The Average Social Security Raise in 2020 Is Biggest in These 10 States

This has been an incredibly busy and much-anticipated month for Social Security beneficiaries.

On Oct. 10, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released inflation data from September, which was the last puzzle piece needed to calculate Social Security's annual cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, for 2020. Think of COLA as the "raise" that beneficiaries receive from one year to the next that's designed to factor in the inflation they've faced over the past year. I say "raise" with quotation marks, because it's not exactly a raise, so much as an attempt to keep pace with inflation. In other words, it's unlikely that Social Security recipients are getting ahead.

As announced by the Social Security Administration (SSA), the program's nearly 64 million beneficiaries will see a 1.6% COLA passed along, beginning in January. For the average retired worker who was bringing home $1,474.77 a month, as of September, this works out to a raise of around $24 a month. It's certainly much better than 2010, 2011, and 2016, when no COLA was passed along, and 2017, when the COLA was a meager 0.3%. However, a 1.6% COLA is still well below the increase retired workers have been historically accustomed to receiving.

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Source Fool.com