Rare Double-Monthly SSI Payments Worth $1,755 Set to Arrive in 2 Weeks

Blank Social Security checks are run through a printer at the U.S. Treasury printing facility in Philadelphia, Pa., on Feb. 11, 2005. William Thomas Cain/Getty Images

Those who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) are slated set to receive their second of two December payments in about two weeks, totaling $1,755 in SSI benefits for the month.

Recipients will get a payment of $914 on Dec. 30 after they got $841 on Dec. 1, according to the Social Security payment schedule (pdf). Managed by the Social Security Administration, the SSI program provides monthly payments to people who have low income, and who are blind or disabled.

Generally, SSI payments are issued one time per month, but December is one of three months in 2022 where payments are sent out twice in a single month, the schedule shows. The reason why is due to a technicality because some months start on a Sunday

However, it does not mean that an SSI recipient is receiving more payments, the schedule shows. The SSI payment sent out on Dec. 1 is replacing the one that would have been sent on Jan. 1, 2023. No SSI checks are going out in January because the month starts on a Sunday.

Next year, recipients are slated to receive double payments in March, June, September, and December, according to the administration’s 2023 schedule.

Meanwhile, the monthly maximum federal SSI amounts for 2023 are $914, $1,371 for an eligible person with an eligible spouse, and $458 for an “essential person,” according to the Social Security Administration’s website. The amounts went up after the agency announced the cost-of-living-adjustment, or COLA, will increase by 8.7 percent due to decades-high inflation.

“In general, monthly amounts for the next year are determined by increasing the unrounded annual amounts for the current year by the COLA effective for January of the next year,” the website says. “The new unrounded amounts are then each divided by 12 and the resulting amounts are rounded down to the next lower multiple of $1.”

Other than providing taxpayer-funded checks to adults and children with disabilities or blindness who have low income, SSI payments are also made to people aged 65 and older who have no disabilities and meet the low-income threshold.

Although SSI is run by the Social Security Administration, it is funded by general taxes, while taxes that fund separate Social Security are separate, according to the agency. Social Security payments and SSI payments are separate, and some critics have described SSI as a federal “welfare program.”

Increase

The agency announced in mid-October that COLA for Social Security and SSI benefits will increase by levels not seen since the early 1980s. Retirees can expect an average monthly payment increase of about $140 per month due to the COLA, analysts have forecasted.

“The 8.7 percent cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) will begin with benefits payable to more than 65 million Social Security beneficiaries in January 2023,” said the agency, which added that “increased payments to more than 7 million SSI beneficiaries will begin on December 30, 2022,” it said, noting that some people receive both Social Security and SSI payments.

Mary Johnson, an analyst at the Senior Citizens League, told Fox News in October that the COLA increase may bump some retirees into a higher tax bracket. Some may be forced to pay income taxes on their benefits for the first time ever, she also warned.

“These are income-based programs,” Johnson told USA Today. “Most, if not all of them, are easily administered through the states. If we’re forecasting a COLA that’s close to 9 or 10 percent, yes of course that’s going to affect, not only your eligibility for low-income benefits, it’s going to for everyone else, for people who don’t get benefits.”