Every year since 1975, the month of October has brought with it a highly anticipated announcement: the Cost of Living Adjustment, or COLA figure. The COLA is an annual increase implemented across all benefits paid by the Social Security Administration (SSA). The increase is determined in relation to year over year inflation and it is implemented in order to help the benefit check retain its buying power as costs rise.
For 2025, seniors across the country received a COLA of 2.5%, which could be considered as average from a historical standpoint. Based on the data available to date, the next COLA is projected to come in at a slightly higher figure of 2.7%, as per estimates from The Senior Citizen’s League (TSCL). Even though the next COLA is on track to provide seniors with a marginally larger increase, it appears that the 2026 COLA is also on track to fall short in fulfilling its purpose. Here is what you need to know.
2026 Social Security COLA estimates
The COLA is calculated using data from a subset of the CPI called the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, or CPI-W. The CPI-W for the third quarter of the year is measured against the third quarter CPI-W of the previous year. If there is an increase from the previous year to the current year, this becomes the next COLA, and if there is a decrease, the COLA will be announced at 0%.
Based on the CPI-W for both July and August, TSCL has estimated a COLA of 2.7% for 2026. Since the data for July and August will be used in the official COLA calculation, the estimates from TSCL will likely be close to the actual figure announced by the SSA later this month.
While a COLA of 2.7% reads as average from a historical standpoint, the fact of the matter is that is still may not be enough to address the growing costs faced by seniors, and it all ties back to the index used to calculate the COLA.
The CPI-W measures the costs of a basket of goods and services of a cohort of individuals who are currently working and are presumably much younger. As a result, costs of housing and medical care do not carry as much weight in the final calculation, causing the COLA to fall short. According to recent findings from TSCL, the dollar loss faced by seniors is compounding with each passing year as a result of using the wrong index to calculate the COLA. As such, TSCL advocates for switching over to the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly (CPI-E) instead.
“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,” TSCL wrote in an October 15th release.
TSCL executive director Shannon Benton further noted the following: “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.”
COLA announcement delay
The 2026 COLA was previously scheduled to be announced on October 15th following the release of the September CPI that is required for the calculation. Due to the current ongoing government shutdown that began on October 1st, however, the release of the September CPI has been delayed, which in turn delayed the COLA announcement.
On October 10th, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shared an update stating that it would now release the September CPI on October 24th, and the SSA will announce the next COLA on that same day.