This News Could Mean Bigger Social Security Payments in 2024
One of the best things about Social Security is that its payments are designed to keep up with inflation. Annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) ensure that those receiving benefits get a boost to their monthly payments each January in order to preserve the benefit's purchasing power.
The size of the Social Security COLA in January 2023 was massive, adding 8.7% to the size of recipients' checks. Amid fears that falling inflation rates could leave seniors without any Social Security raise at all in 2024, the report that the Bureau of Labor Statistics just released Tuesday pointed toward the likelihood of at least some increase in benefits come next year.
Inflation continued to calm down during the last two months of 2022, but the most recent monthly report on the Consumer Price Index showed a month-over-month uptick. In particular, the Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers variant of the CPI, also known as CPI-W, rose by 0.9% in January compared to December 2022. That brought the 12-month change in the CPI-W to 6.3%.
Source Fool.com
