By the Templateez Team · Licensed Attorney · June 2026

Social Security Disability Intake Forms: What Every Representative Needs From the Initial Interview

Social Security disability cases are unlike anything else in your practice. There is no opposing party to depose, no jury to persuade, no damages to calculate. Instead, you are building an administrative record for a single adjudicator who will apply a rigid sequential evaluation to determine whether your client can perform any work that exists in the national economy. Every piece of information you fail to capture at intake is a gap the ALJ will notice — and a gap that could cost your client benefits worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime.

Whether you are an attorney or a non-attorney representative authorized under 42 U.S.C. § 406, the initial interview is where you win or lose the case. Here is what your intake form needs to capture and why.

Why SSD Intake Is Fundamentally Different

The Social Security Administration evaluates disability claims through a five-step sequential evaluation. Each step is a gatekeeping question, and a claimant who fails at any step loses. Your intake form needs to collect information that addresses every step, because you will not know until later which step becomes the battlefield.

Step 1 asks whether the claimant is engaged in substantial gainful activity. If they are earning above the SGA threshold — $1,620 per month in 2026 for non-blind claimants — the claim ends. Your intake must capture current work status, earnings, and whether any work is subsidized or constitutes an unsuccessful work attempt.

Step 2 asks whether the claimant has a severe medically determinable impairment. This is a low bar, but you still need to identify every impairment — physical and mental — because combinations of non-severe impairments can collectively meet the severity threshold.

Step 3 asks whether any impairment meets or medically equals a Listing. If it does, the claimant wins without further analysis. Your intake should flag impairments that might match specific Listings so you can target your medical evidence gathering.

Steps 4 and 5 are where most cases are decided. They require assessing the claimant's residual functional capacity and comparing it against past relevant work and other work in the economy. This is where your work history and daily activities intake becomes critical — and where the Medical-Vocational Guidelines (the "grid rules") can direct a finding of disabled based on age, education, and RFC.

Onset Date and Date Last Insured: The Two Dates That Define Everything

No two fields on your intake form matter more than the alleged onset date and the date last insured. The onset date is when the claimant became unable to work. The DLI is the last date they have enough work credits to qualify for Title II (SSDI) benefits. The claimant must prove they were disabled on or before the DLI.

These dates drive your entire case strategy. If the DLI was three years ago, you need medical evidence from that period — not from last month. If the onset date is poorly chosen, you could inadvertently place it after the DLI and destroy the Title II claim.

Your intake form should capture:

• The date the claimant stopped working and why
• The date they believe they became unable to work (which may differ from the last day worked)
• Their date last insured, if known (from the SSA award letter or benefits statement)
• Whether they have applied for or are receiving SSI (Title XVI), which has no DLI requirement

Onset date strategy is a judgment call that should happen after reviewing the medical records, but you need the raw facts at intake to frame the analysis.

Medical Evidence: Every Provider, Every Treatment, Every Medication

The medical record is your evidence. In SSD cases, there is no testimony from the treating physician at hearing (in most cases) — the records speak for themselves. That means you need every record from every provider, and you need to know where to send your requests before the claimant walks out of your office.

Your intake form must capture a complete medical source list:

• Every doctor, specialist, therapist, and counselor — with addresses and approximate treatment dates
• Every hospital admission and emergency room visit
• Mental health providers, including psychiatrists, psychologists, and licensed clinical social workers
• Physical therapists, occupational therapists, and chiropractors
• The claimant's primary care physician and how often they are seen

For each provider, you need the treatment date range (at minimum, first visit and most recent visit) and what condition was being treated. This lets you prioritize records requests and identify gaps in treatment that the ALJ will ask about.

Equally important is the current medication list. Get the name of every medication, the prescribing physician, the dosage, and the side effects. Side effects can be disabling on their own — drowsiness from pain medication, cognitive fog from anticonvulsants, nausea from chemotherapy. If your intake form does not ask about side effects, you will miss this argument every time.

Work History: The 15-Year Lookback That Decides Step 4

At Step 4, the ALJ determines whether the claimant can perform any of their past relevant work. "Past relevant work" means work performed in the 15 years before the alleged onset date that constituted substantial gainful activity and lasted long enough for the claimant to learn it. Your intake form needs a detailed work history covering that full 15-year window.

For each job, capture:

• Job title and employer
• Dates of employment (month and year)
• Hours per week and rate of pay
• A description of the physical demands — how much lifting, how much standing, how much walking, how much sitting
• Whether the job required use of machines, tools, or specialized equipment
• Supervisory duties, if any
• The highest technical complexity of the tasks

This information feeds directly into the vocational expert's classification of each job by its exertional level — sedentary, light, medium, heavy, or very heavy — and its skill level. If the claimant's RFC restricts them to sedentary work and their past work was all medium or heavy, Step 4 is resolved in their favor, and the case advances to Step 5 where the grid rules may direct a finding of disabled.

The grid rules are particularly powerful for claimants over 50 (closely approaching advanced age) and over 55 (advanced age) who are limited to sedentary or light work and whose past work does not provide transferable skills. Capturing age, education level, and work skill profile at intake lets you identify these grid-rule cases immediately.

