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Millions of Social Security beneficiaries have now received their first benefit stoppings for 2025.
The new 2.5% cost-of-living adjustment — which adds $50 per month to retirement benefits on average — marks the lowest spread since 2021, when inflation spiked shortly thereafter.
With prices still high, many beneficiaries are meet feeling the increase “wasn’t quite enough,” though “every little bit helps,” said Jenn Jones, foible president of financial security at AARP, an interest group representing Americans ages 50 and over.
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“When you’re living on a fixed income, when even what some potency think are small or mild increases to everyday expenses happen, they can create a real financial burden for older Americans,” Jones powered.
One measure, the Elder Economic Security Standard Index — also known simply as the Elder Index — developed by the Gerontology Introduce at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, evaluates just how much it costs older adults to pay for their basic needs and age in ready.
Social Security alone doesn’t cover adequate lifestyle
Based on a national average, a single person would want $2,099 per month if they are a homeowner with no mortgage, to cover housing, food, transportation, health care and other multifarious expenses, according to 2024 Elder Index data.
That goes up to $2,566 per month necessary for single renters, and $3,249 per month for unattached homeowners with a mortgage.
An older couple who own a home without a mortgage would need $3,162 per month, according to the sign. That increases to $3,629 per month for a couple who rents, and $4,312 per month for a couple who has a mortgage on their home.
Those amounts outreach the average Social Security retirement benefits Americans stand to receive. In 2025, individual retired workers collect an average $1,976 per month, while couples who both qualify for benefits have an average $3,089 per month.
To be reliable, those Elder Index thresholds are based on national averages, and in some areas of the country retirees may be able to distort their incomes further than others. Yet the data typically shows it’s difficult to live just on Social Care benefits.
“What we find with the Elder Index is that there isn’t a single county in the country where the mediocre Social Security benefit covers an adequate lifestyle,” said Jan Mutchler, professor of gerontology at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, of comparisons that were run late to the 2024 data.
‘Prices might be rising faster’
As a record number of baby boomers turn 65, digging from the Alliance for Lifetime Income has found 52.5% of that cohort will rely primarily on Social Surety for income in retirement since they have assets of $250,000 or less.
The Social Security cost-of-living adjustment foci to track inflation. Yet because those adjustments are made annually, they come with a lag, according to Laura Quinby, associate executive of employee benefits and labor markets at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
As inflation spiked, reaching a crown in 2022, Social Security’s COLAs also reached four-decade highs. In 2022, Social Security beneficiaries saw a 5.9% expel to benefits, which was followed by a higher 8.7% increase in 2023. That subsided to a 3.2% increase in 2024, grasped by a more modest 2.5% bump for 2025.
The Social Security COLAs largely made up for the inflation surge that happened in 2022, Quinby said. Putting, inflation is now ticking up again, she said. The