSA Bulletin (Vol. 80, No. 3, 2020) — the standard reference on this — about 28% of the country's state and local government employees, roughly a quarter, some 6.5 million workers (on 2018 data), are outside Social Security on their public jobs. That's not a rounding error at the edge of the system; it's millions of teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public workers whose paychecks have no Social Security tax taken out and who earn no Social Security credits for that work. Treat the exact percentage as approximate and dated — the share drifts a little year to year — but the order of magnitude is the point: non-coverage is a mainstream situation, not a rare quirk.

Here is the crucial honesty about the *map*, and it's the thing most write-ups get wrong: there is no single official SSA page that lists "the non-covered states." Coverage was built up agreement by agreement, position by position, over seventy years — so the real picture is a patchwork that lives inside each state's Section 218 agreement, not in one national table. What SSA *does* publish is the mechanism (the framework above) and the statistics (the ~28% share and the state-level research in the Bulletin). So when you see a tidy list of *"the 15 states where teachers aren't covered,"* read it as an illustration of where non-coverage clusters — not a definitive roster, and never as a verdict on *your* job. The mechanism and the statistic are the teaching tools; the list is a starting point you then verify.

Non-coverage isn't spread evenly — it concentrates, and it concentrates most among teachers. Because public education was one of the largest groups of state employees when Social Security was expanding, a number of states chose to keep their teachers (and often their police and firefighters) on a standalone public pension rather than fold them into Social Security. The result: a cluster of roughly 13 to 15 states where teacher non-coverage is common — which is why the classic examples of this whole topic are almost always teachers. Linda is one; so is a big share of California's teaching workforce.

The states commonly cited in that cluster include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, and Texas — with Connecticut and Georgia often flagged as partial or transitional cases. But hold that list loosely, and here's why it's labeled illustrative in three different ways. First, it isn't official — no SSA page certifies it, so treat it as a pattern, not a proof. Second, coverage is position-level, not state-level — even in a *"non-covered"* state, many public positions are covered, because that state's Section 218 agreement brought some groups in and left others out. Third, the boundaries move — states have modified their agreements over time. So the map tells you *where to be suspicious that your job might be non-covered*; it does not tell you whether your particular position is. For that, you check — which is the next two sections.

Put a face on all of it. Linda's district was never in Social Security for its teachers — her pension is CalSTRS, and for the roughly 30 years she taught, no Social Security tax came out of her pay and she earned no Social Security credits. That's the pure non-covered case: a solid public pension standing in place of Social Security for that work. But Linda also has a second, covered chapter — 12 years of private-sector work earlier in life, on which she *did* pay Social Security tax. Those 12 covered years cleared the 40-credit (10-year) bar for a benefit of her own, so she reaches retirement with two things at once: a CalSTRS pension from non-covered teaching, and a small Social Security benefit from covered work. Holding both is not a contradiction — it's the textbook non-covered situation.

Under the old rules, holding both cost her twice. WEP (the Windfall Elimination Provision) used a modified formula that shrank the small Social Security benefit she'd earned from her 12 covered years. And GPO (the Government Pension Offset) reduced any spousal or survivor benefit by two-thirds of her public pension — which, for a teacher's pension, nearly zeroed the widow's benefit she should have received when her husband, a covered engineer, died. The exact dollar figures of that old math — and of the restoration — are worked in full in Lesson 97; here they're history, named but not re-computed. The point for *this* lesson is what they had in common: both penalties reached out of her non-covered job to shrink her *other* Social Security.

Then the rules changed. The Social Security Fairness Act (P.L. 118-273), signed January 5, 2025, repealed both WEP and GPO retroactively. Linda's own benefit was restored to its full, un-reduced amount; her widow's benefit came back to life; and SSA sent her a retroactive payment for the months she'd been underpaid, plus a higher monthly check going forward. That's the good news this lesson keeps returning to. But notice what didn't change: Linda still earned no Social Security credits from her ~30 non-covered teaching years. The repeal removed the penalty on her *other* benefits; it did not turn her non-covered teaching into covered work. Those are two different things, and keeping them straight is the heart of the post-repeal landscape.

There's a good chance a non-covered public worker has already been told their job isn't in Social Security — and signed a piece of paper saying so, whether or not they remember it. That paper is Form SSA-1945, the "Statement Concerning Your Employment in a Job Not Covered by Social Security." By law, when a state or local employer hires someone into a non-covered position, it must give them this one-page notice and get their signature — a plain-language heads-up that *this job is outside Social Security, so it won't build Social Security credits or benefits.* It's an educational notice, not a penalty form: nobody is being charged anything: it exists so that non-coverage never comes as a nasty surprise decades later. (The full field-by-field walkthrough of the form lives in Lesson 96 — here we just need to recognize it.)

