It's official: The 2019 COLA for military retired pay, Survivor Benefit Plan annuities, Social Security checks, and VA disability and survivor benefits will be 2.8 percent. It will first appear in the January 2019 checks.

MOAA accurately forecasted this final outcome over a month ago based on annual trends and factors such as energy commodities, shelter (housing), and transportation services.

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The 2.8 percent 2018 COLA will be the second-largest COLA of the past decade, trailing only the 3.6 percent COLA year of 2011.

View this year's trends for yourself on MOAA's COLA Watch webpage. Click here for the annual figures since 1975.

Groceries are one of the more than 80,000 items factored into the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) monthly calculation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). BLS describes CPI as a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers from around the country for a market basket of consumer goods and services. This basket of goods includes the ordinary items or services you'd expect to use on a daily basis: food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, or education and communication, among others.

Some of the biggest factors that influence your COLA include the prices of:

• Food
• Clothing
• Housing
• Fuels and transportation fares, and
• Charges for medical services and drugs.

With the price of fuel on the rise, for example, we've seen a comparable rise in CPI.

The weighting of each category is calculated in accordance with a two-year-long survey that looked at family purchasing data through approximately 24,000 weekly diaries and 48,000 quarterly interviews.

Measured price changes on those items over time determine the annual COLA. The calculation is made by comparing the average CPI from July through September of the current year to the average for the same months of the year prior.

Any percentage increase in the year-over-year averages is rounded to the nearest tenth of 1 percent. For example:

• Average CPI for July through September 2016: 235.057*
• Average CPI for July through September 2017: 239.668
• Percentage change in average third quarter CPIs: 2 percent = 2018 COLA

*(CPI started at a 100.00 baseline in 1973 after Congress amended the Social Security Act of 1935, calling for automatic annual cost-of-living increases to be made to Social Security payments.)

It is important to keep in mind that the CPI might not reflect your personal experience with price changes. This measure is supposed to represent the experience of the average household, not a specific category of individuals or families.