Salary by Metro

Published by Salary by Metro · Updated October 14, 2026

Cost-of-living adjustments and merit raises

A COLA is a price adjustment applied across the board. A merit raise is a judgment about one worker. One percentage on a letter can be either, or both.

A shopper paying at a cashier counter in a Navy Exchange in Virginia
A shopper pays at the Navy Exchange on Naval Base Little Creek, Virginia, August 7, 2002. Photograph by Photographer's Mate 1st Class Martin Maddock, U.S. Navy. Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

A cost-of-living adjustment and a merit raise answer different questions. The first asks whether prices rose, and moves a payment so it still buys about the same basket. The second asks how the worker did, and moves that worker's pay relative to other workers. They can show up as the same kind of number, a percent, which is why they get mixed together.

The public example is Social Security

The Social Security Administration announced a 3.6 percent benefit increase for 2027 on October 14, 2026. The press release is at https://www.ssa.gov/news/en/press/releases/2026-10-14.html. Nearly 72 million Social Security beneficiaries see that cost-of-living adjustment in benefits payable for January 2027. Increased payments to about 7.3 million Supplemental Security Income recipients begin on December 31, 2026. Some people receive both. The same release says that, on average, Social Security retirement benefits will increase by $75 a month. The COLA page, https://www.ssa.gov/cola/, states the purpose in one line: the purchasing power of Social Security and SSI benefits should not be eroded by inflation.

The law ties that adjustment to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, the CPI-W, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes. SSA's COLA page describes the arithmetic. Compare the CPI-W in the third quarter of the last year a COLA was determined with the third quarter of the current year. The percentage increase is the COLA. If the index does not rise, there is no COLA. Everyone covered by that rule gets the same percentage. The adjustment is not a performance review.

A merit raise is a different decision

A merit or performance raise is attached to a person. Two people in the same job can receive different percentages in the same year. The employer is ranking work, not reprinting a price index. Credentials, a scarce skill, and a promotion can sit in the same decision. None of that is in the COLA rule.

A private payroll does not have to publish a separate cost-of-living adjustment. The year's raise pool can be a single budget. The people who build it may have had inflation in mind, and they may also have had performance, promotions, and turnover in mind. The worker then sees one percentage. If the letter calls the whole thing merit, the letter has not shown how much of it only replaced lost purchasing power. Splitting those pieces requires the employer's own breakdown, or a comparison you label yourself: this raise against a published price index, and this raise against a published measure of pay growth. Those are two sentences, not one.

CPI-U and the Employment Cost Index are different yardsticks

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, the CPI-U, is the broad price index. In the CPI news release for September 2026, published October 14, 2026, the all-items CPI-U rose 3.7 percent over the 12 months ending September, before seasonal adjustment. The index level was 336.940 on a 1982-84 base of 100. The release is at https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm. The technical note in that release says the CPI-U population covers more than 90 percent of the U.S. population. The CPI-W, the index Social Security uses, is a subset: households that get more than half their income from clerical or wage occupations and have an earner employed at least 37 weeks in the previous year. BLS says that group is about 30 percent of the population.

The same September release says the CPI-W rose 3.9 percent over those 12 months, to an index level of 330.654. That 3.9 percent is not the Social Security COLA. The COLA is not the change from last September to this September. SSA computes it from the third-quarter CPI-W comparison described on https://www.ssa.gov/cola/, and the result SSA published for 2027 is 3.6 percent. Quoting the September 12-month CPI-W change as if it were the COLA mixes two published numbers that were built differently.

The Employment Cost Index measures the change in the cost of labor, free from the influence of employment shifts among occupations and industries. That sentence is from the ECI technical note for the June 2026 release, at https://www.bls.gov/news.release/eci.tn.htm. The news release itself, published July 31, 2026, is at https://www.bls.gov/news.release/eci.nr0.htm. Wages and salaries for civilian workers rose 3.2 percent over the 12 months ending June 2026, not seasonally adjusted. Wages and salaries for private industry workers rose 3.1 percent over that same year. Total compensation, which includes benefits, rose 3.3 percent for private industry workers and 3.4 percent for civilian workers.

CPI-U is a yardstick for purchasing power: what happened to the prices consumers pay. The ECI's wage-and-salary series is a yardstick for labor-market pay: what happened to the wages employers pay for a fixed mix of jobs. The June 2026 ECI window and the September 2026 CPI window are not the same 12 months. Subtracting 3.1 from 3.7 and calling the result a real raise is not a calculation either agency published. Use each index for the question it answers, and name the release date.

What a wage table is doing here

A change in prices over time is not the same fact as a difference in prices between places. The CPI-U says how a national basket moved from one month to the next. A regional price parity says how expensive one metropolitan area is relative to the United States in a single year. The comparison on this site uses the second of those, the Bureau of Economic Analysis all-items parities for 2024. It will not tell you whether your raise kept up with last year's inflation. The guide to comparing pay across metros is the place for the place-to-place question.

The May 2025 wage tables are levels, not raises. They say what registered nurses, or any other occupation, were paid in a metro. They do not say what the increase was from the year before. OEWS wages are straight-time gross pay. The May 2025 technical notes, at https://www.bls.gov/oes/2025/may/oes_tec.htm, say cost-of-living allowances are included and shift differentials are not. A COLA that has already been folded into base pay can sit inside the published wage. A weekend differential does not. Neither figure is the raise on one person's letter.

  • Quote the SSA COLA as a benefit adjustment, with the October 14, 2026 release and the CPI-W rule. It is not a private-sector merit budget.
  • Quote the CPI-U when the question is consumer prices. The September 2026 12-month change is 3.7 percent, from the October 14, 2026 CPI release.
  • Quote the ECI wage-and-salary change when the question is pay growth in the labor market. The June 2026 civilian figure is 3.2 percent, from the July 31, 2026 release.
  • A higher paycheck changes the wage that goes into the take-home estimate. A Social Security COLA is not that paycheck.

Take-home calculator · Compare two metros after prices · Comparing pay across metros · Cost of labor and cost of living · Registered nurses, national wages

Questions this page answers

What is the 2027 Social Security cost-of-living adjustment?

SSA announced a 3.6 percent benefit increase for 2027 on October 14, 2026. Nearly 72 million Social Security beneficiaries see it in benefits payable for January 2027. The press release is at https://www.ssa.gov/news/en/press/releases/2026-10-14.html. The adjustment follows the CPI-W, as explained at https://www.ssa.gov/cola/.

Is the 12-month CPI-W change the same as the COLA?

No. In the October 14, 2026 CPI release, the CPI-W rose 3.9 percent over the 12 months ending September 2026. The COLA uses the third-quarter CPI-W comparison SSA describes, and SSA published 3.6 percent for 2027. They are different calculations.

How is a merit raise different from a COLA?

A COLA such as Social Security's applies one price-index percentage to covered benefits. A merit raise differs by worker because it is a judgment about performance. A private raise letter can use one percentage for a budget that mixed inflation and performance, and the letter itself may not split them.

Should a raise be compared with the CPI-U or with the Employment Cost Index?

Compare it with the CPI-U if the question is purchasing power. The CPI-U rose 3.7 percent over the 12 months ending September 2026. Compare it with the ECI if the question is labor-market pay growth. Civilian wages and salaries rose 3.2 percent over the 12 months ending June 2026. The windows differ, so the two percentages are not a matched pair.

Does the May 2025 wage table show cost-of-living raises?

No. OEWS publishes wage levels for May 2025, not the change from a prior year. Cost-of-living allowances that are part of straight-time pay are included in the wage. The percentile is still a place in the distribution, not your raise.