The question people ask now is: *isn't that form obsolete after the WEP/GPO repeal?* No — and this is a common trap. The SSA-1945 requirement is still in force. What changed is the *wording*: SSA updated the form in 2025 to remove its references to WEP and GPO (since those penalties are gone), but the core disclosure remains mandatory — a newly hired non-covered employee still signs it. That makes sense once you separate the two ideas: WEP and GPO were penalties; the SSA-1945 is a disclosure of your coverage status. The penalties were repealed; your status still exists, so the notice that tells you about it still exists too. Practically, the form is a gift: if you signed an SSA-1945 at hire, that's near-proof your position is non-covered — and one of the fastest ways to answer the very question this lesson opened with.

Enough framework — here's the part you can *do*. You never have to wonder whether your public job is in Social Security, because four independent checks will tell you, and any one of them is usually enough. This is the antidote to the opening fear: not a map, not a guess, but your own documents.

1. Your pay stub — the fastest check. Look for a deduction labeled Social Security, FICA, or OASDI. If Social Security tax is being withheld, your job is covered. If there's a pension or retirement deduction (CalSTRS, PERS, STRS) but no Social Security line, that's the fingerprint of a non-covered job. (You'll usually still see a Medicare deduction either way — most public workers pay Medicare tax even when they're outside Social Security, so don't mistake the Medicare line for Social Security.)
2. Your my Social Security Statement — the retirement view. Create or open your account at ssa.gov (Lesson 11) and read the earnings record. Covered years show your actual earnings; non-covered years show $0 — a column of zeros across years you know you were working is non-coverage in black and white.
3. Your HR or payroll office — the authority on your position. Because coverage is set position by position, the people who run your employer's payroll can tell you exactly how your job is classified, and whether your group is inside or outside your state's Section 218 agreement.
4. Form SSA-1945 — did you sign one? If you were handed and signed a "Statement Concerning Your Employment in a Job Not Covered by Social Security" when you were hired, your position is non-covered. No SSA-1945 in your file is a hint (not a guarantee) that you're covered.

And when you want the official reference behind all of this — the rules on Section 218 agreements, mandatory coverage, and how positions are determined — SSA keeps it in one place: ssa.gov/slge ("State and Local Government Employers"). It's written for employers and administrators, but it's the authoritative source on how coverage is decided, and it points you to your State Social Security Administrator — the person in your state who can speak to your specific agreement. Free, official, and definitive — the opposite of a stranger's list.

So you've checked, and your public job is non-covered. What does that actually mean for your retirement — especially now that WEP and GPO are gone? Two things are true at once, and the whole post-repeal landscape lives in keeping them apart.

First, non-covered years still earn no Social Security credits — the coverage question still matters. Every year you work a non-covered job, you pay no Social Security tax and you build no credits toward a Social Security retirement benefit. The repeal did nothing to change that — it was never about credits. So if you're deciding where to work, weighing a covered private-sector job against a non-covered public one, or simply checking your Statement, the non-covered years are still zeros in your Social Security record. Read your Statement once a year so the picture is never a surprise. And note the flip side that saved Linda: covered years elsewhere still count in full — her 12 covered private-sector years gave her a real (if small) Social Security benefit. Non-coverage narrows one job; it doesn't erase a covered career built somewhere else.

Second, the penalty for being non-covered is gone. Before 2025, having a non-covered pension reached over and cut your *other* Social Security — WEP trimmed a benefit you'd earned from covered work, and GPO slashed a spousal or survivor benefit by two-thirds of your public pension. Since the Social Security Fairness Act (Lesson 97), neither applies. Your non-covered pension no longer reduces the Social Security you earned elsewhere, or the spousal/survivor benefit you're due on a spouse's record. So the modern summary is precise and worth memorizing: non-covered work still earns you no Social Security credits, but it no longer penalizes the Social Security you have. That's a genuinely better deal than the one Linda planned her whole career around — and it's the honest, evenhanded state of the law today.

Time to make it concrete. The explorer below lets you pick a type of worker — a state teacher in a likely-non-covered state, a state teacher in a likely-covered state, a federal employee, a private-sector worker, a state/local worker whose group is under a Section 218 agreement, or a member of the military — and it shows the likely coverage status, what it means, and the concrete steps to confirm it. It starts pre-filled on Linda's CalSTRS situation. One firm caveat is built into the tool and worth stating here: it deals in likelihoods, and it's illustrative — because coverage is decided position by position, the only definitive answers come from your pay stub, your Statement, your HR office, and ssa.gov/slge. Use it to build intuition, then verify.

