How Does The Va Add Disability Percentages

How the VA rates your disability and sets the amount of veterans disability bounty.

After you take applied for disability benefits and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has adamant that your disability is service-connected, the next stride is for the VA to assign a rating to your disability. The rating reflects the severity of your disability and is intended to reflect how much the impairment impacts your ability to work. Your rating is used to set the amount of your disability compensation, then that y'all are compensated for your loss in earning capacity every bit a consequence of your service to the country.

Generally, less severe disabilities receive lower ratings and more severe disabilities receive higher ratings. The VA has adult a Schedule of Rating Disabilities (VARSD). The ratings in the schedule are based on the average touch on earning chapters that each disability has in civilian occupations. Ratings range from 0% to 100% in 10% increments.

How Does the Schedule of Rating Disabilities Work?

The VA Schedule of Rating Disabilities breaks downward disabilities into different categories based on the part of the trunk impacted. Each category contains groups of medical issues. Each group of issues and then contains a listing of diagnoses, and each diagnosis has its own diagnostic lawmaking. Each diagnostic code specifies symptoms that are required for various ratings of inability.

For example, under the Digestive Arrangement category, there are four groups:

ulcers
postgastrectomy syndromes
weight loss, and
coexisting abdominal conditions.

Under ulcers, there are iii diagnoses, one of which is "Ulcer, duodenal", diagnostic code 7305. Under diagnostic code 7305, iv different ratings are described:

severe, 60%
moderately severe, 40%
moderate, twenty%, and
mild, 10%.

Each level of severity and so lists the symptoms you must suffer to qualify for the associated rating. For example, for a severe rating of 60% for an ulcer, yous must take symptoms including periodic airsickness and merely fractional relief from ulcer therapy.

How Does the VA Assign My Rating?

To charge per unit your inability, the VA volition offset at the body system category, locate your diagnosis, and then find the diagnostic lawmaking which best matches with your symptoms. The VA is required to advisedly review the medical show in your file when assigning a rating.

Even if one inability could satisfy more ane diagnostic lawmaking, you can only get rated (and paid) nether one lawmaking. Where two or more codes employ, the VA must choose the diagnostic lawmaking that will give the highest rating.

Sometimes the VA does not use the rating criteria correctly. Other times, yous may feel your disability is more than severe than the VA says it is, but information technology actually has been correctly rated under the criteria in the Schedule of Rating Disabilities.

What if My Disability Isn't Listed?

If your disability is non listed in the Schedule of Rating Disabilities, the VA volition expect for a disability that is close to the ane you accept and so evaluate your disability based on the diagnostic lawmaking for the related inability.

What Does Each Rating Pay?

A 0% rating doesn't pay any disability compensation only is important because information technology may authorize you for priority health care and other VA benefits.

The monthly payment for ratings of 10% or higher volition vary based on whether the veteran has any dependents, and if so, how many.

If you are a single veteran with no dependents, in 2017 you'll receive a monthly benefit of:

$409 for a 30% rating
$839 for a fifty% rating, or
$1,556 for an lxxx% rating

If you are married with one dependent child, in 2017 your monthly payment rate volition exist:

$493 for a 30% rating
$979 for a fifty% rating, or
$1,781 for an 80% rating

You lot'll receive more coin for each additional child or if you support a parent or disabled spouse. See the current VA compensation rate tables for information almost all of the monthly payment rates. In addition, your monthly checks are normally subject to annual cost-of-living increases.

What if I Have Multiple Disabilities and Ratings?

If y'all have multiple ratings (considering y'all have multiple disaiblities), the VA does not simply add them together to create your final rating. What the VA does is combine your ratings according to a formula. To utilise this formula, the VA uses a Combined Ratings Tabular array. The combined rating is and then rounded upwards or down to the nearest whole number. In no case can you lot receive a rating that is higher than 100%.

For example, say you take one disability rated at xl% and another rated at 60%. Again, you might think this entitles yous to a 100% rating, just it does not. Y'all tin utilize the Combined Ratings Table to come across what your combined rating volition exist. Become across the tabular array to where y'all find the 40, then scroll downwardly until you lot run into the number 60 in the left hand cavalcade. In that location y'all will find the number 76, which will be rounded up to the nearest increase of ten, which is eighty. Your combined disability rating volition be 80%.

What if I Accept Both Service-Connected and Non-Service Connected Disabilities?

The VA is required to evaluate each of your service-connected disabilities independently and assign a rating to each. All the same, if you have both service-connected and not-service connected disabilities and it is very difficult to determine which condition is causing your symptoms, the VA is required to employ the "do good of the uncertainty" rule. The benefit of the doubtfulness rule means that when the VA can't tell which inability is causing your symptoms, they take to presume that your service-connected disability is causing them (not your non-service continued disability). This tin assist you to get a higher rating.

What if My Disability Got Worse While I Was Waiting for the VA to Laurels Benefits?

You can ask the VA to assign you different ratings for different periods of time while your application was pending. This is called "staged ratings." You can inquire the VA to look at the medical show and assign you a higher rating for the period during which your symptoms worsened and met the criteria for a diagnostic code with a higher rating. (If your inability improved, then the VA will besides assign a lower rating for the catamenia when your symptoms were lighter.) Staged ratings can help you lot get a college retroactive benefit payment when it has taken years for your claim to become awarded.

Continue reading to find out nigh advanced ratings, such as special monthly compensation, 100% TDIU ratings, and 100% disability ratings, and special rules for TBIs and musculus injuries.

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