2026 Social Security COLA forecasts up in the air as inflation exceeds expectations: What seniors need to know

In October the Social Security Administration (SSA) announced that Social Security beneficiaries, as well as those who receive Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), would see their benefits increase by 2.5 percent in 2025, thanks to the annual Cost-of-living Adjustment, or COLA as it is often called.

The 2025 COLA, calculated using the Consumer Price Index for Urban wage earners and clerical workers (CPI-W), came out to 2.5 percent—lower than the 3.2 percent increase offered in 2024 and the 8.7 percent boost in benefits applied in 2023.

The lower COLA is reflective of an economic environment where inflation is slowing, and prices are rising less quickly than they were in 2022 and 2023. However, the most recent CPI report for January, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a warning that inflation could be taking hold of the economy once again. In January, prices, according to the CPI-W rose by 0.68 percent.

What the January CPI numbers tell us about 2026 COLA

The 2026 calculation will be made by comparing the average of the CPI-W for July, August, and September of this year to that from the same period in 2024.

In 2024, the average was 308.729, and in January the CPI-W was determined to be 311.172, an increase of 0.79 percent. It is very early to be able to predict with real accuracy how high the 2026 COLA could reach, especially considering the large cloud of economic uncertainty plaguing the US economy at the moment.

The February CPI report will be released on Wednesday, March 12, 2025, and will show whether inflation is continuing to pick up, as it did in January, or retreat. The Senior Citizen League, a senior rights organization, that publishes a COLA forecast, estimates that the 2026 increase will be around 2.3 percent, less than what was offered this year. However, the estimate related on February 12, is an update to the previous projection of 2.1 percent that had been released in mid-January, based on the December consumer price reports. The League will continue to update its forecast as economic data becomes available, but long story short: high inflation means a higher COLA.

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