• People with higher earnings pay more in Social Security payroll taxes than do lower-earning participants, and they also receive larger benefits. Because of the progressive nature of Social Security's benefit formula, replacement rates—the amount of annual benefits as a percentage of average annual lifetime earnings—are lower, on average, for workers who have had higher earnings.
• The amount of taxes paid and benefits received will be greater for people in later birth cohorts because they typically will have higher earnings over a lifetime, even after adjusting for inflation, CBO projects. For the median participant, the growth in taxes and benefits will be approximately equal, so replacement rates will be roughly stable.

Many of the exhibits in the publication show a distribution of possible outcomes that quantifies the amount of uncertainty in the projections. Those distributions were based on 500 simulations in which most of the key demographic and economic factors in the analysis vary according to historical patterns.

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