Getting a Social Security Card

I have been renamed, but my daughter has a card now. Fair trade.

Our daughter, Astra Meridian, has a last name that's different from either mine or my wife. This introduces certain complexities to life, many of which we were aware of. One that I wasn't aware of is that Social Security cards are not always delivered to mailboxes. There appears to be some sort of anti-fraud device at the USPS that people report that prevents delivery, though it doesn't appear to be formally public.

All of our friends with more traditional last names for their children have had no difficulty receiving the cards, and the one other couple we know whose child does not bear their last name also did not receive their card at first.

Reddit•r/SocialSecurity

My daughter’s social security card was never delivered after she was born.

More than half of newborn cards and replacement cards aren't delivered for one important reason. Usps had special direction to deny delivery of social security cards and other federal documents of a person isn't listed as a registered occupant of a given address.

In other words, since the first card issued to newborns are addressed to the child and Not the parent, the delivery never makes it to your locale and is instead sent back to Baltimore. Go get a vaccination record from department of health or a signed copy from the doctors office, take that with your id,go order a replacement at ssa office, then stop by the post office on your way home and complete a change of name and address form to properly register yourself at your address. Since the replacement is issued to the applicant for the number holder(baby) you as the applicant then need to be properly registered with USPS.

u/yurxzi•2025-09-12•15 points•3 comments

The Normal Way

The normal way one receives one's child's social security card is that the hospital has staff on-site who will take your forms right after birth, report the birth to the relevant local authority, and then send them off for the SSA to send the card to your home address. Our friends reported receiving their childrens' cards within 8 weeks or so. We were also informed of that latency by the person recording Astra's birth

The Other Way

If the card doesn't arrive within 8 weeks, you've got to go to the SSA and apply for a new one. Technically, I believe you can apply for a reissue of the same card as delivery but we were not given that option. There are constraints to the number of cards that a person can receive:

• 10 cards in a lifetime
• 3 cards in a year

These are obviously anti-fraud devices at the SSA, but combined with the anti-fraud devices at the USPS, this risks an inability to have a Social Security card at all unless one appeals to the government that it was cause hardship. The hardship condition is quite limited: having your number but not your card is not enough. If you can get services without the physical card, even just theoretically, you've not got hardship. So overall, it's very important to get and keep one's card.

In our case, I was at work so Julie went and followed the procedures to have another card sent out. I'm the documenter, she's the doer, so in this case I can't tell you more than that she filled out the document, talked to the person, got Astra's SSN (but not the card) and then the card never arrived.

Replacing A Card

You have to go to an SSA office, preferably one locally in order to replace a card. If you report within 2 weeks of a delivery deadline to ask for a replacement you can apparently get the same one reissued as a delivery-failed which does not count towards your 3 cards a year. We were ignorant of this and consequently by the time we took it seriously we were at Try 3 for the year - our final shot at it.

Much of this process is intended for an adult so it makes it quite hard. The requirements often are hard to hit for one's child. However, what is useful is that an American passport only needs you to prove that your child was born to you and that she's American. This was much easier for us to do and we were able to apply at a USPS facility locally for the passport and receive it within a few weeks.

Documents

We needed to furnish a few documents to prove our identity and our daughter's identity to the SSA. We took with us:

• Astra's birth certificate - This is apparently useless
• Astra's vaccination record - This is apparently useful
• All 3 of our passports

USPS Address Verification

The thing that the Reddit guys recommended did not actually work. The USPS Address Verification system accepted a request to start verification for Astra Meridian, but the actual post office wanted photo ID with the address on it to process the request. All the identification with addresses on it were not hers (a six month old cannot sign a home lease) and all the identification with a photo on it did not contain an address (US passports do not carry addresses). Consequently, nothing could be done here. What we did do is ask that the post office tell the last mile delivery guy to please deliver to our mail box any mail intended for Astra Meridian. I don't know if anything took or not but the mail did arrive on this third attempt.

