When will the 2025 Social Security COLA be announced?

In October, the Social Security Adminstration will announce the 2025 Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) that will be tacked onto benefits starting in January. COLAs are offered to retirees, welfare beneficiaries, and workers. The increase is based on price fluctuations, namely inflation, over a given period and aims to reduce the erasure of purchasing power for wages and benefits.

The SSA is required to calculate and apply a COLA to all benefit programs it manages each year, including Social Security and Supplemental Security Income. This year, a bonus of 3.2 percent was applied to benefits, whereas the year prior, an 8.7 percent increase was added as corporate greed, supply chain failures, and a surge in global energy prices sent prices for many basic goods soaring. This year, the COLA is likely to be smaller as price growth has slowed. The Senior Citizens League, a senior rights organization, updated their forecast in mid-August, estimating that the COLA will likely fall somewhere around 2.57 percent next year.

How is the COLA calculated?

The SSA calculates the COLA by looking at the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) data from quarter three of the current year (July, August, and September) and comparing it to the average from the same quarter of the previous year. Based on the current figures from July, the COLA would come out to 2.4 percent, meaning that the Senior Citizen League is projecting the CPI-W to increase over the next two months.

Though prices fell in June, those gains were erased in July, when the CPI-W rose above the level recorded in May and is only 0.077 percent lower than the highest data point captured this year in April.

When will the COLA be announced?

Once the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases the September Consumer Price Index report, the SSA will be able to publish the 2025 COLA. This year, the announcement will be made on Thursday, October 10.

On Wednesday, September 11, the BLS will release the August figures, allowing forecasters to recalibrate their projections to align with the most current data.