Daily Activities: Building the Functional Capacity Report

The SSA's Function Report (Form SSA-3373) asks about the claimant's daily activities in exhaustive detail. Most claimants fill it out poorly — either understating their limitations out of pride or overstating them in ways that damage credibility. Your intake form should capture the same information so you can help the claimant complete the Function Report accurately.

Key areas to cover:

• Self-care — Can they dress, bathe, and groom independently? Do they need reminders for medication or hygiene?
• Meal preparation — Do they cook? What kind of meals? How long can they stand at the stove?
• Household chores — Can they clean, do laundry, mow the lawn? How long before they need to rest?
• Shopping — Do they go to stores? For how long? Do they need someone to drive them?
• Social activities — Do they attend church, visit friends, go to family gatherings? How often? For how long?
• Pain and fatigue patterns — What time of day is worst? How long can they sit, stand, or walk before needing to change position? Do they need to lie down during the day?

The goal is not to paint a picture of total incapacity — the ALJ will not believe it. The goal is to document specific, credible limitations that are consistent with the medical evidence. A claimant who says "I can stand for about ten minutes before my back forces me to sit down" is far more persuasive than one who says "I can't do anything."

Prior Applications and Denials: The Administrative History

Many claimants who walk into your office have already been denied — sometimes more than once. Your intake form must capture the full administrative history:

• Dates of all prior applications (both SSDI and SSI)
• The level of each denial — initial, reconsideration, ALJ hearing, Appeals Council
• Whether a federal court appeal was filed
• The name of the ALJ who issued any prior unfavorable decision
• Whether the claimant has a current pending application

Prior denials affect your case in two ways. First, the doctrine of administrative res judicata (Drummond/Acquiescence Rulings) may require the ALJ to adopt prior RFC findings unless there is new and material evidence of changed circumstances. Second, a prior denial creates a presumption of non-disability for the period already adjudicated, which means your current application effectively starts at the date of the prior denial.

If the claimant's DLI falls within a previously adjudicated period, you may need to reopen the prior application rather than file a new one. This is a strategic decision that depends on the intake facts.

Representative Fee Agreements: Get It Signed at Intake

Under 42 U.S.C. § 406(a), representative fees in Social Security cases are regulated. The standard fee agreement provides for 25% of past-due benefits, capped at a dollar amount set by the Commissioner (currently $7,200 for fee agreements approved under the fee agreement process). If you do not get the fee agreement signed and submitted to SSA before a favorable decision, you will have to go through the fee petition process instead — which is slower, more burdensome, and not guaranteed.

Your intake form should include or attach the fee agreement and confirm:

• The claimant understands the 25% / $7,200 cap structure
• Whether there is a prior representative who may have a fee claim
• Whether the claimant has already appointed a representative with SSA

Do not leave intake without a signed fee agreement and a signed SSA-1696 (Appointment of Representative). Filing the 1696 gives you access to the claimant's electronic file and ensures SSA communicates with you directly.

ALJ Hearing Prep Indicators: What to Flag at Intake

Most SSD cases are denied at the initial and reconsideration levels and are won at the ALJ hearing. That hearing may be 12 to 18 months away, but there are things you should flag at intake that will shape your hearing preparation:

Credibility factors. Does the claimant have a consistent treatment history, or are there gaps? Gaps must be explained — financial barriers, transportation issues, distrust of doctors — and the explanation needs to be documented early.

Third-party function reports. Identify at intake who lives with the claimant or sees them regularly and can provide a third-party function report. A spouse, adult child, or close friend who can describe the claimant's daily limitations adds corroboration that the ALJ cannot ignore.

Mental health complexity. If the claimant has both physical and mental impairments, flag it. Mental impairments are evaluated under their own criteria (the "paragraph B" and "paragraph C" criteria), and they interact with physical impairments in ways that can push an RFC below the threshold for any sustained work.

Substance abuse. If substance abuse is present, you need to know at intake because the ALJ is required to determine whether the claimant would still be disabled absent the substance use (the DAA materiality analysis). This does not disqualify the claim, but it changes the analytical framework.

The Employment Law Overlap

SSD claimants sometimes have related employment claims — wrongful termination, failure to accommodate a disability, or retaliation for taking medical leave. If your practice covers both areas, cross-referencing your intake with an employment law intake ensures you catch claims that share the same underlying facts but run on different timelines and before different forums.

Putting It All Together

Social Security disability intake is not about collecting information for a demand letter or a complaint. It is about building the foundation of an administrative record that will be evaluated under a rigid, step-by-step framework where missing information counts against your client. Every provider you fail to list is a record you will not have. Every job you fail to document is a past-work argument you cannot rebut. Every daily activity you fail to capture is a function-report answer that will be filled in by someone who does not understand the legal significance of what they are writing.

A structured intake form built for SSD practice — not adapted from a personal injury template or a generic legal intake — ensures you collect what the sequential evaluation demands, flag the strategic decisions that need to be made early, and build toward a hearing you may not attend for over a year.

If you handle multiple practice areas, the Legal Bundle covers 38 legal intake sets across practice types, each structured for the substantive requirements of that area of law.