On This Episode
What’s new in 2026 for retirees & pre-retirees? From Social Security and Medicare to tax breaks and retirement contributions, this year brings several updates that could quietly impact your cash flow, taxes, and savings strategy.
Subscribe On Your Favorite App
More Episodes
Check out all the episodes by clicking here.
Disclaimer: PFG Private Wealth Management, LLC is an SEC Registered Investment Advisor. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. The topics and information discussed during this podcast are not intended to provide tax or legal advice. Investments involve risk, and unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial advisor and/or tax professional before implementing any strategy discussed on this podcast. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Insurance products and services are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed insurance agents.
Marc:
What’s new in 2026 for retirees and pre-retirees from Social Security and Medicare to tax breaks and retirement contributions? Let’s talk about some of the updates to the money matters that we cannot ignore on this episode of the podcast. Let’s get into it here on Retirement Planning-Redefined.
Hey everybody, welcome into the podcast with John, Ann, and Nick from PFG Private Wealth hanging out with me to talk about what’s new in 2026. No, they make little tweaks to things every calendar year and little updates. So we want to make sure we stay abreast of all that good stuff. So we’re going to talk with the guys about it this week. Nick, my friend, what’s going on buddy? How are you?
Nick:
Good. Got a cold snap going on here, but doing pretty good.
Marc:
Yeah. Well, that’s good. A cold snap to you guys is everybody else would take that in a heartbeat amongst-
Nick:
For sure.
Marc:
Most of the Northeast at this-
Nick:
It’s also a good reminder that I could never live in the cold again.
Marc:
Again. Yeah, for sure. I’m with you there as well. John, my friend, how are you?
John:
I’m doing all right. Not too much to complain about today.
Marc:
There you go. Well, that’s good.
John:
It is a little chilly for Florida but-
Marc:
That’s right. Yeah.
John:
Surviving here. And I have to mention here with my buddy, Nick, about the Patriots going to the Super Bowl here. So I’ve got a lot of angry texts this past weekend. So I don’t like to rub it in too much to him, but-
Marc:
Okay.
John:
I figured it was about time to let him know. I’ll send him some screenshots during the game.
Marc:
It still cracks me up that you guys are right there in Tampa and not Tampa fan, but it is what it is. Everybody’s got their fans. There’s fans for different reasons, so I get it. I grew up a fan of probably the most disliked team in the country because my dad was, but then we moved and I switched teams when I was a young kid. So I get it. So it’s always a fun little thing.
But with that aside, let’s talk about some of the financial stuff, some stuff we can agree on, whether we like those things or not either. But let’s talk about the COLA adjustments that are coming in for the new year guys. And my mom loves to make this joke. She’s 84. She’s on Social Security. She’s like, “It’s always a diet COLA because they give us a little something, then they take a little something away.” So what’s she talking about? Why don’t you guys break it down for us?
Nick:
Yeah. So made notice that there was a bit of a raise from the cost of living adjustment moving forward. It’s going to be 2.8%. So although it was an increase from previous, the increase is lower than it had been the previous couple of years, but really there’s been pretty substantial… When interest rates were really low through the 2014 through 2020 phase, there weren’t a lot of increases, but they’ve been pretty substantial now over the last four or five years. And our clients are really seeing the difference in how it impacts them from a cashflow standpoint. And obviously expenses have gone up as well, but at least it’s been close to keeping up.
Marc:
Yeah. And so they kind of do that little bit of an adjustment, right? And then where the diet side comes in, I guess that she’s always joking about, John, is it seems like they take away about half of it a lot of times with Medicare changes. So what’s happened there?
John:
Yeah. So unfortunately, although we did get a 2.8% increase on Social Security, the Medicare premiums for Part B did go up. So this coming up year, people are going to see when they get their Social Security payments, they’re going to see Medicare Part B deducted and it’ll be about $202.90, which is up about roughly $18 from the previous year, which if you’re looking at it’s actually the second-largest jump in the program history, which is pretty significant.
Marc:
Yeah. Yeah.
John:
So unfortunately people got their increase, but it was probably offset by the increase in Medicare premiums.
Marc:
Yeah. And everybody’s numbers are different, but I think I was reading that just on average, that if the average person across the country went up about $40, to your point, it took about 20 of it back. Right. So you’re only, not that much of a bump as compared to prior years. But again, they have their setups for that. So that’s some numbers you certainly want to be aware of. It shouldn’t make or break anything unless you’re on Social Security only, which obviously a lot of people are, but that’s not the retirement of your dreams. So you want to make sure you’re at least aware of those numbers.
