The VA Disability Hack in Nine Steps

A VA disability claim can feel like a maze. I filed my own. Before I sent it in, I spent three years on the rating schedule, the regulations and thousands of Board of Veterans' Appeals decisions. This page is the nine-step method that came out of it, in order.

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.

Step 1. Gather your documents

This is where many veterans stall. The date VA receives your claim can decide how far back an award reaches. So before you gather anything, send VA an intent to file. If your complete claim reaches VA within a year of it, VA counts the claim as filed on the day the intent to file arrived. It does not have to name a condition. An intent to file does not work for a supplemental claim, where you add evidence and ask VA to decide again. Submit With Evidence shows the three ways to send one.

Then start requesting your records. You need your service treatment records, your personnel file, your VA treatment records and any private doctor's records for the condition.

VA has a duty to help get your records. But it can only request records you tell it about. Say who holds them, roughly when you were treated, and for what. Do that work before you send the complete claim.

Inside the year your intent to file gives you, see your own doctor. Ask for a written opinion on whether each condition is at least as likely as not tied to your service, or to a rated condition. The VA calls this a nexus opinion.

Ask that doctor to fill out VA's Disability Benefits Questionnaire (DBQ) too, if VA publishes one for the condition. An adequate private report can be accepted without a VA exam. Gather Your Documents covers thin service records and the forms VA doesn't publish.

For a joint, ask your doctor to measure with a goniometer, a tool for measuring angles, and to test for pain on motion. In citation 19143628, the Board called a knee exam not adequate for rating purposes. It left out motion lost to pain and didn't test both active and passive motion. The first-claim guide lists what else a joint exam needs, including repeated use and flare-ups.

Step 2. Find your ratings in the rating schedule

The rating schedule doesn't rate back pain. It rates lumbosacral strain, diagnostic code 5237, on how far you can bend forward and your combined range of motion. Muscle spasm or guarding that changes how you walk or the shape of your spine counts too.

Once you know the criteria, you know what the exam has to measure. When your condition falls between two ratings and is closer to the higher one, you get the higher one. The free pages carry the criteria for each condition, read from the eCFR.

Step 3. Research secondary conditions

This is the multiplier. A disability caused by a service-connected condition is service connected too. So is the part of another condition's worsening that a service-connected condition caused, beyond its natural course. That takes medical evidence of how bad it was before, or the earliest records after the worsening began.

One condition often leads to several secondaries, and each can get its own rating. A bad knee changes how you walk and takes the hip and back with it. Nerve problems from a spine condition, called radiculopathy, are rated separately from the spine. The free page for a condition lists what the Board has seen claimed alongside it, and how often each one was granted.

Step 4. Identify presumptive conditions

A presumption means you don't have to prove the link. VA assumes your condition came from service unless it has affirmative evidence that it didn't.

Some chronic diseases, such as arthritis and diabetes, count if they showed up at 10 percent or more within one year of separation. Hansen's disease and tuberculosis have three years, and multiple sclerosis has seven.

Other presumptions cover herbicides in Vietnam and near the Korean Demilitarized Zone, former prisoners of war, radiation and the water at Camp Lejeune. Under the PACT Act, VA also presumes herbicide exposure at set places and dates in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Guam, American Samoa and Johnston Atoll.

Gulf War illness must have appeared during service in Southwest Asia, or at 10 percent or more by December 31, 2026. VA has extended that date many times since 2001, so check the current rule before you rely on it. Burn pit exposure and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis have their own presumptions. Presumptive Conditions has those rules, and VA's PACT Act page lists what VA applies beyond them.

Step 5. Read the actual Board decisions

This is the hack itself. The Board of Veterans' Appeals publishes its decisions as plain text files on va.gov. They show what evidence won and what exam mistakes led to a loss.

Take one I read while writing this, citation 1812000, at https://www.va.gov/vetapp18/Files2/1812000.txt. A Vietnam machine gunner claimed hearing loss. Two VA examiners said no because his hearing tests in service were normal. The Board threw both opinions out and granted the claim on one VA treatment note and his own credible statements. It sent four other claims back for new exams, because the examiners had ignored what he told them. Its order to the next examiner was blunt.

It is not sufficient to base an opinion on a mere lack of documentation of complaints in the service or post-service treatment records.

How to Read a Board Decision walks you through another one.

Step 6. Mental health caused by your conditions is real and ratable

Depression and anxiety caused by a service-connected condition are separate disabilities. The rule on secondary conditions covers them too. In the Board decisions we've indexed, a bad back is named as the cause most often, then a bad knee, then tinnitus and hearing loss. The rating depends on how much the symptoms get in the way of work and relationships. Mental Health Caused by Your Conditions has the codes and quotes the 30, 50 and 70 percent levels.

Step 7. Submit with evidence

A claim is evidence, not a form. The rule on when VA must order an exam looks for three things. Evidence of a current disability, or of symptoms that keep coming back. Evidence of an event, injury or disease in service. And some sign the disability may be tied to that event, or to another service-connected disability. Your complete claim should establish all three the day it goes in: the diagnosis, the event or the primary condition, and a nexus opinion. File your private records and your own statement with it too.

Step 8. Lay evidence matters

Lay evidence is competent when it comes from someone who knows the facts and describes what anyone can observe. VA has to consider it with the medical evidence. In the decision above, the exams went back because the examiners ignored his credible statements.

Ask your spouse, battle buddies and coworkers to write what they saw: what you were like before, what they see now, and when it started. Lay Evidence and Buddy Statements has prompts for them. File their statements with the claim.

Step 9. Be honest

Your credibility is a single thing, so losing it on one claim can cost you the others. Mere suspicion about your statements isn't a reason to withhold the benefit of the doubt, but contradiction by evidence or known facts is. VA treats a knowingly false statement in a claim as fraud.

An honest, thorough claim doesn't guarantee a grant, but it's the kind of record the Board can grant on. Be Honest shows how to describe a bad day and a good day.

Where to go next

Start with Step 1 today, and send VA your intent to file first. Then read the free page for each condition you have. I'm a veteran who did this for myself, not a lawyer or an accredited agent.