Did the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) end income tax on Social Security Retirement Benefits?

The simple, straight forward answer to the title question is no. To better understand what is going on here, one must understand just how Social Security benefits can become taxable.  

Taxpayers who file as single are taxed on their Social Retirement benefits when 1/2 of those benefits plus their other income is more than $25,000. For taxpayers who file joint returns, $25,000 increases to $32,000

The amount of the benefit that is taxed ranges between 50% and 85% of the Social Security retirement the taxpayer receives. The same analysis claims that at present, 36% of the recipients of those benefits pay tax on them at present.

Before you jump for joy, the tax break to help senior citizens will expire on 12/31/2028. Talk about short-term relief.  Also note that those figures of $25,000 and $32,000 were set in 1984 and have never been indexed for inflation. 

If indexed for inflation, the CPI calculator provided by the federal government tells us that $25,000 in 1985 would now be $76,154 now.  $97,505 in 2025 is the amount of $32,000 in 1985.

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The OBBB solution is to give senior citizens an added deduction of $6,000. Most senior citizens I deal with in doing tax preparation are very confused on how to calculate their tax on their Social Security benefits.

This complicates tax return preparation for senior citizens. Indexing the amounts of $25,000 and $32,000 for inflation is a much better solution. But it would reduce taxes collected by a much larger amount, which would more rapidly exhaust the mathematical fiction that is the so-called Social Security Trust Fund.