SSA Office of Hearings Operations (OHO) — Public Data
SSA Office of Hearings Operations (OHO) — Public Data
OHO handles the post-DDS appeal stage: when a DDS-Det denies a disability claim, the claimant can request an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) hearing. OHO publishes hearing-office-level workload, wait times, and ALJ-level disposition data. This data joins to DDS-stage workload via state/region, giving a complete "DDS denial → ALJ outcome" journey per state.
Files in this directory
| File | Source | Period | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
alj-disposition-by-judge-LATEST.csv | 03_ALJ_Disposition_Data.html | FY 2025 YTD | 1,439 individual ALJs with hearing office, total dispositions, awards, denials, fully/partially favorable |
hearing-office-wait-time-LATEST.csv | 01_NetStat_Report.html | FY 2025 YTD | 165 hearing offices with site code + average wait time in months |
03-alj-disposition.tables.json | (same as above) | (same) | Raw rendered HTML capture (624 KB) — source for the ALJ CSV |
01-netstat-report.tables.json | (same as above) | (same) | Raw rendered HTML capture (35 KB) — source for the wait-time CSV |
FIELD_DEFINITIONS.txt / AVAILABILITY_SUMMARY.txt | OHO docs | n/a | Field-by-field meaning + freshness/archive notes |
Source root: https://www.ssa.gov/appeals/DataSets/
Schema
alj-disposition-by-judge-LATEST.csv (9 columns, 1,439 rows)
Judge, Office, Total Dispositions, Total ALJ Dispositions Across All Offices,
Decisions, Awards, Denials, Fully Favorable, Partially Favorable
Total Dispositions— disposition count at the ALJ's primary officeTotal ALJ Dispositions Across All Offices— disposition count across all offices the ALJ heard cases at (often equal to the first column for ALJs not hearing remotely)Decisions= Awards + Denials (excludes dismissals)Fully Favorable+Partially Favorable= Awards (subset breakdown)- Example MA-relevant rows:
BOSTONoffice (7 ALJs)
hearing-office-wait-time-LATEST.csv (3 columns, 165 rows)
Site Code, Hearing Office, Hearing Office Times in Months
Site Code— internal SSA office identifier (e.g.,T1P= Akron OH)Hearing Office Times in Months— average wait from request-for-hearing to hearing held, current period
How this joins to DDS-stage data
Hearing offices serve geographic regions but are not 1:1 with states. To attach state to each office:
- The OHO datasets index page lists each office's coverage region. (As of the
May 2026 fetch, the index page itself is bot-blocked from this environment;
see
../../MANUAL-FETCH-NEEDED.md.) - Office naming convention: most cities map to their state via standard
geocoding (e.g.,
BOSTON→ MA,AKRON OH→ OH suffix). For ambiguous codes, cross-reference SSA's hearing-office-locator page.
Refresh
OHO publishes monthly. To refresh:
NODE_PATH=scripts/.npm/node_modules node scripts/playwright-fetch.js
node scripts/extract-oho-alj-table.js
Both scripts are idempotent. The Playwright fetch overwrites the JSON captures; the extractor overwrites the CSVs.
Caveats
- ALJ table is national, not state-aggregated. To produce a per-state
allowance rate at the ALJ stage, group rows by office state, then divide
Awards÷Decisions. - Wait-time table is current-period snapshot, not time series. OHO publishes monthly archives going back to FY 2011 — see the index page for archive URLs.
- Some ALJs have very low caseloads (1–7 dispositions). Filter by
Decisions >= 50for stable allowance-rate comparisons.