Social Security recipients will receive a 3.2% increase to their monthly checks.
American retirees just got a small raise. At least that’s one way to look at the 3.2% increase in Social Security payments to about 66 million recipients beginning this January. The cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) applied to monthly checks was made to compensate for inflation.
According to the Social Security Administration the average monthly compensation for a retired worker in 2024 will be a net of about $1,907 a month, an average increase of $59 over last year.
The average Social Security payment increase over the past 20 years has been 2.6% but, due to rising inflation following the pandemic, 2022 and 2023 saw even larger COLA adjustments—5.9% and 8.7% respectively. This year’s more modest increase is reflective of the lowering of the inflation rate in recent months. That said, COLA isn’t tied specifically to inflation, rather it’s based on the change to the consumer price index which tracks prices of household goods and services and is itself used measure inflation.
