About
Why I built this.
I'm Hector K, Air Force Veteran. I served six years, and I filed my own VA claim the hard way before any of this existed.
It started in my twenties
Early in my career I started having odd back problems. I was in my low twenties. Numbness and tingling in my arms and legs, and back pain that did not let up. Nobody that age should be dealing with that.
When I outprocessed I signed up for VA, the same as everyone does. Then I got out and kept hurting.
Years of appointments and no answers
Doctor after doctor. X-rays. MRIs. A spinal tap. Still no answers. If you have been through that, you know what it does to you. You start to wonder whether anyone is going to write down what is actually wrong.
I was sure it was hopeless
When I started getting ready to file for a higher rating and for the conditions my back had caused, I read every horror story I could find. I was convinced it was impossible. Then I looked at how the VA does the math and it seemed rigged. A 50 and a 30 do not make 80. They make 70. That alone made me think the game was fixed.
It is not rigged. It is just a rule nobody explains. The calculator on this site shows you every step of it.
So I studied
I laid out all of my medical records and read them line by line. Every appointment, every finding, every phrase. Then I categorized them. That sounds tedious because it is, and it is also the first step of everything on this site.
Then I found the Board decisions
One day I came across a Board of Veterans' Appeals decision online, and it blew my mind. The Board publishes its decisions. You can read the actual reasoning, case after case: what the veteran claimed, what the evidence showed, what the Board granted, and exactly why it denied the rest.
I read thousands of them. Anything I could find. Then I built my claim around what I had learned.
That is what this site is. We have indexed 1,479,738 Board decisions so a veteran does not have to read thousands to learn what I learned.
What I am trying to do
Like anything in government, the process is complex and bureaucratic. That is not going to change. What can change is how much of it you have to carry yourself. My goal is to break it down and let technology do the reading, so you can spend your time on the part that actually matters, which is your own evidence.
How this site is built
Every number here is computed, never typed. The counts and grant rates come from the Board's own published decisions. The rating criteria come from 38 CFR as published in the eCFR, quoted from the section itself. When a figure appears on a page, a script put it there from the data, and the build fails if anyone writes a number by hand.
Rules change and we can make mistakes. Check anything you rely on against the source we link, and tell me if you find an error.
What this is not
I am not a lawyer, not a Veterans Service Organization, and not the VA. I do not prepare, present, or prosecute claims, and I do not represent you. You file your own claim on VA.gov or with a free VSO, and I never take any part of what the VA awards you. I never ask for your medical records. Nothing here is legal or medical advice, and nothing here is a diagnosis.
It is built and run by Pursuit Labs, LLC, a small company I own. Nobody here earns more when your rating goes up.
It is free when you sign in. Questions, or something wrong on a page? Email hello@thevadisabilityhack.com.