When you first hear about VA disability compensation, it may seem straightforward. If you were injured or disabled during your military service, you’re owed compensation — it’s that simple. But once you start learning more about VA disability ratings, things can get confusing in a hurry.
The VA disability rating guide provides the VA with specific measures to determine how much money you should get. Read on to learn more about what factors they consider when determining your disability rating.
How the VA Rates Disabilities
- Qualifying for VA Disability
- VA Disability Rating Schedule
- VA Compensation Amounts
- Range of Motion
- Degrees of Posture Challenges
- Incapacitated Much? That Counts Too
- How Often Veterans are Fighting Mental Illness
- Chronic, Progressive Conditions
- Different Amputations
- Dominant vs. Non-Dominant Hands
- Bilateral Disabilities
- Presumptive Conditions
- Amount of Affected Area
- Combining Disability Ratings
- What to Do If Your Claim Is Denied
- Learn More About the VA Disability Rating Guide
Qualifying for VA Disability
Before the VA rates your disability, you have to do three things to qualify. They are essential to all VA disability claims and they all work together:
- Your doctor or a VA doctor must diagnose your condition
- Show a service connection from your activities in the military that could cause your current condition
- Establish a medical nexus between the two
To qualify for compensation for a disability, you must first have an official diagnosis. A certified, VA-approved doctor must diagnose you with the condition for which you’re seeking compensation. You can start with your family doctor, but there are a few extra hoops you’ll have to go through if you do.
Once you have your diagnosis, you’ll need to be able to point to a specific event or circumstance in your service record that caused your disability. This could include conditions you served under, an accident, an injury, or a medical incident that occurred while you were in the military.
Finally, you must prove that the circumstance or incident during your service caused your disability. For example, you have to prove that your bad knee is “as likely as not” caused by your time in the Army 20 years ago even though you haven’t had any problems with it since. Carrying 100lbs of gear could have really torn it up, but you’ll have to show some medical proof that the damage started in the service.
VA Disability Rating Schedule
Once you’ve been approved for disability compensation, the VA will give you a rating that represents how much your disability impacts your life. This will be a percentage ranging from 10 percent to 100 percent. It will determine, among other factors, how much you will receive from the VA each month.
When determining ratings, the VA looks at several different factors, which we’ll discuss below. They may evaluate your range of motion, whether your disability is bilateral, or how often your disability incapacitates you. You may also get a combined rating if you have two or more disabilities.
Use our VA disability calculator to estimate your
combined VA rating and monthly payment
VA Compensation Amounts
Your disability rating will be the most significant factor in determining how much monthly compensation you receive. For instance, if you have a 10 percent rating, you’ll receive $171.23 per month tax-free. If you have a rating of 20 percent, you’ll receive $524.31 per month.
Above disability ratings of 30 percent, the VA begins to consider whether you have a spouse, parents, or children who are dependent on you. If you have a 40 percent disability rating and no dependents, you’ll receive $755.28 per month.
VA Math can be confusing. Our VA disability lawyers deal with it every day, so here is one of ours explaining how the VA awards ratings for multiple disabilities.
Range of Motion
One of the significant factors the VA considers when giving you a disability rating is your range of motion. This applies most often to injuries in your shoulders, back, neck, arms, hips, and legs. Range of motion may be a factor in determining disability ratings for back strain, spinal fusion, vertebrae fractures, dislocations, and more.
When evaluating back and neck conditions, the VA may look at how far you can turn your head, how far you can tilt your head from side to side, and how far up and down you can look. For back injuries, they may want to see how far you can bend over, how far you can bend side to side, and how far you can twist at the waist.
When calculating the rating for a hip injury, the VA will check how far you can cross your legs, how far you can swing your leg out to the side, and how far you can lift your leg to the front and back. Shoulder injury ratings are similar. They’ll want to see how far to the front and side you can raise your arm. Your doctor will want to see how far you can bend and straighten your knee for a knee injury rating.
Degrees of Posture Challenges
Part of the range of motion considerations will be whether your joint is stuck in a usable or unusable position. For instance, if your back is stuck in an upright position and you can’t bend over, the VA will give you some compensation, but not the maximum amount for your injury.
If you’re stuck in a hunched over position, the VA will award you a much higher disability rating. If you are stuck in a position that makes it hard to keep a job or do normal tasks around your house the VA may give you TDIU. You may also qualify for SMC or Aid and Attendance money if you can’t do normal functions around your house.
The more significant your range of motion limitation is, the higher your disability rating will be. This can either be based on your ability to move or your ability to move without pain. Both affect what they call your ROM (range of motion).
Incapacitated Much? That Counts Too
Another major factor the VA looks at when awarding disability ratings is how often your disability incapacitates you. The way the VA defines incapacitating episodes varies by disorder, but in general, anytime you’re confined to your bed or must seek immediate medical treatment will qualify. The idea is that the episode is so severe that you cannot work while it’s happening.
Incapacitating episodes can be a factor in nearly any disabling condition. You might see this most commonly in seizure disorders, back pain disorders, digestive system conditions, arthritis, or respiratory conditions. But these criteria can also apply to conditions like diabetes, immune disorders, and even skin conditions.
Every disability is rated in different ways, but some of them commonly travel together. Here one of our VA disability lawyers talks about common veteran disabilities that add up to 100% TDIU.
How Often Veterans are Fighting Mental Illness
Incapacitating episodes can also apply to mental illnesses, as well as physical illness. Depression, anxiety, and PTSD are all common among veterans, and they can be debilitating. Even with no physical symptoms, these illnesses can make it impossible to get out of bed or maintain a normal work situation.
