For Immediate Release – October 15th, 2025
As COLA Announcement Delayed, Seniors Miss Out on Thousands of Dollars in Social Security Payments Due to Bad Government Policy
Social Security’s 2026 Cost-of-Living Announcement (COLA) has been delayed to Friday, October 24th, due to complications arising from the government shutdown. The announcement had previously been scheduled for today, October 15th.
A new analysis from TSCL shows the average senior who retired in 1999 has lost nearly $5,000 in Social Security payments as a result of the government using the wrong price index to calculate Cost-of-Living Adjustments (COLAs). The COLA is currently calculated with the CPI-W, a price index that tracks inflation for people who work and live in cities. Instead, it should be using the CPI-E, which is designed to reflect seniors’ budgets and tends to come in slightly higher than the CPI-W. On average, the CPI-E comes in about 0.1 percentage points higher than the CPI-W.
The cost of using the wrong price index is rising for seniors over time. As shown in the figure below, TSCL’s analysis predicts that, if current long-term inflation patterns continue, the average person who retired in 2014 will lose about $8,000 of benefits across a 25-year retirement from using COLAs calculated with the CPI-W instead of the CPI-E. For someone who retired in 2024, we project that number to rise to just over $12,000.
Key Insights:
- The CPI-E has outperformed the CPI-W 69 percent of the time across the last 25 COLAs. On average, the CPI-E comes in at 2.7 percent, while the average CPI-W comes in at 2.6 percent. The CPI-E puts more emphasis on areas where seniors tend to spend more of their budget than younger Americans, such as housing and medical care.
- Congress has introduced bills to change the COLA calculation to the CPI-E, but they keep getting bogged down in D.C. gridlock. Examples include the Social Security Expansion Act (2025), the Boosting Benefits and COLAs for Seniors Act (2024), the Social Security 2100 Act (2023), and the Fair COLAs for Seniors Act (2023). None of the bills have passed into law.
- Changing to the CPI-E would bring relief to millions of seniors. TSCL’s 2025 Senior Survey estimates that approximately 21.8 million seniors, or 39 percent of Americans older than 65, depend on Social Security for 100 percent of their income. That study also finds the median senior gets by on less than $2,000 per month, with an estimated 7.3 million surviving on less than $1,000 per month. Meanwhile, the average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment was $1,550 as of the end of September, according to Zillow.
TSCL Executive Director Shannon Benton says…
- “Continuing to calculate COLAs with the CPI-W when the CPI-E is already available is a great example of how Congress refuses to make even small changes that would benefit seniors. It’s not as if switching to the CPI-E would involve setting up some new metric. It already exists, and by definition, it’s better for American seniors.”
- “If Congress continues to pass the buck on switching to the CPI-E, the problem is only going to get worse and worse. Current retirees’ Social Security benefits will fall further behind inflation, while future retirees won’t just fall behind—they’ll start from the back.”
- “Seniors are tired of hearing that ‘no cuts’ is the best the government can offer them on Social Security. Our research shows that 93 percent of older Americans believe Social Security reform should be a high priority or top priority for the Trump Administration and Congress. They’re telling us they want change, and while switching to the CPI-E certainly won’t fix everything, at least it’s a start.”
About TSCL:
The Senior Citizen’s 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 Analysis:
TSCL extracted the average starting benefit for each year from 1999 to 2024 using the Fast Facts & Figures About Social Security report published each September by the Social Security Administration (SSA). Then, TSCL collected the Social Security COLA, calculated using the CPI-W, from the SSA website every year. TSCL calculated what the COLA would be using the CPI-E instead of the CPI-W by downloading the CPI-E historic data file from the SSA website, then taking the average year-over-year change for July, August, and September, which is the same methodology used to calculate COLAs using the CPI-W.
For each year in the dataset, TSCL calculated the total income across a 25-year retirement by applying 25 COLAs to each data point. For years in which COLA data was available, TSCL applied the exact figures for the CPI-W and the CPI-E. For future years, for which COLA data is not yet available, TSCL applied the average COLA for each index since the start of the 21st century.
TSCL then calculated the total earnings from Social Security, using both the CPI-E and the CPI-W for each year by multiplying the expected monthly income by 12. Next, after summing these figures to get estimated earnings across a 25-year retirement, TSCL took the difference between the 2024 and 1999 figures to calculate the estimated lost income from using the CPI-W.
Contact Information:
- Shannon Benton, Executive Director: sbenton@tsclhq.org; 703-548-5568
- Alex Moore, Statistician: amoore@tsclhq.org; 571-374-2658
