Bars over time
Social Security Cost-of-Living Adjustments
Annual increase in Social Security benefits, %, by year the adjustment takes effect
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
Social Security Administration, Office of the Chief Actuary. Since 1983 the adjustment equals the rise in the CPI-W from the third quarter of the year before to the third quarter of the current year, and takes effect with December benefits, paid in January. There was no adjustment in years when that index fell.
Every automatic cost-of-living raise in Social Security since the adjustments began in 1975. The double-digit raises of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the zero years after the 2008 crisis, and the 2022 jump all follow inflation.
What this chart reads
- Social Security Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA)as “COLA”latest 2026-12-01
Sources
Social Security Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA). Source: Social Security Administration, Office of the Chief Actuary, "Cost-of-Living Adjustments": https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/colaseries.html. U.S. government work, public domain (ssa.gov website policies). Palanor reads it monthly with; when ssa.gov refuses automated requests it reads the newest Internet Archive copy of the same page.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.