Social Security COLA 2024: When will I receive the first payment with the new increased amount?
The cost-of-living adjustment increase for monthly benefit payments usually takes effect the following year, but a quirk for 2023 means it comes sooner.
Social Security beneficiaries will have their benefits increased by 3.2% next year. This is identical to the prediction from the Senior Citizen League, an non-partisan advocacy group for seniors.
While the COLA increase has been announced, Social Security recipients won’t know the exact amount that their payments will increase until December when the agency mails notices to beneficiaries.
The boost to payments themselves will be sent with the first payments for the following year, those that correspond to January 2024.
However, recipients of Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a group that receives their payments on the first of each month, will receive the first increased monthly payments on Friday 29 December. This is because 1 January 2024 is a holiday as well as falling on a Monday, thus the payments are moved forward to the first applicable date that bank transactions can be processed.
How the COLA was calculated
While inflation has cooled significantly in the United States, the increased cost of living is still affecting families, not least those receiving Social Security. But while the slowing of price rises is a good thing in general, it also means the reality that beneficiaries won’t see an increase anywhere near the 2023 COLA.
This is due to the way in which the automatic annual COLA is calculated. The SSA uses inflation data from the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) provided by the US Department of Labor. Not just any data though, but that from the third quarter of the year (July, August and September) prior to the COLA increase.
Last year, the SSA announced a historic COLA increase of 8.7 percent, that was due in large part to inflation peaking in June 2022 at a four-decade high.