ByJanet Novack,
Forbes Staff.
The nation’s 75 million Social Security recipients will receive a 2.8% cost of living adjustment (COLA) increase in their benefits in 2026, up slightly from this year’s 2.5% increase, reflecting the upward creep in inflation, the Social Security Administration announced today.
Meanwhile, the maximum amount of a worker’s earnings subject to Social Security tax (also known as the wage base) will increase by a heftier 4.8%, or $8,400 to $184,500, from $176,100 in 2025. That adjustment, which means higher taxes for about 6% of earners, is based on changes in the national average wage index, not the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), which determines beneficiaries’ COLA. The Congressionally set Social Security tax rate itself is unchanged at 12.4% for 2026, with the worker and the employer each paying half and the self-employed paying the full 12.4% themselves. That means the maximum Social Security tax per worker will be rising by $1041.60 to $22,878 with $11,439 of that taken directly out of an employee’s paycheck, up from $10,918.20 this year.
The 2.8% Social Security benefits increase will raise the average monthly check for all retired workers by $56 to $2,071, while retired couples who are both receiving benefits will see an average $88 boost to $3,208 a month. Announcement of the annual COLA, which is based on the increase in the CPI-W from the third quarter of 2024 to the third quarter of 2025, was delayed because the government shutdown delayed the release of September’s CPI numbers until today. The Trump Administration called back some furloughed employees of the Bureau of Labor Statistics to manage the CPI release. (The BLS says it collected all the data before the shutdown.)
