A Department of Veterans Affairs rating decision letter can run anywhere from three pages to more than 30, written in dense regulatory language and packed with legal citations.
Most veterans open it, find the percentage, and stop reading. That’s a mistake. Several other sections of the letter determine how much money actually shows up, when it starts, and whether the VA got something wrong that’s worth appealing.
You’re Actually Getting 3 Documents
After a claim is decided, the VA sends two separate pieces of paperwork that are easy to confuse.
The notice letter, sometimes called the award letter, is the shorter summary: It states your combined rating, your monthly payment amount and your effective date up front.
The rating decision itself is the longer document, broken into sections covering the decision, the evidence considered, and the reasons for the decision for each condition individually.
A third document, the code sheet, lists every condition by its diagnostic code and rating. The three should all agree with each other, and comparing them is one of the more reliable ways to catch a VA error.
The Decision Section
This section is numbered and goes condition by condition. For each one, it states whether service connection was granted, denied or deferred; and if granted, the percentage assigned along with that condition’s effective date.
Check this section against what you filed for. If a condition you claimed doesn’t appear here at all, that’s not a denial, it’s an omission, and it needs to be raised with VA directly rather than assumed to have been considered and rejected.
Reasons for Decision — The Section Most Veterans Skip
This is the part that reads like homework, and it’s the most useful section in the entire letter. For each condition, VA explains which evidence it relied on and which rating criteria it applied to land on that number. Read it closely, and you can usually see exactly why you ended up where you did.
Sometimes the letter references evidence you never actually submitted or fails to mention something you know you sent in.
Cited in a 2024 Government Accountability Office review, the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims remanded roughly 80% of appealed decisions over three fiscal years, largely because the reasoning behind the decisions didn’t hold up under review.
Effective Date — Where the Money Is
Under the federal regulation governing this determination, the effective date of an award is the date VA received the claim or the date entitlement arose, whichever is later. In practice, that means the effective date sets the point VA’s payments start retroactively, and it can differ from condition to condition within the same letter if you filed a supplemental claim adding something later.
One exception is worth knowing before you separate from service: A veteran who files a claim within one year of separation is entitled to an effective date going back to the day after separation, even if VA takes months to actually decide the claim.
Filing that same claim just past the one-year mark loses that protection and falls back to the general rule, tied to the date VA received the paperwork rather than the date you left service.
A veteran rated at 70% with no dependents draws $1,808.45 a month in 2026. Pushed back two years, a delayed effective date works out to $43,402.80 in back pay lost to a single missed date.
Why the Rating Percentage Isn’t the Only Number
The disability percentage gets the attention, but three other figures in the letter determine what you actually receive. The combined rating, if you have more than one service-connected condition, uses a whole-person formula in which a 50% rating and a 30% rating combine to 65%, not 80%, before rounding to the nearest 10%.
Read More: Combined Disability Ratings: The VA Math No One Explains
The monthly payment amount reflects that combined rating together with any dependents on file — not the individual condition ratings on their own. And some code sheets mark a condition as static, meaning VA considers it permanent and unlikely to improve; a static rating is generally not scheduled for future reexamination and carries more protection against a future reduction than a rating without that designation.
If Something Looks Wrong
You have one year from the date of the decision to file a Notice of Disagreement if you believe any part of it is incorrect, whether that’s the percentage, the effective date, or a missing condition. Within that window, veterans can pursue a Supplemental Claim with new evidence, a Higher-Level Review asking a senior adjudicator to take a second look at the same record, or an appeal directly to the Board of Veterans Appeals.
Which path makes sense depends on what actually went wrong, and free help identifying that is available through any accredited Veterans Service Organization, including the DAV, VFW, and American Legion.
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