How to Fill Out the Disability Activities of Daily Living Form

The Social Security disability Activities of Daily Living form — officially the Function Report, Form SSA-3373-BK — asks how your medical conditions affect your everyday functioning, and the way you fill it out can move your claim toward approval or denial. To fill out the disability Activities of Daily Living form well, describe your limitations rather than your abilities, give specific numbers and recovery times, explain the workarounds you rely on, keep your answers consistent with your medical records, and answer every question rather than leaving anything blank.¹

The form runs ten pages and the SSA estimates it takes about 61 minutes to read, gather information for, and complete. Set aside more time than that. Your answers feed directly into the agency’s Residual Functional Capacity assessment, which decides whether you can do your past work or any other work in the national economy.²

What the Form Asks You About

Knowing what’s coming helps you answer thoughtfully instead of racing through. The form is split into five sections.¹

Sections A and B collect basic information about you, your living situation, and how your medical conditions limit your ability to work. Section C is the heart of the form and covers daily activities: your routine from morning to night, whether you care for anyone else or for pets, personal care tasks (dressing, bathing, hair care, shaving, feeding yourself, using the toilet), reminders you need for grooming or medication, meal preparation, indoor and outdoor chores, shopping, money management, hobbies, and social activities.

Section D asks about specific physical and mental abilities. You’ll check off which physical activities your condition affects — lifting, squatting, bending, standing, reaching, walking, sitting, kneeling, stair-climbing, and using your hands — and explain how. It asks for numbers: how many pounds you can lift, how far you can walk before you need to rest, how long that rest has to be. Then it covers memory, task completion, concentration, following instructions, handling stress, adapting to change, unusual behaviors or fears, and problems getting along with authority figures. There’s also a section on assistive devices such as canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and braces, including which ones were prescribed and when you use them.

The last section is for remarks and your signature. If you add remarks, reference the specific question number so the reviewer can match the explanation to the right part of the form.

Describe Limitations, Not Abilities

Most people instinctively downplay their struggles. They describe what they can still do rather than what their condition prevents. On this form, that instinct works against you. The SSA is measuring functional capacity, not resilience.

Answer based on your average and worst days, not your best.³ If you can prepare a full meal on a good day but usually rely on microwaved food because standing at the stove causes pain, say that. If you sometimes shower without help but need to sit on a shower chair and rest afterward, say that too. The reviewer has no way to see behind your answers; whatever you leave out, they won’t know.

Be Specific and Quantify

Vague answers read as mild limitations. “I can’t stand for very long” tells the reviewer almost nothing. “After 15 minutes of standing, my foot starts to swell and I need to elevate it to relieve pain” tells them exactly what’s happening and roughly what it costs you.⁴

The form itself pushes you toward this level of detail, asking things like how many pounds you can lift and how far you can walk. Pair every quantity with a consequence. How long can you sit before your back seizes? What happens when it does? How long does it take to recover? Numbers plus consequences give the reviewer something to work with.

Explain Workarounds and Recovery Time

If you can still perform a task, but only with significant modifications, those modifications belong on the form. Sitting on a stool while you cook. Using a motorized cart at the grocery store. Splitting laundry across three days because carrying a full basket is impossible. Without these details, the SSA will assume you perform the most demanding version of the activity.⁵

Recovery time is easy to leave out because resting doesn’t feel like anything worth reporting. Report it anyway. If vacuuming one room forces you to lie down for 30 minutes, if a trip to the store means a migraine for the rest of the day, if a shower drains you enough that you can’t do anything else for an hour, those recovery costs define your actual functional limits. Write them down.

Don’t Leave Anything Blank

The instructions repeat this point, and it matters. If a question doesn’t apply, write “does not apply” or “none.” A blank looks like an incomplete application, or worse, like you have no limitation in that area.¹

Stay Consistent With Your Medical Records

The SSA compares your Function Report against your medical file, your initial application, and any third-party report submitted about you. Discrepancies raise problems regardless of which way they cut.

If you tell the SSA you can lift five pounds but your treating physician’s notes describe lifting 25, you need to explain that gap.³ The reverse is just as risky. If your doctor’s notes say you can stand for only ten minutes, but your Function Report describes elaborate nightly meal preparation, the agency may treat the whole claim as unreliable.⁶ Before you submit, review what your records already say and make sure your form is telling a consistent story.

