The 2.8% raise Social Security beneficiaries are getting in 2026 sits almost exactly in the middle of what the program has delivered over the past ten years — not the smallest, not close to the largest. * Here's the full run: 0% in 2016 (no increase at all, because inflation was essentially flat that year), 0.3% in 2017, 2.0% in 2018, then a stretch of years mostly in the 1.3% to 2.8% range through 2021. Inflation broke that pattern hard in the following two years: 5.9% in 2022 and then 8.7% in 2023 — the largest COLA since 1981, driven by the post-pandemic inflation spike. It cooled to 3.2% in 2024, then 2.5% in 2025, and now 2.8% for 2026. * The mechanism behind every one of these numbers is the same: SSA compares average prices in the third quarter of the current year to the third quarter of the previous year, using the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). Whatever that percentage change is becomes next year's COLA — there's no cap, and in years when prices don't rise, like 2016, there's no increase at all. * Zoom out further and the pattern holds: analysts tracking COLA trends put the average annual increase over the last decade at close to 3%, meaning 2026's 2.8% is a fairly typical year by recent standards, even though it never quite offsets how beneficiaries feel actual grocery and housing cost increases.