Notice how the tool never gives you a flat *"yes"* or *"no"* — it gives a likely status and then hands you back to the four checks. That's not caution for its own sake; it's the honest shape of this topic. A federal worker's answer depends on CSRS versus FERS (Lesson 98). A state teacher's answer depends on the district and the state's Section 218 agreement. The reader's own coverage is something only their documents and HR can confirm — which is exactly where the explorer, and this lesson, send you.

This lesson has its own species of scam, and it feeds on exactly the anxiety we opened with. It comes as a call, email, or ad offering — for a fee — to *"confirm your Section 218 coverage,"* *"get your teaching years counted,"* or *"add your public job to Social Security so you don't lose out."* Some versions dress it up as a paid *"coverage review"* or a *"pension-to-Social-Security conversion service."* It targets non-covered public workers precisely because they're worried about those $0 years — and it sells a fix that does not exist.

Here's the tell that beats every version of it: your coverage is set by your state's Section 218 agreement and federal law — nobody can change it, and nobody can "add" you to Social Security for a fee. Whether a position is covered is decided by the state and SSA, not by a private service, and checking your status is completely free — your pay stub, your Statement, your HR office, and ssa.gov/slge answer it at no cost. So anyone charging to *"verify your coverage"* or promising to *"get you into Social Security"* is selling you something that isn't theirs to sell. Don't pay; check it yourself for free. If money is what they're after, it's a scam.

One more thing, because it reaches people who quietly gave up years ago. If you're non-covered and you once heard that WEP or GPO would *"take most of it anyway,"* and you never even applied for a Social Security benefit you might be owed — a small retirement benefit from covered years, or a spousal or survivor benefit on a husband's or wife's record — the ground has shifted under that decision. Both penalties are repealed. The benefit that used to be slashed to almost nothing may now be paid in full, and SSA has been issuing retroactive amounts back to the start of 2024. If you talked yourself out of applying because of WEP or GPO, that reason is gone — it's worth applying now.

None of this erases the honest part: your non-covered years still don't earn Social Security credits, and this lesson never pretends otherwise. But there's a real difference between *"my job isn't covered"* and *"there's nothing here for me"* — and for a lot of people, especially widows and widowers who were zeroed out by GPO, the second sentence is no longer true. The full story of the repeal, the exact figures, and how to claim what was restored is Lesson 97; a free, unbiased place to start is SSA at 1-800-772-1213 or your State Social Security Administrator. You don't have to figure it out alone, and you're not too late.

• Section 218 agreement — a voluntary agreement between a state and SSA (available since 1951) that brings groups of state and local government employees into Social Security. It covers positions, not individuals, and differs state to state — the reason coverage varies by state. Deep mechanics: Lesson 96.
• Non-covered employment — public (or some other) work on which no Social Security tax is paid and no Social Security credits are earned; typically a job in a public retirement system (like CalSTRS) that stands in place of Social Security. First taught in Lessons 14 and 96.
• Mandatory Social Security coverage (the 1991 rule) — since July 2, 1991, a state or local employee whose position isn't covered by a Section 218 agreement and who isn't a qualified member of a public retirement system must be covered by Social Security anyway — the backstop that limits who remains non-covered.
• The ~28% non-covered share — the SSA statistic that about 28% (roughly a quarter, some 6.5 million workers on 2018 data) of state and local government employees are outside Social Security, per SSA Bulletin Vol. 80 No. 3 (2020). Approximate and dated — the mechanism, not the exact number, is the teaching tool.
• Illustrative state map — the informal cluster of ~13–15 states where teacher non-coverage is common (e.g., California, Colorado, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Ohio, Texas, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, and — partially — Connecticut and Georgia). There is no official SSA list; it's a pattern to verify, not a verdict, because coverage is position-level.
• Form SSA-1945 — "Statement Concerning Your Employment in a Job Not Covered by Social Security," the disclosure a non-covered public hire signs; still required after the WEP/GPO repeal (updated in 2025 to drop the WEP/GPO language). If you signed one, your position is non-covered. Full walkthrough: Lesson 96.
• ssa.gov/slge — SSA's "State and Local Government Employers" resource: the free, official reference on Section 218 agreements, mandatory coverage, and how positions are determined. It points you to your State Social Security Administrator.
• State Social Security Administrator — the official in each state responsible for that state's Section 218 agreement and for questions about whether a particular position is covered. The definitive human answer to "is my job covered?"
• WEP / GPO (repealed) — the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset, two former reductions that used a non-covered pension to cut your other Social Security; repealed by the Social Security Fairness Act (P.L. 118-273, signed January 5, 2025), retroactive to the start of 2024. The repeal removed the penalty; it did not make non-covered work earn credits. Depth: Lesson 97.