What Are the Required Number of Years?
For you to qualify for SSDI you would have had to work jobs that make deductions from your salary towards payments to Social Security. This means that the jobs you worked at, would have deducted a specific amount of money as taxes to the SSA through jobs covered by Social Security.
Contributions are calculated in “work credits.” You will need no less than four work credits per year to qualify. The number of deductions need for work credit vary each year but once the specific number is reached for that year in salary or in income derived from self-employment, you would have earned one work credit.
Age plays an important role in the number of credits you need to be eligible for SSDI. Furthermore, the requirement of the SSA is that you would have earned some of these credits over a ten-year period before you became incapacitated. Basically, you need a total of 40 credits but 20 should have been earned during the last 10 years before your disability. Yet still, younger workers can qualify but with fewer credits.