Even if you’ve got personal savings, you still count on your Social Security checks to cover a good chunk of your retirement expenses. Naturally, you want those checks to go as far as possible so you can stretch your own dollars further and enjoy the highest standard of living you can.
Once you sign up, the only change your benefits usually see is an annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), which is announced in October and enacted with the December payment (received in January of the following year).
We still don’t have all the data we need to calculate the 2026 COLA, but projections have been climbing for five straight months now, and all signs point to an above-average COLA on the way.