The 2025 COLA Added $31 to Her Disability Check — Then Her New Job Threatened to Wipe It Out Entirely

Roughly 8.4 million Americans receive Social Security Disability Insurance — and according to SSA’s annual statistical report, the average age of a new SSDI recipient is 53. That’s why, when I heard a 32-year-old woman call into a Boise public radio program in January 2026 to ask why her January check was “a little different” from December’s, I pulled out my notebook.

Her name was Claudette Jennings. She stayed on hold for eleven minutes before she got to ask her question. When the host moved on without fully answering it, she hung up — and I spent the next week tracking her down through the station’s call-in records. She agreed to meet me at a diner near her apartment on a Tuesday morning before her shift started at 6 a.m.

Two Years of Watching the Calendar

Claudette has been receiving SSDI since March 2023, after a herniated disc in her lower back left her unable to stand for more than forty minutes at a stretch. She was working as a hotel housekeeper at the time, earning about $2,100 a month. The injury ended that job within weeks of her diagnosis.

Her approved monthly SSDI benefit came out to $1,218 — a figure calculated from her work history, which started at age nineteen and included several years of part-time and gig work. It wasn’t much. But it was consistent, and after the chaos of losing her income, consistent felt like everything.

Because her birthday falls on the 17th of the month, her payments arrive on the third Wednesday of each month — a schedule tied to SSA’s birthday-based payment system for beneficiaries who became eligible after May 1997. She told me she had that Wednesday circled on every calendar she’d owned since 2023.

What the 2025 COLA Actually Meant at Her Income Level

The Social Security Administration announced a 2.5% Cost-of-Living Adjustment for 2025, effective with January payments. For Claudette, that translated to an additional $30.45 per month — rounded to $31 in her deposit. She noticed immediately when her January 2025 check hit on the 15th.

She told me she spent that extra $31 on groceries the same day. Not as a celebration — just because she needed them and the timing worked out. “It wasn’t life-changing,” she said. “But it was something.”

The national average SSDI benefit in early 2025 sat at approximately $1,580 per month, according to SSA’s benefit projections. Claudette was well below that average, which reflects the reality for workers who are younger at the time of disability — they have fewer years of high-earning work history to draw from.

Claudette knew this. She’d done the math herself, more than once. What she hadn’t fully mapped out was what would happen when she decided to try going back to work.

The Security Guard Job — and the Clock She Didn’t Know Was Running

In September 2024, Claudette was hired as a part-time overnight security guard at a commercial office park outside Boise. The job paid $16.40 an hour, and the shifts were mostly sedentary — monitoring cameras, logging visitors, occasional walks through parking areas. Her back could handle it, most nights.

By February 2025, she’d moved to full-time. Her hours jumped to 40 per week, bringing her gross monthly income to roughly $2,624. Combined with her SSDI payment, she was pulling in close to $3,873 a month — more money than she’d ever had as a single adult.

Claudette had not been told about the Trial Work Period clock when she first accepted the part-time position in September 2024. She found out it existed the hard way — through a letter from SSA that arrived in her mailbox in March 2025, six months after her first shift.

What Lifestyle Inflation Did Before the Letter Arrived

Between September 2024 and March 2025, Claudette had done what a lot of people do when income rises after a period of scarcity: she spent more. Not recklessly, but steadily. She upgraded her phone plan from a $35 prepaid to a $74 monthly contract. She started paying $60 more per month toward her half of the rent after her roommate pushed for a better apartment. She bought a used car — a 2019 Honda Civic — with monthly payments of $287.

By the time the SSA letter arrived, her monthly fixed expenses had increased by approximately $420 from where they were in August 2024. The gap between income and obligation had closed back down to about $310 of breathing room per month — which is to say, almost none.

Claudette showed me the letter at the diner. She’d folded and unfolded it enough times that the crease had worn through the paper in one corner. She said she’d read it at least fifteen times and still wasn’t sure what it was telling her to do.

The No-Insurance Problem Underneath Everything

There was another layer to all of this that Claudette mentioned almost as an aside, the way people mention the thing that’s actually scaring them most. Her security guard job did not offer employer-sponsored health insurance. The company had fewer than fifty employees at her location, placing it outside the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate threshold.

When she was receiving SSDI, she became eligible for Medicare after a 24-month waiting period — a provision that advocates have long criticized as a coverage gap for disabled workers. Her Medicare Part A and B coverage became active in March 2025, right around the time she received the SSA letter about her Trial Work Period.

According to SSA’s Red Book on work incentives, SSDI recipients who complete their Trial Work Period and are found to be engaging in Substantial Gainful Activity can continue Medicare coverage for at least 93 months after their Trial Work Period ends — a provision called Extended Period of Medicare Coverage. Claudette had not been told this either.

Where She Stands Now — and What She Regrets

When I met Claudette in early 2026, she had four Trial Work Period months remaining. She was still receiving her SSDI payment every third Wednesday. She had not increased her hours or her pay since February 2025, partly out of exhaustion and partly out of a new, cautious fear of what changing anything might trigger.

She told me the thing she regrets most isn’t going back to work — it’s that she spent the first six months of her higher income without understanding the rules that governed it. “I should have called SSA the day I accepted that job,” she said. “I kept meaning to. I was just so tired all the time. You think you’ll get to it, and then you don’t.”

That exhaustion is structural, not personal. Claudette works overnights, manages a chronic back condition, and navigates a benefits system that — by many accounts, including from the SSA’s own Office of Inspector General — does not consistently communicate work incentive rules to recipients at the point when they’re most needed.

The COLA bump she’d called the radio station about — that $31 — had already been absorbed into her monthly budget by the time we spoke. It wasn’t a windfall. It was a rounding error in a much larger equation she was still trying to solve.

Claudette Jennings is not a cautionary tale about going back to work after disability. She is something more specific and more common: a person doing everything right with incomplete information, in a system that rewards paperwork fluency she never had a reason to develop. The $31 was real. The relief it represented was real. What sits beside it — the letter, the countdown, the coverage anxiety — is equally real, and far harder to resolve with a single phone call to a radio station.

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