In the case of mental illness, the VA may not look so much at how often you have incapacitating episodes as how severely your mental illness impacts your life. They may look at whether you’re able to maintain a normal work situation and what your social relationships are like. They may also consider how often you have panic attacks, whether you have memory loss or difficulty sleeping, or whether you have delusions or hallucinations.
Chronic, Progressive Conditions
In some cases, your disability rating may be based not on how incapacitated you are now, but on how incapacitating the disease is. There are certain diseases for which we don’t currently have a cure. If these diseases get worse over time, you may get a permanent disability rating based on your presumed eventual state.
Conditions that fall into this category could include Parkinson’s Disease, ALS, and other neurodegenerative diseases. In many of these cases, you may receive a 100 percent disability rating right off the bat. This will save you from having to apply for more compensation over and over as your disease progresses.
One of our veteran’s disability lawyers explains the difference between 100% and Permanent disability ratings.
Different Amputations
If you lost a limb as a result of your military service, you would likely be able to get disability compensation for it. However, your disability rating will be based in part on what limb you lost and how much of it you lost. This also applies to lost toes and fingers.
If you lost part of an arm or leg, the VA would consider how much of the limb you lost when determining your disability rating. You’ll get a higher rating if you lost three or four fingers or toes, or if you lost your thumb than if you lost just one finger. And if you lost your dominant hand, you’ll receive a higher rating than if you lost your non-dominant hand.
Dominant vs. Non-Dominant Hands
Amputations aren’t the only disability circumstance where dominant versus non-dominant hand plays a role. In nearly any disability affecting your hand or arm, you’ll receive a higher rating if the condition impacts your dominant hand. The VA recognizes that it is much harder to compensate for these types of limitations and will compensate you accordingly.
In general, dominant versus non-dominant ratings vary by ten percent – you’ll receive a 30 percent rating for your dominant arm versus a 20 percent rating for your non-dominant arm. This policy may apply to dislocations, painful motion, frozen joints, cancer, and more.
Bilateral Disabilities
In some cases, disabilities may be bilateral — meaning impacting one or both sides of your body – without impacting a dominant limb. These conditions can apply to your ears, eyes, legs, hips, or feet. In general, they will be rated based on one or both sides of your body are impacted, not based on which side is impacted.
Bilateral disability ratings may include things like hearing loss, loss of eyesight, or even loss of eyes. It may be a factor in musculoskeletal conditions affecting your hips, knees, or ankles, as well as your feet. You can also apply this factor if you have two different conditions impacting the same joint on both sides – for instance, one amputated foot and one foot with a limited range of motion.
Here is a video about how the VA uses the bilateral factor to calculate your rating.
You can also use our VA disability calculator to add up your ratings because it will add the bilateral factor in automatically when necessary.
Use our VA disability calculator to estimate your
combined VA rating and monthly payment
Presumptive Conditions
There are some conditions that the VA considers to be presumptive conditions. This means that you do not have to prove a specific service connection for your disability. If you served in specific areas during specific times, the VA would presume certain disabilities to be connected to your service.
Most often, soldiers who served in areas where Agent Orange was being used can qualify for presumptive conditions. Agent Orange presumptive conditions can include everything from cancer and diabetes to Parkinson’s Disease, heart disease, and peripheral neuropathy.
Here is an explanation of presumptive conditions from one of our VA disability lawyers.
Amount of Affected Area
In certain circumstances, the VA may take into consideration the amount of your body that’s affected by a condition. If only a small part of your body, say your fingertips, are affected, it may only warrant a 10 percent rating. But if half of your body is impacted, you’ll be eligible for a much higher rating.
One of the most common conditions that fall under this category is peripheral neuropathy or other nerve disorders. The VA may also consider this factor when rating skin disorders or scars. The location of your condition or scar might also factor into your final rating, depending on how visible it is.
Combining Disability Ratings
In many cases, veterans may have multiple disabilities that they’re entitled to compensation for. But combining these ratings together does not give you your overall disability rating. In VA math, 40 percent plus 60 percent does not equal a 100 percent disability rating.
Instead, you’ll use the VA’s chart (or our VA disability calculator) for combining disability ratings to find your overall disability rating. For instance, let’s say you have a 40 percent disability rating for a limited range of motion in your arm and a 20 percent rating for anxiety. You’ll receive an overall disability rating of 52 percent, which rounds to a 50 percent rating.
What to Do If Your Claim Is Denied
If your VA claim is denied, don’t give up. There are lots of options for appealing your claim, including appealing it all the way up to the BVA in Washington, D.C., if need be. Keep asking questions, don’t take no for an answer, and keep backup records of everything.
It may also be a good idea to hire a lawyer who specializes in defending veterans if your claim is denied. Not only will they be able to help you put together a winning case, but they can also help you navigate deadlines, application requirements, and loopholes. They can help you make sure your claim is approved and get you the highest possible disability rating.
Here is a review from someone that used Woods and Woods’ help on their veteran’s disability appeal.
Learn More About the VA Disability Rating Guide
There are a lot of factors that go into determining a VA disability rating. Understanding a little more about how the VA disability rating guide works can help give you some idea of how much compensation to expect. From a range of motion and bilateral disabilities to presumptive conditions and frequent, incapacitating episodes, make sure you’re getting all the compensation you’re owed for your disability.
If you’d like help filing or appealing your VA disability compensation claim, give us a call at Woods and Woods. We fight for veterans every day, and you don’t pay unless we win. Contact us today to start getting the compensation you’re entitled to.
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