The 2026 Social Security, Medicare and SSI Trustees Rep...

Every spring the Trustees of Social Security and Medicare publish several hundred pages of actuarial projections, and every spring the coverage collapses into one number and a shrug. This year I read the actual documents — the 2026 OASDI report, the 2026 Medicare report, the 2026 SSI Annual Report, and the June 2026 GAO letter to the Social Security Administration — and built four infographics from them.

Each one is written twice: once for a person trying to work out what happens to their own cheque, and once for someone who has to vote on it. Every number carries the table and page it came from, so you can check any of it.

All four are free to read in your browser and free to download as print-ready PDFs. Links are at the bottom of each section.

1. Social Security: the date everyone quotes is the wrong one

The headline you have seen is 2034. That is the year the combined trust funds run dry. But the two funds are legally separate, and current law does not let money move between them. The Trustees say so directly:

Full payment of benefits until the combined reserves are depleted in 2034 implicitly assumes that the law will have been changed to permit the transfer of funds between OASI and DI as needed.

Absent that law, the fund that pays retirees and survivors — OASI — empties in the fourth quarter of 2032, one quarter earlier than last year's report projected. At that point it can pay 78 percent of scheduled benefits, sliding to 62 percent by 2100. The Trustees add, plainly: "Legislative action will be needed to prevent OASI reserve depletion."

The other thing that moved this year was the size of the hole. The 75-year actuarial deficit went from 3.82 to 4.42 percent of taxable payroll, and the unfunded obligation from $25.1 trillion to $29.3 trillion. The single largest driver was not politics — it was the Trustees cutting their ultimate fertility assumption from 1.90 to 1.75 children per woman.

And because Social Security benefits are already indexed to consumer prices, the cut at depletion is a real cut. Inflation does not quietly erase it. A benefit that covers $100 of groceries today covers $83 of them after 2034.

The report also prices the delay, which is the number worth putting in front of anyone who says there is time. Acting in 2026 takes the payroll tax from 12.40 to 16.65 percent, or cuts benefits 25.2 percent. Waiting until 2034 takes it to 17.30 percent, or 28.5 percent — concentrated, as the Trustees put it, on "fewer years and fewer generations."

Read the Social Security infographic → · Download the PDF (13 pages)

2. Medicare: one half can go broke, the other can only get expensive

Almost every argument about Medicare comes from confusing its two trust funds.

Hospital Insurance — Part A — is funded by payroll tax and can run out. It is now projected to deplete in the second quarter of 2033, one quarter earlier than last year. The reason is worth sitting with: it is a revenue change, not a spending one. Over 2026–2035 HI income is $51.6 billion lower than last year's projection while expenditures are only $4.3 billion higher, and the Trustees attribute the drop to lower taxation of Social Security benefits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. A tax cut scored elsewhere pulled a quarter off Medicare's clock.

Parts B and D — SMI — cannot deplete at all. The report calls them "adequately financed," which is the most misread phrase in the document. It describes a mechanism, not a reassurance: whatever Parts B and D cost next year, the premium and the government's contribution are simply reset to cover it. There is no fund to drain because the bill is re-sent every year. About 75 percent lands on general revenue and 22 percent on beneficiary premiums.

Which brings us to the number that actually reaches your bank account. The 2026 Social Security cost-of-living adjustment is 2.8 percent. The standard Part B premium went from $185.00 to $202.90 — a 9.7 percent rise, roughly three and a half times the raise, deducted from the same cheque.

Project that forward and inflation does not rescue it. Between 2026 and 2035 general prices rise 17.5 percent while the Part B premium rises 77.7 percent — a 51 percent increase after inflation. Meanwhile the Part A hospital deductible rises only 12.6 percent in real terms and the Part D out-of-pocket cap 7.4 percent. The real growth in Medicare is concentrated almost entirely in the half that can never go insolvent, which inverts how the programme is usually discussed.

Read the Medicare infographic → · Download the PDF (12 pages)

3. SSI: the programme nobody covers

Supplemental Security Income is not Social Security. It is means-tested, paid from general revenue, has no trust fund and no depletion date. It cannot "run out." Whether it is adequate is a completely different question, and that is where it gets interesting.

The federal benefit rate is $994 a month for an individual in 2026. It rises with the same CPI adjustment as Social Security, so it holds its purchasing power — and only that. Deflated to 2026 dollars, the 1975 benefit was $944 a month. Fifty-one years of cost-of-living increases have bought five percent of real gain. Measured against the average wage instead of against prices, the floor has fallen from 22 percent in 1975 to 16 percent today. The report names the mechanism itself: eligibility declines over time "as average wages and income generally grow faster than the CPI, and therefore the SSI Federal benefit rate."

Then there is the asset test. To qualify you must hold under $2,000 in countable resources, $3,000 for a couple. Those figures were written to take effect in 1989 "and thereafter," and were never indexed. In today's money that 1989 limit was worth $5,283. The real value of the rule has fallen 62 percent — a tightening delivered every year without a single vote.

Read the SSI infographic → · Download the PDF (7 pages)

4. The generational ledger, and the question everyone asks

Once you have the rate history in front of you, the obvious question arrives: has this got more expensive, and by how much?

