About COLA Ledger

This site exists to answer one question properly: what does the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment actually do to the money that arrives in your bank account, once the Medicare premium has been taken out of it?

What it is

A reference. Rates, history and arithmetic for United States Social Security, SSI and the Medicare premiums deducted from a Social Security payment — with every figure traced to the government publication that produced it, and the workings shown rather than summarised.

Adjustments recomputed

51from raw CPI-W

Benefit amounts

46full ledger pages

Medicare years

22from Federal Register notices

CPI-W months

630one of them permanently missing

What makes it different from a summary

• The Social Security and Medicare ledgers are joined. Coverage of the adjustment treats the Medicare premium as background; coverage of Medicare treats the benefit as background. The join is the number people actually experience, and it is computed here at every published benefit amount. The study.
• Every historical adjustment is recomputed, not transcribed. All 51 of them, from the raw index, as a condition of the site building at all. Where the recomputation cannot reproduce a published figure, the page says so and explains why.
• The rules that most published accounts get wrong are implemented correctly. The base quarter is the last year an adjustment became effective, not the prior year. The SSI rate derives from an unrounded annual amount, not from last year’s monthly figure. SSA’s table is indexed a year behind the name the public uses. Each of those has its own page.
• Nothing is estimated to fill a gap. Where a source cannot be read, the page says so and shows nothing rather than something plausible.

What it deliberately does not do

It does not tell anyone when to claim, whether to file at 62 or 70, how to structure a spousal claim, or which Medicare plan to buy. Those depend on facts about a particular person that no calculator holds, and they are outside this site’s scope permanently rather than pending. The editorial policy sets the boundary in writing.

It also stores nothing. The calculators run entirely in the browser: no amount typed into them is transmitted, logged or saved anywhere. That matters here more than on most sites, because what people type in is their income.

Who publishes it

COLA Ledger is published by Inventum. Inventum is an Australian-registered company. Content is produced and reviewed by the COLA Ledger Editorial desk and published under the brand rather than a personal byline.

Where the money comes from

Advertising. The site carries display advertising and nothing else — no affiliate links, no lead generation, no sponsored placements, and no paid inclusion of any figure or recommendation. Advertisers have no influence over what is published here, and no advertiser sees anything typed into a calculator, because nothing typed into a calculator leaves the browser.

Contact

Errors, questions and corrections: support@inventum.com.au. A reported figure with a source attached will be checked, and if it is right it will be corrected and logged with the date. Full contact details.

Start here

• The calculatoryour amount
• Methodologygates and sources
• Sourcesevery dataset
• Correctionsthe dated log
• Editorial policyscope and standards
• Every adjustmentsince 1975