We establish that locally bounded relaxed minimizers of degenerate elliptic symmetric gradient functionals on \(\textrm{BD}(\Omega )\) have weak gradients in \(\textrm{L}_{\textrm{loc}}^{1}(\Omega ;\mathbb {R}^{n\times n})\) . This is achieved for the sharp ellipticity range that is presently known to yield \(\textrm{W}_{\textrm{loc}}^{1,1}\) -regularity in the full gradient case on \(\textrm{BV}(\Omega ;\mathbb {R}^{n})\) . As a consequence, we also obtain the first Sobolev regularity results for minimizers of the area-type functional on \(\textrm{BD}(\Omega )\) .