Yes, and here is the arithmetic. The combined payroll tax — both halves, employee and employer — went from 2.0 percent in 1937 to 15.3 percent in 1990, where it has sat ever since. But the rate is only half the story, because real wages grew too. At the national average wage, the annual bill in constant 2026 dollars went from $1,048 in 1951 to $11,329 today.

Over a full 45-year career at the average wage, in 2026 dollars:

Cohort	Career	Lifetime FICA	vs the 1933 cohort
Born ~1933	1955–1999	$260,195	1.00×
Born ~1948	1970–2014	$358,223	1.38×
Born ~1963	1985–2029	$430,611	1.65×
Born ~1982	2004–2048	$513,759	1.97×
Born ~2004	2026–2070	$603,665	2.32×

Someone starting work today will pay, in real terms, 2.32 times what the cohort born in 1933 paid for the same two programmes.

And then the question behind the question: what if you had just invested it? I ran the back-test on real market history — every year's OASDI contribution into the S&P 500 at that year's actual total return. Depending only on the year you retire, the pot lands between 3.1× and 9.0× what was paid in. To replicate the $31,301 scheduled annual benefit at a 4 percent withdrawal rate, you would need about $2,935 a year at the S&P's long-run real return — roughly 37 percent of the retirement slice of the payroll tax.

That gap is real, and it is the honest reason the argument never dies. The infographic also carries the five things that number leaves out, because they are not small: today's taxes pay today's retirees, so diverting them leaves a $29.3 trillion promise unfunded; a third of beneficiaries are disabled workers and survivors an index fund does not cover; a portfolio is not a guaranteed inflation-indexed life annuity; the 3.1×-to-9.0× spread is luck, not skill; and the Nasdaq figure in particular is a price-return series covering one 40-year technology cycle, shown because it was asked for, not because it is a forecast.

Read the generational ledger → · Download the PDF (8 pages)

Two traps I hit, in case you go to the source yourself

Both are the kind that produce a confidently wrong number.

The COLA column in Trustees table V.C1 is offset by one row. Its footnote says increases are "effective with benefits payable for December in each year," so the row labelled 2025 carries what everyone calls the 2026 COLA. Sanity-check it against a figure you already know: the row labelled 2022 shows 8.7 percent, which is the famous 2023 adjustment. The contribution-and-benefit-base column in the same table is not offset. Two conventions, one table. I had 2.7 percent in a draft before catching it.

Do not run pdftotext -layout over these tables. It shifts year labels off their rows. Medicare's table V.B2 came out one row out, which would have put 2025 Medicare spending at 3.83 percent of GDP instead of 3.94. Extract by word position instead, then validate by checking a printed total against the sum of its own components.

Fact-check notes and sources

2026 OASDI Trustees Report — depletion dates, payable percentages and the OASI/DI transfer caveat: Overview §II.A p. 5 and Conclusion p. 27. Actuarial deficit and unfunded obligation: pp. 6–7. Solvency-gap arithmetic: p. 7. Fertility and immigration assumption changes: p. 3 and table II.C1 p. 12. Chart series from the published figure workbooks, sheets II.D1–II.D4 and VI.G1. ssa.gov/OACT/TR/2026/
2026 Medicare Trustees Report — HI depletion quarter and the OBBBA revenue effect: §III.B pp. 61–62. Payable percentages and HI deficit: Overview p. 8 and §III.B p. 33. SMI financing shares: "Medicare Data for Calendar Year 2025" p. 13. Premiums and deductibles: tables III.C2 p. 83, V.E1 p. 206, V.E2 p. 207. Spending as a share of GDP: table V.B2 p. 188. cms.gov/oact/tr/2026
2026 SSI Annual Report — recipients, expenditures and projections: §II.C–D pp. 4–5. Benefit rate and resource limits: §III.C p. 7. The 1989 resource-limit effective date: legislative history p. 80. ssa.gov/OACT/ssir/
GAO-26-108977, Priority Open Recommendations: Social Security Administration, 23 June 2026 — 48 open recommendations, 4 priority, none of the prior priorities implemented since May 2025; the SSI online-application and DI/FECA data-exchange recommendations. US Government work, not subject to copyright. gao.gov
Historical rates and wages — SSA Office of the Chief Actuary, Social Security & Medicare Tax Rates (1937 to present), the national Average Wage Index series (1951–2024), and SSI payment standards 1975 and later. ssa.gov/oact/
Inflation — the CPI series underlying the 2026 Trustees Report (table VI.G1, indexed to 2026 = 100), spliced to CPI-U (FRED series CPIAUCNS) for years before 1970. The two agree within 0.4 percent where they overlap.
Market returns — S&P 500 annual total returns 1928–2025 from the NYU Stern historical returns dataset. Nasdaq 100 annual price returns 1986–2025; the partial 2026 year is excluded. Real returns are geometric and CPI-deflated.

Every projection quoted is the Trustees' intermediate assumption — their central estimate, not a floor or a ceiling. Both reports also publish low-cost and high-cost alternatives, and the Trustees state that actual experience is unlikely to be as extreme as either. Where I converted a published nominal figure into real dollars, the nominal figure is shown beside it.

I Read All 500 Pages of the 2026 Trustees Reports So You Don't Have To — Here Are Four Infographics