Earlier this year, the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) to Social Security was 5.9 percent, the highest number for that metric since the early 1980s. This was a result of inflation that rose throughout 2021. That figure is pegged to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) for the third quarter of the previous year.

We won’t know next year’s COLA number until the fall, but since inflation has continued to rise, COLA is going to rise with it.

According to CBS News, a Social Security Administration official said that next year’s COLA number could be “closer to 8 percent.”

“Looking at the CPI-W trends we’re seeing so far this year, it’s likely we’ll have a COLA closer to 8% than to 3.8%,” Stephen Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, said last week on a webinar.

CBS News also noted that the 2022 Trustees Report, released last week, presumed a 3.8 percent COLA raise. However, Goss said on the webinar that those figures were likely calculated before inflation reached its current levels.

“The assumptions for the Trustees Report, especially the economic assumptions, were set in mid-February of this year, prior to certain things like a war on the other side of the ocean and the spiking inflation that we’ve seen very recently,” he said.

That Trustees Report also found that Social Security will be able to pay out full benefits through 2034, a year later than what was forecast the year before. In the 2021 version of that report, that date had moved forward to 2033.

The Senior Citizens League, which tracks the Social Security COLA figures closely, has predicted that the number could go as high as 8.6 percent. The League has warned that even the COLA increases haven’t been enough to help Social Security recipients to deal with inflation.

“That’s the deepest loss in buying power since the beginning of this study by The Senior Citizens League in 2010,” Mary Johnson, a Social Security policy analyst for The Senior Citizens League, said in a statement released by the group in May, which also said that Social Security benefits had lost 40 percent of their buying power since the year 2000. That figure had gone from 30 percent to 40 percent just between March 2021 and March 2022, thanks to inflation.

“Retirees know all too well that, Social Security benefits don’t buy as much today, as when they first retired,” she added.

There’s also a possibility, CBS News said, that Medicare premium increases could offset the COLA increase for many Social Security recipients.

 Stephen Silver, a technology writer for the National Interest, is a journalist, essayist, and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters.