The Cost of Living Adjustment for 2026 will be 2.8%, a few ticks higher than the 2025 COLA, Social Security Administration officials announced Friday.<\/p>\n
The long-awaited COLA announcement sets the rate of increase for Social Security beneficiaries, but also for military retirees and people receiving veterans benefits. The increase goes into effect in January. <\/p>\n
The government shutdown delayed the announcement by nine days.<\/p>\n
Nearly 71 million people receive Social Security benefits, officials said, estimating that on average, the monthly benefit will increase by $56. <\/p>\n
As an example, a military retiree who receives $2,500 in retired pay will see a COLA increase of about $70 a month.<\/p>\n
For a veteran receiving $1,500 per month in benefits, the increase would be about $42 in 2026. <\/p>\n
In 2024, Congress passed legislation that ties increases in veterans\u2019 benefits to the rate of Social Security increases. The cost-of-living increase applies to disability compensation, clothing allowances and dependency and indemnity benefits, as well as some other VA assistance programs. <\/p>\n
The COLA is designed to make sure benefits keep pace with inflation. The calculation is based on the Consumer Price Index, which tracks the cost of a wide range of items and calculates inflation and changes in the cost of living.<\/p>\n
The 2025 COLA, at 2.5%, was the lowest increase since before the COVID-19 pandemic. The COLA increases were 3.2% in 2023, 8.7% in 2022 and 5.9% in 2021.<\/p>\n
In 2020, the increase was 1.6%.<\/p>\n
Social Security officials will begin notifying individuals about their new benefit amount by mail starting in early December. <\/p>\n
Karen has covered military families, quality of life and consumer issues for Military Times for more than 30 years, and is co-author of a chapter on media coverage of military families in the book “A Battle Plan for Supporting Military Families.” She previously worked for newspapers in Guam, Norfolk, Jacksonville, Fla., and Athens, Ga. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Cost of Living Adjustment for 2026 will be 2.8%, a few ticks higher than the 2025 COLA,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98707,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[114,32454,33673,33674,32455,33675,18035,268,85,46,65659,33676,266,267,2959,65660],"class_list":["post-98706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-circulated-air-force-times","tag-circulated-army-times","tag-circulated-marine-corps-times","tag-circulated-military-times","tag-circulated-navy-times","tag-cola","tag-finance","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-military-retirees","tag-military-times","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance","tag-social-security-administration","tag-veterans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}