Let’s talk about the catch-up contribution numbers too. This stuff does change every year, just about anyway, and especially from the workplace plan side, guys. There’s some interesting changes this year to be aware of. So I’ll let you guys jump in there. So talk to me about the catch-up contributions and the new super catch-up as well.
Nick:
Yeah. And the Congress is about another stage of infinite wisdom to try to make this as complicated as possible. So the straightforward part is that if you’re under 50 years old, the contribution to 401k or 403(b) went up $1,000 to 24,500. If you’re over 50, you can do an additional 8,000, which is considered a catch-up contribution. One thing for people to note is that a lot of plans do require a separate withholding declaration for the catch-up contributions. It doesn’t just… If you hit your cap on the regular, a lot of times, and in theory, from a dollar perspective, it would exceed that cap. You do still need to put a withholding percentage for most plans for the catch-up portion. So that’s important. We see people all the time kind of come in and like, “Oh, I thought I was maxing out.” And at the point that they’re over 50 and now it’s been a few years and they don’t realize that they’re not getting the catch-up.
So the super catch-up is for people age 60 through 63, they can do an additional 3,250, because why put round numbers if you can. So the total amount that they can do is 35,750. So one thing that we have found are that plan administrators for 401ks have done, from our experience, at least have done a poor job integrating this into their platform to allow people to make these additional super catch-up contributions.
So if it’s not allowing you to do it, or if you fall in that window, it may make sense to reach out to your HR department and make sure that they will allow you to do that. Again, it’s not necessarily a smooth transition from what we’ve seen for a lot of people. And then also something to watch out for, or at least to understand are that for people that are earning an excess of $150,000, and if they are making the catch-up contribution into the 401k, the plan is going to force them to allocate those dollars specifically to Roth dollars versus pre-tax dollars. So that’s something to understand.
Marc:
That’s an important piece right there as well. And John, basically, if you don’t have this available at work, you basically are out, right? You can’t take advantage of it.
John:
Correct. Yeah. So we manage a few 401k plans and what we had to do to start this year is contact the administrator and say, “Hey, are we going to be able to do this?” And if they said no, then basically the person that was higher or that’s trying to do a catch-up was unfortunately out of being able to do the catch-up. But luckily for the ones that we managed, they were able to adjust. And then on top of the administrator, this kind of is more for small businesses, but you also need to check with your payroll provider because the administrator’s going to do some of the amounts that go into their plans, but also your payroll provider needs to be able to switch over to a Roth contribution for some of these high earners.
And then also on the super catch-up, what Nick was referencing, it also needs to be able to allow for kind of bypassing the normal limits that are on there. So there’s definitely a workaround. So just check with your HR, whoever’s running the payroll on how it works for you when that time comes.
Marc:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So it’s an interesting little pro-tip there that you want to be aware of, especially if you’re making over 150, which again, a lot of people are, so you want to be aware of that. What about the IRA and Roth side of contributions? Any changes there?
John:
Yeah. So like Nick mentioned, these tend to go up every year. Some years they don’t, but more often than not, recently they have been kind of creeping up a little bit. So if you’re under the age of 50, your IRA contribution is 7,500. If you’re over 50, the catch-up went from 1,000 to 1,100, so your total amount is about 8,600 you could put into IRAs. And something that we don’t see it too often, but people just need to understand. That’s 8,600 between the two of them, whether it’s a pre-tax IRA/traditional IRA or a Roth IRA, you can’t do seven and seven to 14. You got to do 8,600 total if you’re above the age of 50. And as you know, people are doing some tax planning for 2025 still. Basically, you have until April 15th to make your 2025 IRA contribution, whether that’s going to be pre-tax, Roth, or potentially after tax contribution.
Marc:
Gotcha. Okay. What else is going on that we should be aware of? Any other updated numbers and things for the new calendar year, Nick?
Nick:
So for those that would like to contribute to the Roth, as a reminder, the rules when it comes to Roth, where it’s really differentiated between that and the pre-tax IRA are, it’s based solely on income limits. So those limits have gone up a little bit. For a single filer, the range is 153 to 168. For a married filing jointly, it’s 242 to 252.
Marc:
Okay.