For what it's worth, our other friends who had mail delivery issues with their SSN just applied on the second time and had it work right away, so there is some failure rate and we just eventually got lucky.

Actual Process

We went to the facility on 16th Street. The closest parking facility is 16th and Hoff which is where we parked. It's quite open in the morning so it wasn't too hard to find parking. Appointments at the SSA facility are, as with most US government functions, booked out for many weeks in advance. In our case, we could only find one a month away so we decided to book that and then walk in and see what happened to the card and what our options were. Without finding out what was the highest likelihood outcome, I did not want to apply for a card.

At this time, Julie'd already written to the office of Nancy Pelosi (our local rep) requesting assistance on the issue. It must have been a common one because one of the options on the drop-down list was for help with this. Nothing ever came of it except that we got signed onto her mailing list.

The other options I was considering were to go to another office instead (wouldn't help, they're all sent from Baltimore) or waiting for the next year (very annoying and no advantage).

Enquiring After The Missing Card

So first we wanted to find out what happened here and form a picture of what to do. The Social Security phone lines are often backed up quite a bit. In our case, every time we called they were at 70 minutes and I didn't want to keep the phone on speaker phone by me for that long only to lose the line when I finally make it to the front or something like that. So we went in.

Time	Observation
0907	We arrived at this time. There were 11 people line ahead of us and the guy in front of us was #26 for the day
0918	We entered the building. There were 8 people in line ahead of us at the kiosk
0924	We received our ticket D399; currently displayed were B106, A39, C296, D377.
0957	Currently displayed were A47, B108, D389.

The way things work is that you stand in line outside, then the security guys check your bags, and then you stand in line at the kiosk to check-in or to get your walk-in token, and then there are seats where you can sit and wait or you can stand leaning against the wall. If you've got an appointment and you arrive early you end up standing in the line anyway, but then you're called forward to the kiosk if it's around the time of your appointment. After you've checked in, they call you by the applicant's name and token number, though there are the usual screens up in front of you. The token numbers are not called in monotonic order even within the letter codes, i.e. A134 can go before A121.

Of course, after we were called, I did not record the time, but as you can imagine it was a couple of hours. At the end of the affair, we found out that:

1. We'd have to apply again and yes, for the third and last time this year
2. If we had arrived within 2 weeks of the projected card arrival time, we could have applied for a re-send without it hitting the limits
3. Our documents were sufficient, but we'd need an application and an appointment for it

We asked for, and received, Astra's SSN again.

Replacing the Card

We filled in the standard Social Security card replacement form and arrived on the day we had already booked the appointment for.

Time	Observation
1013	We arrived at this time. There was no line in front of us.
1020	We checked in and received number D391
1030	This is the appointment time, nothing happened
1119	We were called in to a pre-appointment booth and received the number A31. I do not recall which A-number was active.
1153	We were called in to the appointment, informed of the date when we should expect it by, and received the number again to confirm

At the appointment, we went through the application again (which was very straightforward), and then we were given a date some 6 weeks out by which time it should arrive and we were told that if we came back within 2 weeks after that we could get it resent again. Last time, when Julie applied she had them put in "c/o Julie Kang" so this time we changed it up and asked for it to be "ATTN: Roshan George".

We walked out, made an appointment for the day before 8 weeks and for the day of 8 weeks, but we actually received it about a week after the application and canceled the appointments. I was renamed "Roshan Geroge" but the mail made it which is the only thing that matters.

Security at the SSA

One interesting thing at the SSA itself is that it doesn't seem to run by the norms of the rest of San Francisco. The most notable thing was this interaction I observed the security guys having with a dog owner. We were at the front of the room with our pram so what I observed went something like this:

*bark bark*

— Dog

You can't bring your dog in here

— Security Guy

It's a service dog

— Dog Owner

Service dogs don't bark at people like that. Take him outside

— Security Guy

At that very moment, we were called so I didn't get to see what happened afterwards, but by the time we came back there was no dog or dog owner in sight, so either they were called in to their appointment or they had to leave. This never happens in San Francisco.