Every Source, Reproduced Here — So You Never Have to Leave

Women are the fastest-growing group in the entire veteran population. There are now more than 2.1 million women veterans in the United States, and the VA projects women will make up roughly 18% of all living veterans by 2040 — up from a small fraction a generation ago.

The VA’s own reporting shows the practical gap this site exists to close: a large share of women veterans are not enrolled in VA health care, and an even larger share receive no disability compensation at all — often not because they are ineligible, but because they never filed, filed for one condition instead of several, or accepted a first low rating as final.

This federal statute requires the VA to provide counseling and care for conditions related to Military Sexual Trauma (MST) — both the psychological and the physical effects of sexual assault or threatening sexual harassment experienced during military service.

The care is free. You do not need to be enrolled in VA health care, you do not need a service-connected disability rating, and you do not need to have filed a claim. It is available regardless of your discharge status and regardless of whether the assault was ever reported.

This regulation governs how the VA must handle claims based on personal assault, including MST. Because most MST is never reported through official channels, the VA is required to consider evidence from sources other than the service record.

These are called markers — indirect signs that the assault happened. The VA cannot deny an MST-based claim simply because there is no police report and nothing in the service file, and it must first tell the claimant that alternative evidence may be submitted.

This is the section of the VA rating schedule that assigns diagnostic codes and percentages to gynecological and reproductive conditions — diagnostic codes 7610 through 7632. Conditions the VA too often waves off are ratable disabilities here, exactly like any other.

Separately, loss or loss of use of a creative organ can support Special Monthly Compensation (SMC-K) under 38 CFR §3.350(a), paid on top of your regular compensation — $139.87 per month in 2026.

Signed into law August 10, 2022, the PACT Act is the largest expansion of VA toxic-exposure benefits in decades. It added more than 20 presumptive conditions — including many cancers, and reproductive cancer of any type for veterans who meet the qualifying service rules.

“Presumptive” means the VA presumes your service caused the condition once the diagnosis and qualifying service are established, so you do not have to prove the causal link yourself. The Act also created a Toxic Exposure Screening and a facts-found TERA (Toxic Exposure Risk Activity) review path.

Under this regulation, a condition that is caused or aggravated by an already service-connected disability is itself service-connected — a secondary condition. These are some of the most overlooked and most valuable claims.

Each secondary condition adds to your combined rating, and the combined rating is what sets your monthly payment.

PTSD and other mental-health conditions are rated on this scale at 0, 10, 30, 50, 70, and 100 percent, based on how much your symptoms limit your work and daily life — not on the diagnosis label itself.

Women, and MST survivors in particular, are frequently under-rated because trauma symptoms get recorded as ordinary anxiety or depression. The level of occupational and social impairment is what controls the percentage.

A Compensation & Pension (C&P) exam is how the VA assesses your diagnosis, service connection, or severity. For a sensitive exam, VA policy permits a veteran to request an examiner of a particular sex.

Make the request as early as possible and in writing, and ask that the exam be conducted with trauma-informed practices. If an exam is unsafe, dismissive, or medically inadequate, document what happened — an inadequate exam can be challenged.

VA research found women veterans are more than twice as likely to experience homelessness as women who did not serve. That is the downstream result of under-rated claims, missed secondary conditions, and a system that was not built to recognize what women veterans carry out of service.

You do not need a disability rating to ask for housing help. HUD-VASH, SSVF, and VA intimate-partner-violence support exist for exactly this.

VA disability ratings do not add. They combine under this regulation using a whole-person formula: each new percentage applies only to the efficiency you have left. That is why a 50% condition plus a 30% condition combines to 65% and rounds to 70% — not 80%.

The bilateral factor (an extra 10% of the combined value of qualifying paired-limb disabilities) is applied before the rest, and it can push a final rounded rating into a higher pay bracket.

This regulation governs what an accredited agent or attorney may charge. Accredited help is free by law until a claim has been decided and you challenge it — no one may charge you a fee for filing an initial claim.

When a fee is allowed, it must be reasonable; a contingency fee of 20% of past-due benefits recovered is presumed reasonable. This office charges nothing upfront and nothing on first-time claims — a fee is owed only from back pay we actually recover for you.