Mark Your Calendars: Here's When Social Security Will Announce the 2026 COLA
As the standoff between lawmakers in Washington, D.C., drags into its third week, cracks in the operations of the government that affect ordinary Americans are starting to appear. But at least Social Security beneficiaries will have the relief of knowing how much they can expect to receive each month in 2026, even if they do have to wait until Oct. 24 for the news.
With lawmakers on both sides dug in, the likelihood that the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, would release its critical inflation report — the consumer price index (CPI) — as scheduled today had grown increasingly slim. On Friday, the BLS announced that September CPI data will be released on Oct. 24.
Economic data might be less visible than, say, reduced services at national parks, but these numbers are foundational for the Social Security payments that roughly 1 in 5 Americans receive.
The Social Security Administration uses the year-over-year difference in inflation rates as measured by the CPI in July, August and September when it calculates its annual cost-of-living-adjustment, or COLA, which is intended to help beneficiaries’ payments keep pace with inflation. The agency typically releases annual COLA data the same day the BLS publishes the September CPI. In a statement emailed to Money, the SSA affirmed that it will do so this year, as well.
The SSA calculates the COLA using a part of the CPI report called the CPI-W that is slightly different from the more commonly cited “headline” figure, or CPI-U.
When the government shut down as of midnight, Oct. 1, it pressed pause on the CPI — and a lot of other — number-crunching. For instance, the BLS’s highly influential monthly employment report was not published as scheduled on Oct. 3. Analysts and policymakers had been hoping that these figures would give them more visibility into how the economy responded to the Fed’s September rate cut, the first since last December.
Economic data could get spotty from here on out
The last time the federal government shut down, in December 2018 and January 2019, the BLS retained the funding and staffing it needed to release economic data on time. But this time, as Money reported earlier, BLS Commissioner William Wiatrowski is the lone staffer currently working.
This isn’t the first time a shutdown has left officials trying to make critical policy decisions without adequate data. In 2013, a 16-day shutdown delayed the release of the monthly employment report right when the Federal Reserve needed to determine if the economy was healthy enough to begin unwinding emergency support measures implemented in the wake of the financial crisis and the Great Recession.
According to Erica Groshen, a senior economics advisor at Cornell University who was the BLS commissioner at the time, then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke called her to ask if it would be possible for the Fed — whose funding isn’t dependent on the annual Congressional appropriations process — to pay for the production of the report. Groshen and her boss, former Department of Labor Secretary Tom Perez, determined that doing so would undercut Congress’s so-called power of the purse.
Today, the timely release of CPI is equally crucial. While it’s important for Social Security beneficiaries to be able to budget for the upcoming year, the Fed also needs BLS data to determine a path forward, Groshen says.
“This is when the data are most consequential,” she tells Money. “The fact that the labor market has been very, very clearly weakening for the past six, eight months means that there are fears of a recession, [and] it's challenging to interpret the data around the beginning of a recession because not all parts of the economy are going into it at the same time.” Without this data, the Fed is flying blind, she adds.
Whether or not the Fed might consider a similar move this time around, especially if the shutdown drags on long enough to prevent BLS workers from collecting data used to calculate this month’s jobs or inflation numbers, is an open question.
According to Groshen, the precedent established in 2013 makes it unlikely that the Fed would consider such a maneuver again. “I suspect they wouldn't even ask, but if they did, I think they'd get the same response,” she says.
The Federal Reserve did not comment, but remarks from Chair Jerome Powell at a National Association for Business Economics conference on Monday suggested that this topic is at the forefront of officials' minds.
"We will get, of course, the September inflation — CPI and PPI — reports, so that's a positive," he said. But he added that if the shutdown drags on long enough to inhibit the collection of October data, the job of determining the right policy path could get trickier.
"We'll start to miss that data, and particularly the October data. If this goes on for a while, they won't be collecting it, and it could become more challenging," he cautioned.
Lead data reporter Adam Hardy contributed to this article.
More from Money:
6 Federal Services That Won't Be Affected by the Government Shutdown
4 Ways a Government Shutdown Could Affect Your Money
When Social Security Recipients Will Get Their Checks in October
