Your 2026 Social Security Raise (COLA)? Here's What It’s Shaping Up to Be

Social Security is a crucial income source that many retirees rely on pretty heavily to help them make ends meet. While these benefits only replace around 40% of pre-retirement income, they are guaranteed to last for life, unlike savings, and they are also protected against the effects of inflation because periodic raises are built into the Social Security benefits system. Those periodic raises are called Cost of Living Adjustments or COLAs. 

COLAs happen most, but not all, years, and they are a lifeline for seniors because they help to ensure that benefits rise as prices do. That’s why many retirees keep careful tabs on what their annual raise is likely to look like. Now, we won’t know that for sure until October because the data that determines the benefit increase won’t be available until then. However, we have some data in place already that can provide good insight into how the raise is shaping up.

Here’s what seniors need to know about what their 2026 COLA is likely to look like. 

Here are the early projections for the 2026 COLA

The Senior Citizens League, a senior advocacy group, has already made a projection for what next year’s Cost of Living Adjustment will do for seniors. Based on their current projections, the COLA is expected to come in at 2.7%. This would mean that someone who is receiving a $2,000 monthly Social Security benefit would be looking at a raise of around $54 per month. Some of that money would go towards covering the cost of rising Medicare premiums, though, so even if that prediction holds true, retirees are not going to necessarily get exactly 2.7% more to spend next year. 

The projection shows that the COLA will be a little bit higher than the raise retirees got in 2025. In 2025, seniors saw their benefits increase by 2.5%.  A higher raise would be a good thing in that it means more money coming into retirees’ bank accounts, but since these raises are directly tied to inflation (or the rising costs of goods and services), it is not necessarily good news that the benefit increase is likely to be bigger. The bigger increase means inflation has surged more this year than last. 

These projections of a 2.7% increase are likely to be pretty accurate because we already have the first data point that will go into determining how much the Social Security Cost of Living Adjustment will be for next year. 

Here’s how the Social Security COLAs are determined

Social Security Cost of Living Adjustments are calculated based on a specific formula that is designed to measure how prices have changed over time. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) collects data on price changes in a basket of goods and services and creates consumer price indexes that track the costs of buying things like gas, groceries, and housing.  A price index called the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, which the BLS creates, is used to determine the annual Social Security benefits increase.

Essentially, Social Security looks at the third quarter data for the CPI-W, and compares it to the year prior. If the cost of goods and services has gone up, retirees get a benefits increase equal to the average change in CPI-W.  While there are some concerns that this price index doesn’t perfectly match their spending patterns and undercounts the inflation they experience, the reality is that this is the way the formula is set up. 

The CPI-W data for July has been published already, so we already have the first of the three inflation numbers that will be included in the COLA calculation. The July numbers showed a 2.5% increase in year-over-year costs. However, experts are still predicting the COLA will ultimately end up a little higher based on the data for the coming months. 

For now, seniors will just have to wait to see how the final numbers end up, but the most likely result is a raise somewhere in that 2.5% to 2.7% range, so retirees should not plan on a big benefits bump in the coming year.