United States: student aid and Social Security, explained plainly

How these guides are written

Each guide follows the same discipline. The answer comes first, in the opening lines, because most people arrive with one specific question — a deadline, an amount, a payment day. Then come the rule behind the answer, a worked example or table where one helps, and links onward: to the next guide in this section and to the official page where the matter is actually decided. Where a figure changes every year — the Pell Grant maximum, the Social Security bend points — the page says which year the figure belongs to and when it was last checked.

We also say plainly what we could not verify. Government programs are large, and some official pages are hard to read outside the agency's own systems; when a detail could not be confirmed on an official source, the guide describes the rule without inventing the number, and the batch report behind these pages lists the gap. That is slower than copying a figure from another website, and it is the only way we work.

Always verify on the official site

Federal student aid lives at StudentAid.gov, run by Federal Student Aid, an office of the U.S. Department of Education. Social Security lives at SSA.gov, run by the Social Security Administration. If a page — including this one — tells you something different from those two sites, believe those two sites. Be especially careful with look-alike pages: the FAFSA form is always free, legitimate scholarship searches are free, and no real agency will ask you to pay to apply for aid or to "release" a benefit. Federal Student Aid's own guidance is blunt on this point: you never have to pay to find scholarships or other financial aid.

One site, three countries — kept separate on purpose

This website began with Brazilian labor-law calculators (in Portuguese) and a Mexican section (in Spanish), and this United States section is the newest addition. The sections are kept deliberately separate: Brazilian severance rules, Mexican finiquito rules and United States federal aid rules have nothing in common, and mixing them would mislead everyone. If you landed here from a search in another language, the Brazil section home and the Mexico section home are one click away — but nothing on those pages applies to a US case, and nothing here applies to theirs.

Questions people ask about this section

Is this an official US government website?

No. Calculadora Rescisão is an independent information site. It is not affiliated with the U.S. government, the Department of Education, or the Social Security Administration, and it cannot file, check or change any application or benefit. Official business happens only at StudentAid.gov and SSA.gov.

Do you charge for anything here?

No. Every guide and the full retirement age calculator are free to read and use, and the calculator runs entirely in your browser — the birth year you type never leaves your device.

How current is the information?

Each page carries its own last-reviewed date and source list. Figures tied to a program year — such as the 2026–27 Pell Grant maximum — are labelled with that year, because last year's figure is the most common source of error on pages like these.

Image credits

The United States Capitol photograph is by Diliff, via Wikimedia Commons, released into the public domain. The library photograph (a student reading in the Tulane University library, New Orleans; the print carries a Tulane University credit line) is by Tulane Public Relations, via Wikimedia Commons, license CC BY 2.0. The desk-and-planner photograph is by Shixart1985, via Wikimedia Commons, license CC BY 2.0 (already in this site's licensed collection; reused here). All were converted to WebP and resized. No image on this page was generated by AI.

Sources

• Federal Student Aid — official site (StudentAid.gov)
• Social Security Administration — official site (SSA.gov)

Program figures in this section are drawn from the specific official pages cited on each guide.