Social Security recipients will see their biggest benefit increase in decades in 2022. The cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) is 5.9 percent largely due to current inflation brought on by the pandemic. A report by AS.com says this supersized serving of COLA is historic.

The last time recipients saw such a big boost in Social Security benefits was back in 1982 with a 7.4 percent increase. In recent years, the COLA has been relatively low. It was just 1.3 percent in 2021.

Bigger Benefits

The COLA is set to kick-in in January. The Social Security Administration will start rolling out the bigger benefit checks based on its payment schedule. That means about 64 million recipients will see higher payments after the first of the year. But, about eight million lucky people may see their first check with the COLA applied on December 30, 2021.

COLA Calculator

While the 5.9 percent COLA is certainly significant, many seniors will still be struggling. That’s because we are still seeing extraordinarily high inflation, especially in food and gas prices. Couple that with skyrocketing healthcare costs — including higher Medicare premiums — and it’s easy to see why many retirees are coming up short each month.

The Seniors Trust believes the solution is using a different COLA calculator. It wants to see the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly (CPI-E) used, instead of Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). The CPI-E more accurately takes into account the unique spending habits of seniors, especially when it comes to higher costs for healthcare, medicine, and housing.

Changing the COLA calculator is just one of the main tenets of the Social Security Expansion Act. This landmark piece of legislation would also provide retirees with an immediate Social Security benefits boost and shore up the long-term solvency of the program so that it remains intact for all retirees — today and tomorrow.

If you support this mission, please add your name to our petition to Congress.