The 2026 Social Security COLA is 2.8 percent. The average retired worker’s check rises from $2,015 to about $2,071 a month starting in January 2026, roughly $56 gross. Your real raise is smaller: Medicare Part B climbs $17.90 to $202.90, so the typical net increase is about $38.50 a month.
That gap between the headline and the bank deposit is the point of this page. Most coverage stops at $56; the SSA announcement reached nearly 71 million Social Security beneficiaries plus 7.5 million SSI recipients, about 75 million people, and almost every one of them with Part B will keep less than the headline suggests.
A raise that arrives pre-shrunk is annoying, and years of small COLAs make it easy to assume the math is stacked against you. It is not hidden, though. Every number on this page traces to SSA, CMS, or BLS, and you can rerun all of it yourself.
The 2026 COLA in one line
Benefits rise 2.8 percent for checks paid in January 2026, and SSI rises the same 2.8 percent starting with the payment dated December 31, 2025, because January 1 is a federal holiday. The same percentage applies to retirement, SSDI, survivor, and spousal benefits. Your December COLA notice from SSA states your exact new amount.
How much bigger will your check be?
Run your own numbers right here. The calculator applies SSA’s exact rounding rules to your benefit, handles all six benefit types, deducts your actual Part B change (including IRMAA overrides), models the hold-harmless cap, and lets you price a what-if COLA against the official 2.8 percent.
Two rounding rules make your answer land a few cents under naive arithmetic, and both are truncation, never rounding up. Per SSA’s application of the COLA, your benefit times 1.028 drops to the next lower dime: SSA’s own worked example is $2,108.50 x 1.028 = $2,167.538, payable $2,167.50. Then the final check after the Part B deduction drops to the next lower whole dollar. The calculator reproduces both to the cent.
How was the 2.8 percent calculated?
From grocery-store data, literally. The law (Section 215(i) of the Social Security Act, automatic since 1975) compares the average CPI-W, the price index for urban wage earners that BLS publishes monthly, across two third quarters:
- Q3 2025 average: (316.349 + 317.306 + 318.139) / 3 = 317.265 (July, August, September)
- Q3 2024 average: 308.729
- The change: (317.265 - 308.729) / 308.729 = 2.765 percent, rounded to the nearest tenth = 2.8 percent
That is the entire formula, published on SSA’s COLA page. If the index falls, the COLA is zero, never negative, which happened in 2010, 2011, and 2016. One 2025 wrinkle: the announcement came on October 24 instead of the usual mid-October date because the government shutdown delayed the September CPI release by nine days.
Every 2026 number that changed
The COLA determination moves a whole family of figures at once. All of these come from the SSA 2026 fact sheet and the CMS 2026 premium fact sheet.
| Number | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| COLA | 2.5% | 2.8% | +0.3 point |
| Average retired worker | $2,015 | $2,071 | +$56 |
| Average SSDI benefit | $1,586 | $1,630 | +$44 |
| Average survivor benefit | $1,867 | $1,919 | +$52 |
| Max benefit at full retirement age | $4,018 | $4,152 | +$134 |
| Taxable maximum (wage base) | $176,100 | $184,500 | +$8,400 |
| Earnings limit, under FRA all year | $23,400 | $24,480 | $1 withheld per $2 over |
| Earnings limit, year you reach FRA | $65,160 | $1 withheld per $3 over | |
| SSI federal rate, individual | $967 | $994 | +$27 |
| SSI federal rate, couple | $1,450 | $1,491 | +$41 |
| Medicare Part B standard premium | $185.00 | $202.90 | +$17.90 |
| Medicare Part B deductible | $257 | $283 | +$26 |
| One work credit (quarter of coverage) | $1,810 | $1,890 | four credits at $7,560 |
Three max-benefit numbers get mixed up constantly, so keep them separate: $4,152 is the 2026 maximum for a new claim at full retirement age, $5,181 is the maximum for a new claim at 70, and $5,251 is the most any current beneficiary can receive (someone already at the 2025 maximum who then got the COLA). At 62, a new claim tops out at $2,969. The wage base jump matters for workers, not retirees; our wage base guide covers that side.
How much of your COLA will Medicare Part B take?
$17.90 of it, if you pay the standard premium, which is why the honest headline is $38.50 and not $56. Part B premiums are deducted from Social Security checks before payment, and CMS set the 2026 standard premium at $202.90, up 9.7 percent from $185.00, with the annual deductible up $26 to $283.
Three situations change that picture. If you are not enrolled in Part B, or you receive SSI (which Part B never reduces), you keep the whole 2.8 percent. If Part B starts for you in 2026, your check drops by the full $202.90, not the $17.90 increase, so your net change is likely negative even with the COLA. And if your benefit is small, the law protects you: under the hold-harmless rule, the Part B increase cannot exceed your dollar COLA, so your check never falls. At the standard premiums that kicks in below roughly $640 a month of benefits, and per the Congressional Research Service only about 1.3 percent of Part B enrollees are in that position for 2026, because the 2.8 percent COLA comfortably covers $17.90 for everyone else. High earners pay IRMAA surcharges, $284.10 to $689.90 a month in 2026, and the calculator’s premium fields accept those directly.
