The Social Security Administration’s burden, at Step Five, is to demonstrate a claimant’s ability to perform a significant number of jobs “either in the region where you live or in several regions in the country.” Somewhere along the line, practitioners went away from demanding regional breakdowns of national jobs numbers from VEs and ALJs decided the requirement for such a breakdown within the agency’s own regulations did not exist. New developments in the case law are making regional numbers matter again and practitioners can use them to their advantage both in winning at hearing and setting up federal court issues.
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