How Are Social Security Numbers Affixed?

Last week, my granddaughter noticed that my social security number is higher than hers, making it seem as though I'm the younger one. I snickered and reminded her that I'm not older than dirt, no matter what the general family consensus hinted. But it was a curious thing.

Well, it turns out that the whole thing is more or less random in some ways. The first number, and hers was the same as mine, generally tells what area of the country you were born in (or where you were when you applied for the card.) Despite the difference in age, we had been born in the same area of the same state. That also explained why her two older sisters had a different number from ours. It seems, however, that even that has exceptions. When the government ran out of numbers for some areas, they had to find different ones to fill in those population explosions, so they stuffed whatever extra number they came across into that slot. So while the cards in the larger area might all read in the three hundreds, one area might pop up with 6--. There are, obviously, only so many number options out there, at least when they're bundled into set groupings. People, on the other hand, just keep coming.

Numbers usually move from the northeast to the west. So the geographic area you're in when you receive your card is lower in the east and higher on the west coast. I don't know what they did about Alaska and Hawaii. I don't imagine that they were planned for in the original figuring.

The middle letters are apparently "just there", more or less to break up the first and third groups. That doesn't make much sense, so naturally I suspect a government plot, but apparently there isn't one-in this case, at least.

The third grouping of four numbers is your actual identification number.