Social Security COLA 2027: 3.6% Increase

How much will Social Security go up in 2027?

Every Social Security and SSI benefit rises by 3.6%, starting with the January 2027 payment.

SSA's estimate for the average retired worker: $2,095 to $2,170 a month, $75 more, in the January 2027 payment (SSA 2027 Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Fact Sheet).

SSI's federal payment goes from $994 to $1,029 a month for an individual and from $1,491 to $1,544 for a couple. The maximum benefit for a worker retiring at full retirement age is $4,188 a month in 2027 ($4,152 in 2026).

SSA rounds the increased benefit down to the dime and the monthly payment down to the whole dollar (42 U.S.C. §415(i)(2)(A)(ii) and (g)), so your deposit can be up to a dollar below the table. If Medicare Part B is deducted from your check, the deposit rises by the COLA less the Part B increase; CMS announces the 2027 premium in November (2027 Part B premium). Work out your own new benefit.

All 2027 Social Security changes

Every figure SSA announced with the 2027 COLA, beside 2026 (SSA 2027 Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Fact Sheet):

More on each: 2027 wage base and maximum tax · 2027 earnings test · the 2.8% COLA for 2026.

The 2027 COLA and Medicare. CMS has not announced the 2027 Part B premium. The 2026 Medicare Trustees Report estimates it at $209.50 a month, up $6.60 from $202.90 (2026 Medicare Trustees Report) — an estimate, not the premium. On a $2,000 benefit the 3.6% COLA adds $72.00, so with that estimate the deposit would rise about $65.40. The official premium and its effect are on 2027 Medicare Part B premium the day CMS publishes.

The 2027 COLA timeline

All three milestones reached — SSA announced the 2027 COLA, 3.6%, on October 14, 2026.

• ✓ Aug 12, 2026Done. BLS released the July 2026 CPI at 8:30 a.m. ET: CPI-W 327.104. One of the three determining months was known that day, and this page was rewritten around it. The band narrowed from a full percentage point to 0.6 of a point.
• ✓ Sep 11, 2026Done. BLS released the August 2026 CPI: CPI-W 328.481. Two of the three determining months are now known, and this page was rewritten around it. At this point a careful projection is usually within about 0.1–0.2 points of the final figure.
• ✓ Oct 14, 2026Done. SSA announced the 2027 COLA: 3.6% (SSA 2027 Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Fact Sheet), with the new taxable maximum and earnings test amounts — see the 2027 wage base.
• Nov 2026CMS announces the 2027 Medicare Part B premium and IRMAA thresholds. Only now can anyone tell you what your net Social Security deposit will be. See our projected 2027 IRMAA brackets.
• Jan 2027The COLA appears in benefit payments, starting with the December 2026 SSI payment and the January 2027 Social Security payments.

One caution on that October date. The 2026 announcement was scheduled for October 15, 2025 and actually came on October 24, 2025, because the government shutdown delayed the September 2025 CPI release by nine days. The same shutdown cancelled the October 2025 CPI outright — a month that simply does not exist in the published series. A COLA that rests on exactly three monthly prints has no redundancy if one of them is disrupted.

The statutory formula, quoted

The inputs — all six months official

These are published CPI-W readings, not estimates. Since the BLS release of October 14, 2026 that includes all three months of the 2027 numerator: July, August and September 2026.

A check you can run yourself. Divide the two published columns: 317.2647 ÷ 308.7290 = 1.027648, an increase of 2.7648 percent, which rounds under §415(i)(1)(D) to 2.8 percent — exactly the COLA SSA announced for 2026 on October 24, 2025. The same arithmetic applied to the same series reproduces the official answer to the digit. That is the whole reason to trust the method here. Run it on the 2027 columns: 328.746 ÷ 317.265 = 1.036187, an increase of 3.6187 percent, which rounds to 3.6 percent — exactly the COLA SSA announced for 2027 on October 14, 2026.

Where the July 2026 figure comes from. 327.104 is the July 2026 value of BLS series CWUR0000SA0, published in the BLS Consumer Price Index news release of August 12, 2026. Against July 2025's 316.349 that is a year-over-year rise of 3.400 percent.

Where the August 2026 figure comes from. 328.481 is the August 2026 value of the same series, published in the BLS Consumer Price Index news release of September 11, 2026 and read from the BLS public data API. Against August 2025's 317.306 that is a year-over-year rise of 3.522 percent, up from July's 3.400 percent. Month over month it is a rise of 0.42 percent from July's 327.104, well above the five-year average August step of about +0.18 percent — so August was a firm print by seasonal standards, and that is the reason our central case rose rather than fell.

