2027 COLA Calculator

The cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, is the annual raise Social Security gives every beneficiary to keep pace with inflation. The Social Security Administration (SSA) announces the official 2027 COLA in mid-October 2026, expected on October 14, as soon as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes the September inflation report. Until that announcement, every 2027 figure is an estimate, and this calculator labels its result that way. Enter your current monthly benefit and the tool shows your 2027 payment, the dollar increase, and what is left after the Medicare Part B premium comes out of your check. The sections below explain where the percentage comes from, how the Part B premium can eat into a raise, and which protections apply.

The Hold-Harmless Provision

A federal rule called the hold-harmless provision protects many beneficiaries from seeing their Social Security check shrink because of a Part B increase. When your premium is deducted from your benefit, the dollar increase in your premium cannot be larger than the dollar increase in your benefit from the COLA. If the COLA is small, your premium rise is capped so that your net payment does not go down.

For example, suppose the COLA is only 1.0% and your benefit is $600. The raise is $6.00, but a standard premium increase of $6.60 would take more than that. Under hold-harmless, the premium increase is limited to $6.00, so your net check stays the same instead of falling by sixty cents. The provision matters most when the COLA is low or the benefit is modest. At a 3.5% COLA, it only comes into play for benefits below about $189 a month, because that is where the raise falls under a $6.60 premium increase.

Hold-harmless does not cover everyone. It does not apply to people who enroll in Part B for the first time in 2027, to people who pay an income-related monthly adjustment amount, known as IRMAA, or to people who are billed for Part B directly instead of having it deducted from their benefit. People whose state pays their premium are handled differently. The calculator applies hold-harmless when the premium you enter is the standard amount or less. If you enter a higher premium because you pay a surcharge, the full increase comes out of your raise. New enrollees should enter their premium and treat the net result as a ceiling.

Using the Estimate and Checking the Official Number

Treat any 2027 result from this page as a planning figure until SSA publishes the official percentage. The result panel tells you whether the COLA in use is an estimate or an official figure, and the Part B premium is labelled separately because CMS publishes it on a different schedule. Official numbers are posted on ssa.gov and medicare.gov. Your personal notice, which SSA sends in the fall or posts in your my Social Security account, gives the exact new benefit and the premium that will be deducted.

To plan, run the calculator two or three times: once with your current benefit, once with your Part B premium set to zero to see the gross raise, and once with the higher premium you pay if a surcharge applies to you. If you are deciding when to claim, the Social Security calculator shows how your starting benefit changes with age, and every later COLA compounds on whatever base you start with.

How the COLA Is Calculated

The COLA is set by a formula in the Social Security Act, not by a vote or a judgment call. SSA uses the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, known as the CPI-W, which the BLS publishes every month. SSA takes the average CPI-W for the third quarter, July, August and September, and compares it with the average for the same three months a year earlier. The percentage increase between those two averages is the COLA, rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent.

Because the formula needs all three months, the answer is not final until the September report arrives in mid-October. July and August data narrow the range, which is why forecasters publish estimates that move a little each month. If the third-quarter average is not higher than the year before, there is no COLA that year, and benefits stay the same. That has happened three times since automatic adjustments began in 1975: 2010, 2011 and 2016.

The new percentage applies to your benefit starting with the December payment, which arrives in January. It applies to retirement, survivor and disability benefits alike, and it applies to the benefit you are entitled to, before any deduction for Medicare premiums. That last detail matters, because it means the raise is calculated on your gross check, while the Part B premium is subtracted afterward.

Worked Example: A $1,900 Benefit

Take a retiree who receives $1,900 a month in 2026. The new benefit is the old benefit multiplied by one plus the COLA. The table shows three illustrative percentages, so you can see how sensitive the result is. These are examples of the arithmetic, not forecasts.

At 3.5%, the math is $1,900 × 1.035 = $1,966.50. Over twelve months that is $23,598 instead of $22,800, a difference of $798. Each full percentage point of COLA is worth $19 a month on a $1,900 benefit, or $228 a year. For a quick estimate of your own raise, multiply your benefit by the COLA percentage divided by 100. A $3,000 benefit gains $105 a month at 3.5%, and a $1,200 benefit gains $42.

Your actual deposit can differ from a hand calculation by a few cents because of rounding. The notice SSA sends in the fall states your exact new amount.

What Recent COLAs Looked Like

The last official figure is the 2026 COLA of 2.8%, which SSA announced on October 24, 2025. On a $1,900 benefit that was a raise of $53.20 a month. Before it, the 2025 COLA was 2.5%, the 2024 COLA was 3.2%, and the 2023 COLA was 8.7%, the largest in four decades. The 2023 figure followed the burst of inflation in 2021 and 2022 and shows how a single year's CPI-W can swing the result.

Two cautions apply when you compare years. First, a larger COLA is not automatically a larger gain in purchasing power. The CPI-W measures the spending of urban wage earners, while retirees spend a bigger share on health care and housing, so many seniors feel prices rise faster than the index. Second, the COLA only replaces ground already lost. It is a catch-up payment for the past year's inflation, not a real raise.

Medicare Part B and Your Net Check

For most beneficiaries, the Medicare Part B premium is deducted straight from the Social Security payment, so the amount that reaches your bank account is smaller than the benefit on paper. The standard Part B premium for 2026 is $202.90 a month, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS announces the 2027 premium in the fall, and until it does, the 2027 premium in this calculator is an estimate based on the Medicare Trustees Report projection.

Here is the same $1,900 example with the premium included. In 2026, the net check is $1,900 minus $202.90, or $1,697.10. If the COLA is 3.5% and the 2027 premium rises to $209.50, the gross benefit becomes $1,966.50 and the net check is $1,757.00. The gross raise is $66.50, but the premium takes $6.60 of it, so the net raise is $59.90 a month. In other words, roughly a tenth of the raise goes to the higher premium in that scenario.

At a smaller COLA the squeeze is tighter. At 2.0%, the same benefit rises by $38.00, the premium rises by $6.60, and the net raise is $31.40. The lower your benefit, the larger the share of any raise that a premium increase can absorb. Use the optional Part B field in the calculator to enter the amount actually deducted from your check. If you pay an income-related surcharge, enter the higher amount, and the tool scales it by the same proportion as the standard premium.

SSI and Other Payments

Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is a separate, needs-based program, and its federal payment rises by the same COLA percentage as Social Security. If you receive both, enter your SSI amount in the optional field and the calculator shows the new SSI payment alongside your benefit. SSI increases typically reach recipients a month earlier than Social Security raises, with the payment made at the end of December.

A few related numbers also change with the COLA, though they follow their own formulas. The Social Security wage base and the earnings limit for people who claim before full retirement age are announced by SSA at the same time, while the income thresholds that trigger taxes on benefits are fixed in law and do not change. Up to 85% of benefits can be taxable at higher incomes, and those thresholds are not indexed to inflation, so a larger COLA can push more of a benefit into taxable territory.