Hearings Backlog Reduction Update Booklets
Fiscal Year 2009, Third Quarter through June

Eliminating the hearings backlog remains SSA's highest priority. In May 2007, we announced our plan to eliminate the backlog of hearing requests and prevent its recurrence and we are making tremendous progress. Thanks to additional funding in fiscal year (FY) 2009, we hired 147 new administrative law judges (ALJ) and about 850 support staff. The additional judges and staff will help us process more hearings and, ultimately, work down the disability backlog. In addition, we are opening 14 new hearing offices throughout the country by September 2010.

We are pleased to share with you the significant progress we have made in working down the backlog through June FY 2009. Embedded behind each State in the map below are booklets containing information on some of the major areas we track and monitor throughout the year. The booklet also provides the number of ALJs and support staff we hired in each State this fiscal year.

By clicking on a particular State, you may view national data and data specific to the hearing offices in that State. For States where there is no hearing office, you will be directed to the State providing primary service for that area. We have provided a Section 508 compliant text version of these files for persons with disabilities.

After turning the corner on the backlog at the end of the second quarter, we have continued to reduce the backlog of pending hearing requests - ending the third quarter with 14,415 fewer cases than the beginning of the year. With our record productivity this fiscal year, we expect to end the year with a pending level much lower than initially projected and we look forward to sharing our end of year summary on this site soon.

FusionMaps              Note: For American Samoa, Guam, and the Philippines see Hawaii.   For the U.S. Virgin Islands see Puerto Rico.