Social Security recipients will receive a 2.8% boost in their monthly benefits in 2026, the Social Security Administration announced Friday. However, many seniors say the annual adjustments haven’t been enough to cover their ever-rising expenses.
The increase for 2026 is larger than the 2.5% cost-of-living-adjustment that beneficiaries received for this year, but far smaller than the ones for the few years before that, when inflation was running rampant.
Retirees’ monthly payments will rise by about $56 to an estimated average of $2,071 starting in January, the agency said. Nearly 71 million people receive Social Security benefits.
(A total of 75 million Americans receive either Social Security or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits from the agency. Some receive both.)
The annual adjustment, known as a COLA, is based on an inflation metric from the third quarter of the year. Inflation has moderated after being at around a four-decade high in 2022, which resulted in an 8.7% adjustment for 2023.
A related metric, the Consumer Price Index, rose 3% in September compared with a year ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced Friday.
The COLA increase was scheduled to be announced last week but was delayed by the federal government shutdown.
A good chunk of beneficiaries’ COLA for 2026 will likely be erased by an increase in Medicare Part B premiums, which is expected to be released next month. The monthly premium for 2026 is forecast to jump to more than $206, up from $185 this year, according to Medicare’s most recent trustees report. That would be about twice the increase for 2025.
For the average beneficiary, the higher projected Medicare premium would eat away at nearly half the bump in Social Security benefits, Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, an advocacy group, said in a statement. For some, the premium increase would consume their entire COLA.
Not keeping up with expenses
Social Security recipients have long complained that the annual COLA has not kept up with their actual expenses. In fact, the benefits lost 20% of their buying power between 2010 and 2024, according to an analysis last year from The Senior Citizens League. Those who retired in 2010 would need a boost of $370 a month, or $4,443 a year, on average, to regain the lost value.
Over the last decade, the annual increase has been about 3.1%, on average, according to Social Security.
AARP has advocated for the COLA formula to better represent senior citizens’ costs, particularly since they typically have higher health care expenses.
“The CPI for working Americans doesn’t quite capture what the spending patterns are for older Americans,” Joel Eskowitz, senior director of Social Security at AARP’s Public Policy Institute, told CNN. “It’s close, but there are just different things that working Americans spend on than retired Americans.”
This story is developing and will be updated.
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