People receiving Social Security or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits will see a 2.5% bump in their payments in 2025, the Social Security Administration announced today. The annual Social Security cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) will add an average of $50 per month to benefit checks.
About 72.5 million Americans receive benefits from Social Security or SSI. The SSA will send notices to recipients in December explaining their new benefit amount. That information also is available online for anyone who has a “my Social Security” account.
On average, beneficiaries receive $1,927 per month, according to the SSA. After the COLA increase in 2025, payments will average $1,976 per month.
The Social Security COLA averaged 2.6% over the past decade, putting this year’s adjustment in line with what’s been typical. But it’s a smaller bump than recipients saw in recent years of high inflation. Payments increased by 3.2% in 2024. In 2023, at the height of pandemic-fueled inflation, the increase was 8.7%.
The annual COLA is calculated based on the annual inflation rate from the third quarter of 2023 through the third quarter of 2024. The rate that’s used comes from a version of the consumer price index known as the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers. The CPI measures average price changes for everyday goods and services.