The Railroad Retirement Board has called part of its own rulebook facially unlawful, and the earnings figure inside it has been wrong since 2007
Four hundred dollars a month.
That is what the Railroad Retirement Board's own regulations said a disability annuitant could earn from work outside the railroad before the annuity stopped being payable. Congress replaced that figure on 12 January 2007. The regulation was never changed to match, and it stayed on the books for nineteen years, until a final rule the Board filed on Friday morning struck it out.
The correct figure for this year is $1,320 a month and $15,840 a year.
How a number stays wrong for nineteen years
The Board is clear that the money was never wrong, only the rulebook. It applied the statutory formula in policy and practice from 2007, posted an annual notice of the limits on its website, and wrote to disability annuitants to tell them what the limits were. What it did not do was open 20 CFR Part 220 Subpart M and change the text. The obsolete language was sitting in a second place as well, at 20 CFR 230.1, and that section is now removed and reserved.
The formula behind the real numbers is short. Public Law 109-478 raised the monthly amount to $700 for 2007 and indexed every later year to the national average wage index, taking the larger of the previous year's amount or $700 multiplied by the ratio of the wage index from two years earlier to the wage index for 2005, rounded to the nearest $10. That produced $1,260 a month in 2025 and $1,320 in 2026.
Why it moved now
The Board says it found the provisions during the regulatory review directed by Executive Order 14219, and describes them as facially unlawful and in conflict with the statutory criteria. The repeal follows a Presidential memorandum of 9 April 2025 on unlawful regulations.
Nobody is being asked what they think. The Board states that notice and comment proceedings are unnecessary and contrary to the public interest, on the ground that section 2(e)(4) sets the limits itself and leaves the agency no discretion, and it says in terms that no comments are being requested. One small inconsistency is worth recording: the ACTION line reads Final rule, while the preamble calls the same instrument a direct final rule three times over.
The second correction, and it runs the other way
Buried in the same preamble is a change that makes the Board look less generous on paper than it has been.
Section 2(e)(4) defines the annual allowable earnings amount as the total of the monthly amounts, which is twelve times the monthly figure. The fifth and sixth sentences of that same section then say no deduction is made where an annuitant exceeds the annual amount by less than half of one month's allowance. In practice that means somebody can earn up to twelve and a half times the monthly figure across a year before anything is taken back at the end of it, and the Board has been publishing that larger number so annuitants can see where the deduction actually starts. For 2026 that meant a published annual limit of $16,500 rather than $15,840.
The rule says the reported figure was never strictly consistent with the statutory definition, and that from 2027 the Board will publish the statutory one in all notices and correspondence. The half-month tolerance is in the statute and survives untouched in the revised regulation, including in its own worked examples. What goes is the number that spelled it out.
Status
The rule takes effect 30 days after publication, and the filing states a publication date of 10 August 2026.