Where the September 2026 figure comes from. 330.654 is the September 2026 value of the same series, published in the BLS Consumer Price Index news release of October 14, 2026 and read from the BLS public data API. Against September 2025's 318.139 that is a year-over-year rise of 3.934 percent, and month over month a rise of 0.66 percent from August's 328.481. A firmer September than any of our carry-forward rules assumed is what took the quarter from our 3.5 percent central case to the official 3.6 percent — still inside our published 3.3–3.7 percent band.

What the trend looks like so far

Kept as the record: this section shows how we projected the 2027 COLA before SSA announced it (3.6%, October 14, 2026, in SSA 2027 Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Fact Sheet).

Year-over-year CPI-W through the last published month. Green is published; amber is a month the formula needs and nobody has.

The shape matters more than any single number. CPI-W ran near 2.2 percent through February, accelerated hard into a 4.44 percent May, gave a chunk of it back in June at 3.52 percent, eased further to 3.40 percent in July, and firmed back up to 3.52 percent in August — the second of the three months that actually count. A run that volatile is precisely the case where extrapolating the one remaining month still deserves a band rather than a confident point estimate.

What September now has to do. July is fixed at 327.104 and August is fixed at 328.481, so the quarterly mean is (327.104 + 328.481 + Sep) ÷ 3 and only one number is still free. For the quarter to land on our central 3.5 percent, September has to come in at 329.52. The bottom of our band, 3.3 percent, needs September at 327.62. The top, 3.7 percent, needs September at 331.43. Every one of those levels is well within the range CPI-W has moved in a single month before, so nothing here strains plausibility — the disagreement between the six carry-forward rules is what generates the band, not any one rule being far-fetched.

Central projection and band

Kept as the record: this section shows how we projected the 2027 COLA before SSA announced it (3.6%, October 14, 2026, in SSA 2027 Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Fact Sheet).

We ran six carry-forward rules against the same published data rather than picking one and calling it the answer. A month ago each rule had to fill both August and September 2026. Now August is a fact too — every row below uses the official 327.104 for July and 328.481 for August, and only carries September forward. Each row then averages the three and divides by 317.265.

The band, and why it narrowed again. The six rules now span 3.41 to 3.48 percent, dramatically tighter than the 3.29–3.66 spread they showed a month ago, because they no longer disagree about August either. We publish a band of 3.3% to 3.7% — still wider than the spread of the rules themselves, on purpose, for the same reason as before: the rules share one dataset and one blind spot, and none of them knows what actually happens in the one month it is still filling.

The width follows the page's own rule for cushioning unobserved months rather than a fresh judgement call. Last month's cushion was a third of a point on each side (0.5 × 2⁄3 = 0.33), allowed for two unobserved months out of three. One of those two — August — is now observed, so only a third of the original exposure remains: 0.5 × 1⁄3 = 0.17 points a side. We publish that as ±0.2 around the rounded central case, because §415(i)(1)(D) rounds the COLA itself to a tenth of a point and quoting a band to hundredths would still overstate the precision. So the band runs 3.3% to 3.7% — 0.4 points wide against last month's 0.6, two-thirds the width, with two of the three prints now locked in. The test that matters is whether the cushion still covers the disagreement between the rules, and it does with room to spare: the six rules span 3.41% to 3.48%, comfortably inside 3.3%–3.7%. It is a proportional narrowing, not a claim that the answer got easier — the same one-index-point surprise in September still moves the COLA by about 0.105 points.

Corroboration, treated as a data point rather than a verdict. The Senior Citizens League, which publishes a monthly CPI-W-based estimate, put the 2027 COLA at 3.8 percent in its early-August 2026 update. That figure was computed before either the July or August prints landed, at a time when all three determining months were still unknown, and it now sits 0.3 points above our central case and just above the top of our band. TSCL updates after each CPI release, so its number may have moved since; we have not seen a newer TSCL figure and are not asserting one. We are recording the disagreement rather than smoothing it: we computed our figures independently from the BLS series and did not adjust them toward theirs, in either direction.

What a 0.1-point miss is worth

Kept as the record: this section shows how we projected the 2027 COLA before SSA announced it (3.6%, October 14, 2026, in SSA 2027 Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Fact Sheet).

The average monthly benefit for retired workers was $2,084.40 in June 2026, per SSA's Monthly Statistical Snapshot. Every figure below applies the COLA to that average; your own number scales with your own benefit.

So 0.1 percentage point is worth $2.08 a month, or $25.01 over a year, on that average benefit. The full width of our narrowed band — 0.4 of a percentage point — is now $8.34 a month, about $100 a year, down from the $12.51 a month and roughly $150 a year that the previous (0.6-point) band covered. Scale it: a $3,500 benefit moves $3.50 a month per 0.1 point, roughly $168 a year across the current band.

