Under the Social Security Act, whenever the agency pays authorized representative fees or court-awarded fees directly out of a claimant's past due benefits, we must impose an assessment (or "user fee") to cover administrative costs. The user fee applied is the lesser amount of 6.3 percent of the authorized or awarded fee or a dollar limit that is subject to the cost-of-living increase.

We derive the dollar limit for December 2025 by increasing the unrounded limit for December 2024, $120.19, by 2.8 percent. This gives a new unrounded limit of $123.56, which we then round to the next lowest multiple of $1. The dollar limit effective for December 2025 is thus $123.00.