Under the Social Security Act, whenever the agency pays authorized representative 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 lower amount of 6.3 percent of the representative's authorized fee or a dollar limit that is subject to the cost-of-living increase.

We derive the dollar limit for December 2024 by increasing the unrounded limit for December 2023, $117.26, by 2.5 percent. This gives a new unrounded limit of $120.19, which we then round to the next lower multiple of $1. The dollar limit effective for December 2024 is thus $120.00.