How to Read a Board of Veterans' Appeals Decision

Step 5 of the method is the one nobody does. Read the actual Board decisions, not summaries or forum threads. I read thousands before I filed, and it changed what I put in my claim. Here's how to read one in about ten minutes, using a real decision.

New here? Everything under Decisions is free: one page per condition and one per pairing, each built from what the Board actually did. Nothing to sign up for.

What the Board is

The Board of Veterans' Appeals is the appeals body inside the VA. If a regional office denies your claim or gives a rating you disagree with, you can appeal to the Board. A Veterans Law Judge there reviews the whole file and writes a decision. It has to explain itself, listing the facts found, the law applied and the reasons for the result. That explanation is the hack. It's a written record of what evidence won, what lost, and what the exam did or didn't measure.

The decisions are public. The VA posts them on va.gov as plain text files, one per decision, grouped by year. Every address follows one pattern.

https://www.va.gov/vetapp{yy}/Files{n}/{citation}.txt

Here yy is the two-digit year, n is a folder number the VA assigns, and the citation is the decision number at the top. The one below is at https://www.va.gov/vetapp21/Files4/21020000.txt.

The parts, in ten minutes

Recent decisions on the merits, meaning the judge decided the claim, share one skeleton. Each part starts with its heading in capital letters. Read them in this order.

1. Order. The result, one line per issue: granted, denied or remanded. Thirty seconds, and you know who won.
2. Findings of Fact. Numbered sentences on what the judge decided the evidence proves. One minute, and you know the single fact the case turned on.
3. Conclusions of Law. Whether the legal criteria were met. Write down the diagnostic code and the rules cited, to look up in the VA's rating schedule later. One minute.
4. Reasons and Bases. The long part. Skim the law at the top, two minutes, less once you've seen it a few times. Read the evidence summary slowly, five minutes. It lists every exam, treatment note and statement, and what each said. Then read the analysis at the end, one minute. That's where the judge says which evidence decided it.

The header at the top gives the citation number, decision date and docket number. From 2019 on, the issues on appeal appear in the Order lines, in the Board's own words. Older decisions list them under The Issues right after the header, put the Order at the end, and move a few other pieces around. A remand, where the judge sends the case back for more work, opens with Remanded and Reasons for Remand instead.

A real one: Citation Nr 21020000

Decided April 6, 2021. The veteran served from 1983 to 1986. The VA had linked his lower back (lumbar spine) disability to service and rated it 20 percent, then 40 percent starting March 3, 2020. He asked the Board for a higher rating in both periods, and the Order denied both.

The Findings of Fact are two sentences:

1. From August 18, 2014, to March 2, 2020, the Veterans lumbar spine disability is manifested by, at worst, flexion to 55 degrees.

2. As of March 3, 2020, the Veterans lumbar spine disability is manifested by, at worst, flexion to 10 degrees.

That's the entire case. Two numbers. The Conclusions of Law cite diagnostic code 5242 in the spine rules, degenerative arthritis and degenerative disc disease of the spine. They also cite the rules on functional loss and on choosing between two ratings.

Open the spine rules to the General Rating Formula for Diseases and Injuries of the Spine. Flexion means bending forward, and thoracolumbar means the middle and lower back. Forward flexion of the thoracolumbar spine greater than 30 degrees but not greater than 60 degrees is 20 percent. Flexion of 30 degrees or less is 40 percent. Normal is 90 degrees.

Above 40 percent, the formula requires unfavorable ankylosis of the entire thoracolumbar spine. Ankylosis means the joint is frozen and can't move. Unfavorable means fixed bent forward or backward, with a listed effect such as difficulty walking because of a limited line of vision. A segment fixed in neutral is favorable ankylosis and stays at 40 percent.

So 55 degrees sits in the 20 percent band and 10 degrees in the 40 percent band. No ankylosis, so no 50 percent. The judge said 55 degrees "squarely" placed the veteran in the 20 percent criteria. That's why he lost. The spine rules rate this condition mostly on measured motion, with or without pain.

What the exam missed

This is the part I read for. The evidence section lists four VA exams: November 2014, October 2015, August 2017 and September 2020. Flexion was 65, 55, 70, then 10 degrees. In the first three, the examiner wrote the disability "does not result in functional impact," and repeated testing showed no extra loss of motion. All four recorded that no flare-ups were reported.

The rule on functional loss says the exam must adequately portray functional loss. A part that becomes painful on use "must be regarded as seriously disabled," it says. With arthritis, the rule on painful motion says painful motion is an important factor. The joint should be tested for pain when you move it and when the examiner moves it, with and without weight on it. The decision's law section says the examiner should, where possible, state in degrees of extra lost motion what pain, weakness, fatigue and flare-ups take away. Three exams with no flare-ups reported and no functional impact found locked in 20 percent for more than five years.

The record shows something different after the third exam. Private chiropractic records went back to June 2016 but called the limitation mild before April 2019. VA notes from 2019 record back pain from picking up a granddaughter, four chiropractor visits and a plan for physical therapy. By September 2020 he reported constant pain with shooting pain down both legs. He used a back brace and couldn't complete repeated testing because of pain. No VA exam happened between August 2017 and September 2020, so no VA examiner measured any of that until the fourth exam. The 20 percent rating ran through March 2, 2020 anyway.

One more thing. A note to the spine formula says nerve problems that come with the back condition are rated separately when an exam or test shows them. The 2020 exam recorded him reporting shooting pain down both legs, off and on. An April 2020 chiropractic note called the condition non-radiating at that time. The decision records the leg pain but doesn't take it up as a separate rating. So before your own exam, say clearly if pain shoots down your legs, so the examiner tests for it. And claim that as its own condition.

What to look for in any decision

• Why it was granted or denied. In a merits decision, look in the Findings of Fact and the last few paragraphs of Reasons and Bases. Find the sentence that starts with "The Board finds" or "The Board concludes" there. In a remand, read Reasons for Remand for what the judge said was missing.
• What the exam measured, and what it didn't. Compare the exam with the criteria in the rating schedule. If the criteria turn on flare-ups, incapacitating episodes or weight-bearing and the exam is silent on them, that silence decided the case.
• What evidence carried it. In service connection cases, find the nexus opinion, a medical opinion on the link to service or to a condition the VA already rates. Look for the words "at least as likely as not" in it. The decision says which opinion the judge believed and why.
• How lay evidence was treated. Lay evidence takes no special education, training or experience to give, like a spouse's statement. It counts when the person knows the facts and describes what anyone could observe. When a decision credits or discounts a spouse's statement about ongoing symptoms, it explains why. Read that reasoning, because it tells you how to write yours. The lay evidence article covers what makes a statement count.
• Whether the benefit of the doubt applied. When the evidence for and against is about evenly balanced, the rule on reasonable doubt resolves it in the veteran's favor. A judge who finds the preponderance, or greater weight, of the evidence against the claim is saying it wasn't in balance. So the benefit of the doubt didn't apply. Look at what was missing.

Reading fifty, not one

One decision teaches you one case. Fifty on the same diagnostic code teach you the pattern. Which exam findings win and which exam defects lose. Which secondary conditions, the ones caused or made worse by a rated condition, the Board accepts, and what a good nexus letter says. I built my claim around that pattern.

For your own conditions, open this site's decision pages. They show what the Board granted and denied, condition by condition, with the decisions themselves linked at their source.

A past Board decision binds only the case it decided, and the Board decides each case on its own facts. Another veteran's decision isn't evidence about your condition. Read decisions to learn what evidence the Board weighed, so you know what to gather for your own claim.

This is education from a veteran who did it himself, not legal advice or representation.