What today's print was worth in dollars. The central case moved from 3.4% to 3.5%, one tenth of a point, so the projected raise on that average benefit rose from about $70.87 a month to $72.95 — roughly $2.08 a month, or $25 over a year. That is the whole cash value of the second of three prints, which is a fair measure of how little any single month can be leaned on.

How little it takes to move it again. Because the quarter is an arithmetical mean of three months, a surprise of one index point in a single month shifts the quarterly average by a third of a point — which is 0.105 percentage points of COLA, or about $2.19 a month for life on the average benefit. That arithmetic has not changed just because July and August are in. Only September is still open, so only one such surprise is still available, and that month coming in a couple of tenths hot or cold is entirely ordinary. That is the mechanical reason the answer can still change again on October 14.

And the COLA is not the whole story of what arrives in January. It is a gross figure. What lands in the account is the COLA less whatever the 2027 Medicare Part B premium turns out to be, which CMS does not announce until November.

How the COLA collides with Medicare: the hold-harmless rule

Most people meet the COLA as a net number — the deposit went up by this much — because the Part B premium is withheld from the benefit. The rule governing that interaction is at 42 U.S.C. §1395r(f), and it works in a way that surprises people.

Who is left outside it. The protection is narrower than its reputation. It reaches only people whose Part B premium is deducted from a Social Security or Railroad Retirement benefit, and §1395r(f) expressly withholds it from several groups: those enrolling for the first time that year, people whose premiums are not withheld from a benefit at all, dual eligibles whose premiums are paid by Medicaid, those enrolled solely for immunosuppressive-drug coverage, and — the one that matters most to the readers of a 2027 planning page — anyone whose premium is adjusted under subsection (i), the IRMAA surcharge. Cross an IRMAA threshold and you lose hold-harmless entirely, in both directions.

What the announced COLA means for it. Hold harmless only bites when the COLA is small relative to the Part B increase. At the announced 3.6 percent (SSA 2027 Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Fact Sheet) the COLA is roughly $75 a month on the average benefit; whether that covers the 2027 Part B increase is known when CMS announces the premium in November. It is the low-COLA years that trigger it, and when it does trigger, the cost does not disappear: Part B is funded to a target, so the increase the protected majority does not pay is loaded onto the minority who are excluded. IRMAA payers are in that minority. That is the asymmetry worth planning around, and it argues for watching the projected 2027 IRMAA thresholds alongside this page rather than instead of it.

The second-order effect to budget for. A larger COLA raises your gross benefit, which raises the taxable portion of Social Security, which raises MAGI — and MAGI is what IRMAA is measured on, two years later. The base amounts that decide how much of your benefit is taxable ($25,000 and $32,000) have never been indexed since 1984, so every COLA pushes a little more of the benefit across them permanently. A 3.6 percent COLA is a raise and a slow tax increase at the same time. See how much you can earn before Social Security is taxed and the tax torpedo for where that lands.

Common questions

When is the 2027 Social Security COLA announced?

It was announced on October 14, 2026: 3.6%, in SSA 2027 Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Fact Sheet.

What is the 2027 Social Security COLA?

3.6%, announced by the Social Security Administration in SSA 2027 Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Fact Sheet on October 14, 2026. Our last projection before the announcement was 3.5 percent.

How is the Social Security COLA calculated?

Under 42 U.S.C. §415(i), the COLA is the percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index for the calendar quarter ending September 30 over the same quarter of the most recent year that produced an increase, rounded to the nearest one-tenth of one percent. §415(i)(1)(G) defines a quarter's index as the arithmetical mean of the three monthly readings. So the 2027 COLA is the July, August and September 2026 CPI-W average measured against the July, August and September 2025 average of 317.265.

Is the 2027 COLA still a projection?

No. SSA announced it on October 14, 2026: 3.6%, in SSA 2027 Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Fact Sheet. The September 2026 CPI-W print completed the three months the formula needs. Our last projection before the announcement was 3.5 percent.

Does a larger COLA raise my Medicare Part B premium?

Indirectly, yes. The hold-harmless rule at 42 U.S.C. §1395r(f) caps the dollar increase in your Part B premium at the dollar amount of your COLA, but only if your premium is deducted from your Social Security benefit. It does not apply to new enrollees, to anyone paying an IRMAA surcharge under subsection (i), to dual eligibles, or to people who pay Medicare directly. The announced 2027 COLA of 3.6 percent produces roughly $75 a month on the average retired-worker benefit; whether hold harmless binds for you in 2027 depends on the Part B increase CMS announces in November.