Nick:
One thing that people oftentimes will use as an example are what’s called a backdoor Roth conversion. These can be a little bit tricky if you have existing IRAs, because it creates a ratio and just dictates on how much you can convert or not, but it’s something that if your income is in excess of the limits and you are looking for additional places to save, it’s worth having a conversation with your advisor on whether or not you can qualify and/or use a backdoor auth as an option to put money into that account.
Marc:
Gotcha. And you want to make sure that if you are a first-time RMD user, right, you want to make sure that you don’t miss that as well. Anyway, just you want to get that in place. You do have that ability, right, to kind of push it back, but then you kind of are stuck with two in the calendar year as well.
John:
Yeah. So we have come across sometimes where when someone in today’s numbers, once you hit 73, you have to take your first RMD out. And the IRS, they do allow for kind of like, “Hey, your first time doing it just in case you forget.” So we don’t want to hit you with the penalty they allow till April 1st the following year. If you don’t take it out by April 1st, there is a 25% penalty, which used to be 50. So it’s nice they actually drop that to 25% because I think 25 is high, but 50 is very high.
Marc:
True.
John:
But yeah, as you mentioned there, Mark, if you do take, like example, if you decide to defer your 2025 RMD or happen to forget it, you still have to take out, if you take it out by April 1st, you still have to take your 2026 RMD total. So you technically might have to take out two RMDs out of your IRAs.
Marc:
Yeah. And then you got to be careful if that bumps your tax bracket, right? So you have to, just want to make sure you’re managing all that, talk with your advisors. If you’re not working with some, again, and you’re checking this podcast out, make sure you reach out to John and Nick at pfgprivatewealth.com. What about HSA? It’s a great tool for those that have it. What’s some changes there?
Nick:
Yeah. So just as a reminder, to be able to contribute to an HSA, you need to have a high deductible plan at work. That is something that I would hope that they would change at some point, but-
Marc:
Right.
Nick:
That’s a different topic. So if it’s self-coverage only, the contribution limits are 4,400. If it’s family coverage, it’s 8,750. There is the $1,000 catch-up contribution, and you have until April 15th of the following year to make contributions for the previous year. A couple things to look out for that are a little bit different than like, for example, a 401k. HSA contributions, those limitations are both employee and employer contribution limits. So it’s a combined sum, which, for example, with a 401k, an employee can put in 235 or 245 with a new limit and the employer can put an additional money. It doesn’t count towards it. With an HSA, employer contributions count towards the limit. And if you are essentially 65 or older, you’re enrolled in Medicare, you are no longer, even if you’re in a high deductible plan, you’re no longer eligible to contribute to an HSA. So a couple things to look out for.
Marc:
Okay. And then final, John, any kind of little items we might have missed or any button up things we want to kind of touch on here before we go this week?
John:
Yeah. So with the HSA, it doesn’t have to be through work. You can get an individual plan. I unfortunately know that because my health insurance premiums went up way too much this past year, almost 44%. So I spent a lot of time at Florida Blue going through different options and it looks like they actually updated some of their plans to allow for HSAs on some of their plans with lower premiums to try to kind of boost it up with the… I don’t know if they did that to offset the rise and increase, but it did look like some new plans came out on their platform-
Marc:
Gotcha. Okay.
John:
With HSAs.
Marc:
All right. Well, that’s some good information to know. Any final thoughts? Any little tidbits we need to touch on before we go?
John:
So something we hit at the end of last year on our, I believe our last podcast of the year was the Big Beautiful Bill and the new deduction for anyone above the age of 65, where basically it’s a $6,000 deduction per person, and that’s through 2028. So it’s kind of recapping the numbers there. Single filer, if your AGI, adjusted gross income is above 75,000, you do not qualify it. So kind of recapping that. Anyone below 75,000 will qualify for that $6,000 deduction and married filing jointly, the number is 150,000.
Marc:
All right. So good stuff to think about. Again, whether it’s Social Security, Medicare, taxes, retirement, savings limits, whatever, there’s always little changes annually. Make sure that you’re running through that stuff. A quick review now can help make sure that 2026 works smoothly with the rest of your plan and works with it, not against it. So if you got some questions, need some help, reach out to John and Nick at pfgprivatewealth.com. That’s pfgprivatewealth.com to have a conversation and a consultation about your retirement journey and your financial numbers. The guys are here to help. Don’t forget, subscribe to us on Apple and Spotify and whatever app you enjoy using. And that’s going to do it this week for Retirement Planning-Redefined with John and Nick. We’ll see you next time.