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Socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with health disparities related to stress and immune dysregulation. DNA methylation (DNAm) is an epigenetic mechanism that incorporates environmental cues into the context of the genetic background resulting in a stable but responsive method to affect genetic expression. Investigations into how SES associated health disparities could be partly mediated through DNAm have resulted in low replication, which may be due in part to how variable SES measures are across studies. In this current work, we aimed at breaking down multiple components of SES in the sub-categories of wealth, education and self-report, as well as how these events in childhood, relative to older adulthood, may differ. Investing the whole blood DNAm of an elderly Costa Rican cohort (n = 465) using the Illumina EPIC array, we found there to be stronger associations with DNAm to measures of older adulthood compared to childhood SES. However, we found DNAm associations to childhood SES to be confounded with both stress and inflammatory biomarkers, supportive of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis. Of the subcategories of SES, self-report measures at both life stages resulted in dampened associations to DNAm relative to more objective SES measures. Our study highlights the importance of strictly defining SES while accounting for and integrating biomarker measures related to the overall physiology of outcome health measures when investigating associations with DNAm.