Mysterious $154.40 payment with my Social Security check - IRMAA refund or something else?

That's almost certainly an IRMAA refund. The exact same thing happened to me last year after I filed SSA-44 when my business income dropped. I got a random payment around $160 with zero explanation. I called SSA to confirm and wasted 3 hours getting disconnected twice. When I finally spoke to someone, they confirmed it was indeed my IRMAA refund for Medicare premium adjustments. The timing seems to match up with your situation perfectly.

OMG the SSA never explains ANYTHING!! i got extra $$ in july and spent 4 days trying to call them!!! hung up on 6 times!!

The amount is consistent with an IRMAA refund. When you file an SSA-44 for a life-changing event, they recalculate your Medicare Part B premium surcharge retroactively. The extra payment is them returning the overpaid IRMAA amount from previous months. If my calculations are correct, the standard IRMAA tier difference is about $77.20/month in 2025, so two months of refunds would be $154.40 exactly. So that matches your situation perfectly. You should eventually receive a letter explaining the adjustment, but in my experience, the payment often arrives before any notification. The MySocialSecurity portal unfortunately doesn't show detailed explanations for these types of adjustments.

I've spent the past week calling Social Security about an unrelated issue and COULD NOT get through no matter what time I called. Tried right at 8am when they open and got a message saying all representatives were busy. Tried at 4pm, same thing. So frustrating!!! Finally I tried this service called Claimyr (claimyr.com) that someone else on this forum recommended. They somehow got me connected to a real SSA agent in under 20 minutes when I'd been trying for days! You can see how it works in their video: https://youtu.be/Z-BRbJw3puU If you really want to confirm what that payment is for, might be worth trying instead of wasting days getting disconnected.

This is definitely an IRMAA refund based on your successful SSA-44 filing. Here's what happened: 1. When you filed the SSA-44 for your life-changing event, SSA approved a lower IRMAA tier. 2. The adjustment is retroactive to when the life-changing event occurred or was reported. 3. The $154.40 represents exactly two months of tier difference ($77.20 × 2). 4. SSA processes these adjustments quarterly, which is why you're seeing two months bundled together. The reason there's no immediate explanation in your MySocialSecurity account is that IRMAA adjustments are technically handled through Medicare systems, not the main SSA benefit systems, even though SSA collects the IRMAA. You'll eventually receive a letter, but their systems don't talk to each other efficiently. No need to worry about them asking for it back - this is a legitimate adjustment based on your approved SSA-44.

consider yourself lucky! they TOOK an extra $325 from me last month with no explanation. turns out they had me in wrong IRMAA bracket for over a year! still fighting to get my money back

what's irmaa??? is that different from cola?

once i got random deposit from SS for $412 and it turned out they had calculated my benefits wrong for 3 months! but took them 5 months to tell me that lol. SS works in mysterious ways