Avoid Exaggerating in Either Direction

Overstating your symptoms damages your claim as much as understating them. Claiming a constant 10-out-of-10 pain level every day of the week, or describing yourself as more impaired than you actually are, undermines your credibility. On the other end, writing that you do “nothing” all day is rarely true and reads that way; even on your worst days, you probably feed yourself and handle basic hygiene, and the SSA expects you to acknowledge that.⁴

Watch out for hobby answers that contradict your stated limitations. If you tell the SSA you can’t use a computer for work but list computer gaming as a hobby, that’s the kind of internal contradiction reviewers latch onto.³

The form itself carries a warning that knowingly providing false statements or concealing material facts to affect a claim is a crime under federal law.¹

Answering Questions About Mental Health

Cognitive and emotional limitations are harder to quantify than physical ones, which makes the mental-functioning questions especially important to answer with care. The SSA evaluates mental impairments across four areas, sometimes called the paragraph B criteria:

Understanding, remembering, or applying information: learning, following instructions, sequencing tasks, solving problems, and recognizing mistakes.
Interacting with others: relating to supervisors, coworkers, and the public, handling conflict, and responding to social cues.
Concentrating, persisting, or maintaining pace: focusing on tasks, ignoring distractions, maintaining attendance, and sustaining effort through a full workday.
Adapting or managing oneself: regulating emotions, responding to work demands, adapting to change, managing symptoms, and maintaining personal hygiene.⁷

Answer these questions in terms of sustained functioning, not isolated good moments. Cooking a meal on a Tuesday when you’re stable does not mean you can hold that level of performance across eight-hour workdays, five days a week. SSA guidance itself recognizes that functioning well in a familiar, structured, or supportive setting does not demonstrate the ability to function in a competitive work environment.⁷

Detail any help you receive. If a family member manages your medications, reminds you to eat, drives you to appointments, or handles your finances, write that down. The agency is assessing whether you can function independently, and support that keeps you afloat needs to be visible in your answers.

If Someone Else Is Filling Out a Third-Party Report About You

In some cases the SSA also sends a Third-Party Function Report (Form SSA-3380-BK) to a friend, family member, or caregiver, asking them to describe your limitations independently. It covers the same categories as your own report, and the instructions specifically tell the third party not to ask you for the answers.⁸

The point is an independent perspective. Two problems can appear when the reports are compared: inconsistencies between the two reports hurt the claim, but responses that look nearly identical also raise concerns because they suggest coaching.⁹ The person filling out the third-party form should describe what they’ve actually observed, in their own words.

Why Your Answers Carry This Much Weight

Your Function Report is not a formality. Under 20 CFR § 404.1545, the SSA’s Residual Functional Capacity assessment — the finding of the most you can still do despite your limitations — must be based on all relevant evidence in the record, including your own descriptions of your limitations and observations from family, neighbors, and friends.² Social Security Ruling 96-8p lists reports of daily activities as nonmedical evidence adjudicators must consider, and it requires them to explain how any inconsistencies between those reports and the medical findings were resolved.¹⁰

SSR 16-3p governs how the agency evaluates your symptoms. It replaced the older “credibility” framework and makes clear that symptom evaluation is not a judgment about your character, but an evidence-based analysis of how your symptoms limit your functioning. Adjudicators are required to weigh the entire record — daily activities, medication side effects, treatment history, and precipitating factors — and are prohibited from disposing of symptom evidence with a boilerplate line like “the claimant’s symptoms have been considered.”¹¹

If your claim is denied and reaches a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge, the Function Report stays in the record. The ALJ will often question you directly about the same daily activities and limitations, and a Medical Expert may testify about what you can still do despite your impairments.¹² What you wrote on the form is what you’ll be asked to explain and defend.

Deadline and How to Submit

You typically receive the form by mail from your local Social Security office or from your state’s Disability Determination Services agency, and you return it by mail the same way. The current version of the SSA-3373 cannot be completed or submitted electronically through the my Social Security portal, and the agency’s eSubmit tool does not offer an upload option for this form.¹³

Once the form is sent to you, you generally have about ten days to complete and return it. Don’t sacrifice accuracy for speed; if you need slightly more time, contact the office that sent the form. Failing to provide the requested information, according to the SSA, may prevent an accurate and timely decision on your claim.¹

One last instruction from the SSA: do not have a doctor or hospital complete the form for you. The Function Report is meant to capture your own perspective on your daily functioning, not a clinical write-up. Use plain language, describe what your days actually look like, and let your medical records speak to the diagnoses.

1
Social Security Administration. Function Report – Adult, Form SSA-3373-BK
2
Social Security Administration. 20 CFR § 404.1545 – Your Residual Functional Capacity
3
Atticus. Social Security Function Report
4
Nolo. Explain to Social Security How Your Disability Affects Your Daily Activities
5
Allsup. Common Mistakes – Not Telling the Whole Truth With Activities of Daily Living
6
Disability Associates. Can You Still Do Household Chores While Applying for Social Security Disability Benefits
7
Social Security Administration. 12.00 Mental Disorders – Adult
8
Social Security Administration. Function Report – Adult – Third Party, Form SSA-3380-BK
9
Atticus. Third-Party Function Report
10
Social Security Administration. SSR 96-8p – Assessing Residual Functional Capacity
11
Social Security Administration. SSR 16-3p – Evaluation of Symptoms in Disability Claims
12
Social Security Administration. Medical Expert Handbook
13
Social Security Administration. Social Security Administration Forms