What has the COLA been each year since 1975?
The 2.8 percent for 2026 sits almost exactly at the modern norm: the trailing 10-year average is about 3.1 percent and the last 20 years average about 2.6, while the all-time average near 3.7 is skewed by the double-digit late 1970s and early 1980s.
The full arc in one paragraph: automatic COLAs began in 1975 (created by the 1972 amendments, P.L. 92-336), peaked at 14.3 percent in 1980, and settled into the 1 to 4 percent range for most of the last three decades. There is no 1983 entry because the 1983 amendments moved the adjustment from July to the following January, a one-time gap. Three years paid nothing, 2010, 2011, and 2016, and the post-pandemic spike delivered 5.9 percent in 2022 and 8.7 percent in 2023, the largest since 1982.
| Year paid | COLA | Year paid | COLA |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 0.3% | 2022 | 5.9% |
| 2018 | 2.0% | 2023 | 8.7% |
| 2019 | 2.8% | 2024 | 3.2% |
| 2020 | 1.6% | 2025 | 2.5% |
| 2021 | 1.3% | 2026 | 2.8% |
Does the COLA keep up with what retirees actually pay?
By design it keeps up with the CPI-W, the spending basket of working-age urban wage earners, and that is the entire controversy: retirees spend more of their budget on medical care and shelter, the categories that tend to outrun the average.
BLS maintains an experimental index for Americans 62 and older, the CPI-E, and SSA’s own researchers have measured the difference. Per the Social Security Bulletin (Vol. 67, No. 3, 2007), actual CPI-W COLAs averaged 3.02 percent a year from 1984 to 2006; had the same COLAs used the CPI-E, they would have averaged 3.35 percent, higher in every year of that span except 2005.
Two honest caveats before you extrapolate. The CPI-E is experimental, built on a small sample, and in stretches after 2006 (including parts of the post-COVID period) it ran below the CPI-W as medical inflation cooled. And the near-term dollar effect is modest: the CRS computed that a hypothetical 3.0 percent R-CPI-E COLA for 2026 would have made the average benefit $2,075 instead of $2,071, about $4 a month. Our calculator’s CPI-E what-if reproduces that $4 exactly.
The louder claim comes from The Senior Citizens League, a seniors advocacy group, whose 2026 buying-power study estimates benefits are worth 86.3 cents on the 2016 dollar, a 13.7 percent loss it says would take $295.85 more a month to recover. Its earlier 2024 study put the loss at 20 percent measured from 2010, a different baseline.
Congress has a standing proposal, the Social Security 2100 Act (H.R. 9519, Rep. John Larson), that would switch COLAs to the higher of CPI-E or CPI-W. As of mid-2026 it has not advanced, and the trust-fund shortfall makes any COLA-raising change a hard sell near term.
Will your COLA raise be taxed?
For a growing share of households, yes, and the COLA itself is part of the reason. Benefits become taxable when provisional income (adjusted gross income plus nontaxable interest plus half your benefits) passes $25,000 for singles or $32,000 for joint filers, with up to 50 percent of benefits taxable there and up to 85 percent past $34,000 and $44,000, per IRS Topic 423. Those thresholds were set by the 1983 amendments (the 85 percent tier in 1993) and have never been indexed for inflation, so every COLA quietly pushes more retirees across them.
The new counterweight runs through 2028. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, created a bonus deduction of up to $6,000 per person 65 and older, $12,000 for a qualifying couple, for tax years 2025 through 2028. It phases out at 6 percent of modified AGI above $75,000 single or $150,000 joint, disappearing entirely at $175,000 and $250,000, and it stacks on top of the existing age-65 additional standard deduction ($2,000 single, $1,600 per spouse for 2025). Be precise about what it does: it does not repeal the taxation of benefits, it reduces taxable income, which for many middle-income retirees cuts the tax on their benefits to zero anyway.
What will the 2027 COLA be?
Unknown until mid-October 2026, when SSA runs the same Q3 CPI-W math on 2026 data, but the inputs are running hot. The CPI-W rose 0.7 percent in May 2026 alone, pushing the year-over-year rate to 4.4 percent, the fastest since April 2023, per BLS data.
The forecasts, clearly labeled as forecasts: The Senior Citizens League projects 3.8 percent as of its July 6, 2026 release, which would raise the average retired-worker benefit by about $77, from roughly $2,026 to $2,103. Independent Social Security and Medicare analyst Mary Johnson raised her estimate to 4.7 percent after the May data, per CNBC (June 12, 2026), up from her prior 4.2 percent. A bigger COLA is not free money, though: the 2026 Medicare Trustees Report projects a 2027 Part B premium near $209.50, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget warns a roughly 4 percent COLA would deepen the trust-fund shortfall by about $300 billion over a decade, and a high COLA only ever reimburses inflation you already paid. You can preview any forecast today: enter your benefit in the calculator, set the what-if rate to 3.8 or 4.7, and read the side-by-side dollar difference.
This page carries 2026 figures and will be refreshed when SSA announces the 2027 COLA in October 2026. One next step: check your December COLA notice against the calculator’s output, because the notice states your exact new benefit and the calculator shows you where every dollar of the change went. This is educational information, not financial, tax, or benefits advice.