For Immediate Release – October 24th, 2025
Cost-of-Living Adjustment for 2026 Announced at 2.8%
Today, the Social Security Administration (SSA) announced that 2026’s Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) will be 2.8 percent. On average, retired workers’ Social Security checks will increase by $54 from $2,008 to $2,062 effective January 1st.
The 2026 COLA will be slightly higher than the last COLA. The 2026 COLA is 0.3 percentage points higher than the 2.5 percent COLA implemented at the start of 2025. From a historic standpoint, this COLA is about average, ranking 29th out of the 51 COLAs announced since the government tied COLAs to the Consumer Price Index in 1975.
Inflation has climbed since the beginning of the year. This February, TSCL’s model predicted that the 2026 COLA would come in at 2.1 percent amid signs of cooling inflation. However, our predictions ticked upward throughout the year as the Trump administration implemented economic policy changes, including sweeping tariffs, new tax breaks for seniors who earn enough to pay income taxes, and stricter immigration enforcement. By August, our prediction had climbed to 2.7 percent.
Key Insights:
- Most seniors rely on Social Security for most of their income. A 2025 TSCL study finds that 73 percent of seniors depend on Social Security for more than half their income. About 39 percent rely on Social Security for all their income, while another 34 percent depend on the program for 51 percent to 99 percent of their income. TSCL estimates that the median senior survives on less than $2,000 a month.
- Subpar COLAs drive deep dissatisfaction among older Americans. Only 10 percent of seniors are happy with the amount they receive from their monthly Social Security checks, with many citing COLAs that lag inflation as a problem. TSCL’s research found that 94 percent of seniors said the 2025 COLA of 2.5 percent was too low and would cause their monthly checks to fall behind inflation.
- Seniors are calling for reform in the COLA calculation. TSCL’s research has found that 93 percent of seniors believe Social Security and Medicare reform should be a top priority or a high priority for the Trump administration and Congress. Further, when asked to pick just one area of Social Security to prioritize, the top choice was better COLAs (34 percent), followed by improving Social Security’s long-term finances (33 percent).
TSCL Executive Director Shannon Benton says…
- “The 2026 COLA is going to hurt for seniors. Year after year, they warn that Social Security’s meager increases won’t be enough, and the Census Bureau estimates that about 10 percent of retirement-age Americans live in poverty. However, our research suggests that the number may be higher. It’s about time our elected representatives show up for seniors, or else seniors won’t show up for them at the voting booth.”
- “Seniors, and The Senior Citizens League, call on Congress to take immediate action to strengthen COLAs to ensure Americans can retire with dignity, such as instituting a minimum COLA of 3 percent and changing the COLA calculation from the CPI-W to the CPI-E.”
- “One straightforward option for reforming Social Security COLAs would be calculating them with the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly (CPI-E) instead of the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners (CPI-W), which is the government’s current measure for calculating COLAs. The CPI-E is specifically designed to represent older Americans’ spending habits. As a recent TSCL analysis shows, it tends to come in higher than the CPI-W about 69 percent of the time, resulting in thousands of dollars in lost benefits for seniors.”
About TSCL:
The Senior Citizens League (TSCL) is one of the nation’s largest nonpartisan seniors’ groups. Established in 1992 as a special project of The Retired Enlisted Association, our mission is to promote and assist our members and supporters, educate and alert senior citizens about their rights and freedoms as U.S. citizens, and protect and defend the benefits seniors have earned and paid for. TSCL consists of vocally active senior citizens concerned about the protection of their Social Security, Medicare, and veteran or military retiree benefits. To learn more, visit https://seniorsleague.org/about-us/.
About the TSCL COLA Model:
TSCL issues a new prediction of the next COLA for Social Security each month using our statistical model. The model incorporates the Consumer Price Index, the Federal Reserve interest rate, and the national unemployment rate to make its predictions. The model’s predictions update throughout the year, adjusting in response to economic conditions. For additional information about the model, contact Alex Moore, TSCL’s statistician, at amoore@tsclhq.org.
We released a new version of the model, v1.2, in January 2025. The new version updates the model’s use of dates, processing data according to the federal fiscal year instead of the calendar year. The new model also reduces each prediction’s reliance on previous predictions made throughout the federal fiscal year.
Contact Information:
- Shannon Benton, Executive Director: sbenton@tsclhq.org; 703-548-5568
- Alex Moore, Statistician: amoore@tsclhq.org; 571-374-2658
