A disability rating is a number, and most veterans treat it as the whole answer. It is not. Sitting alongside it are payments, grants, and programs that are decided separately, and several of them are worth more over a year than a ten point difference in the rating itself.

 

Some of it VA grants on its own. Special monthly compensation for loss or loss of use of a creative organ, under 38 CFR 3.350, is added on top of the schedular rate rather than combined into it, and it is often awarded inside the original decision. So is basic eligibility to Dependents' Educational Assistance under Chapter 35, which pays for a spouse or child to go to school. Both appear as numbered items deep in a rating decision that most people read once. Nobody writes again to remind you.

 

The rest has to be asked for. The annual clothing allowance under 38 CFR 3.810 is paid for a prosthetic or orthopedic device that wears out clothing, or a prescribed skin medication that ruins it, and more than one qualifying item means more than one payment. It is filed at the prosthetics department of a VA medical center rather than a regional office, and the application closes on 1 August each year. The automobile allowance under 38 U.S.C. 3901 turns on the qualifying condition and not on the rating percentage at all. The home loan funding fee is waived for any veteran receiving compensation, with no minimum rating, and can be refunded if a rating's effective date predates the closing.

 

Three protections also build up quietly over time. A rating held five years cannot be reduced on the strength of a single examination, under 38 CFR 3.344. Service connection itself cannot be severed after ten years, under 38 CFR 3.957. And after twenty years a rating cannot be dropped below its established level at all, except for fraud, under 38 CFR 3.951. None of that appears in a re-examination letter.

 

This page lists only what could be verified against VA or the regulation itself. It is not a complete account of what exists. If you know of a program that is missing, the contact page is the place to say so.