Permanent and total VA disability: what P&T carries

Permanent and total VA disability — P&T on your paperwork — is the finding that decides what your rating means for the people who live with you.

It is also the one veterans most often think they already have because they reached 100%. Those are different things, and the difference is the whole point of this guide.

Total and permanent are two separate findings

The VA is answering two questions, and it can answer the first yes and the second no.

Total means your conditions rate at 100% on the schedule, or you qualify for TDIU — paid at the 100% rate because your conditions prevent substantially gainful employment.

Permanent means something else entirely: that the medical evidence makes it reasonably certain your condition will last the rest of your life. Not that it is severe. That it is static.

So the combinations that surprise people:

• 100% without P&T. Your rating is at the top of the schedule, and the VA still expects you to attend future examinations, because it thinks you might improve.
• TDIU with P&T. You are not at 100% on the schedule at all, and you hold the permanent finding.

That second one matters, because the family benefits below key off P&T rather than off the number. A veteran on TDIU with P&T has them. A veteran at 100% schedular without P&T does not.

What the VA is looking at for "permanent"

There is no checklist. The rater is making a medical-likelihood judgment on the evidence in front of them, and the things that move it are unglamorous:

The nature of the condition. Some conditions do not get better and everyone knows it — an amputation, total blindness, advanced neurological disease. Others plausibly improve with treatment, and the VA will want to see whether they do.

Your age and treatment history. A condition that has been documented as unchanged for a decade under active treatment reads differently from the same condition diagnosed last year.

What the examiner wrote. A C&P report saying the condition is stable, at maximum medical improvement, and not expected to improve is the sentence the finding often turns on. An examiner who leaves the question blank leaves the rater guessing.

The VA can make the finding on its own, and often does. It is also something you can raise if you believe the evidence supports it.

What P&T carries

This is the part that is usually written as a list and rarely written with numbers. All figures below are current rates, and the two programs run on different clocks — DIC changes with the December cost-of-living adjustment, Chapter 35 on October 1 with the academic year.

Two of those deserve more than a row.

Chapter 35 is per person, not per family

Each eligible dependent gets their own entitlement — 36 months of it, at $1,574.00 a month full time for coursework at a college, university or trade school. A spouse and two children are three separate entitlements, not three people sharing one.

It steps down with course load: $1,244.00 at three-quarter time, $912.00 at half time. Apprenticeships and on-the-job training pay on their own descending scale, starting at $999.00 for the first six months.

The current rate table is on VA.gov, and it changes every October rather than every December, which trips up people who assume all VA numbers move together.

DIC, and the ten-year rule almost nobody explains correctly

Dependency and Indemnity Compensation is paid to a surviving spouse. Normally it requires the veteran's death to be service-connected.

38 CFR § 3.22 creates a second route. Where a veteran was rated totally disabling — TDIU counts — for a continuous period of at least ten years immediately preceding death, the surviving spouse is entitled to DIC whether or not the death had anything to do with the service-connected condition.

There is a separate, smaller thing called the eight-year provision: an added $360.85 a month where the veteran was totally disabling for the eight full years before death and the marriage lasted those same eight years.

These get merged into an "8/10 year rule" constantly. They are not one rule. Ten years is what creates the entitlement; eight years is an added amount on an award that already exists.

The arithmetic, and why we are not doing it for you

Elsewhere on this site we are blunt that climbing the rating scale pays less than people expect — VA math is not addition, and from 90% a new 10% condition changes your monthly payment by nothing at all.

That remains true. What the table above shows is that the monthly payment was never the only term in the equation. Whether the rest of it changes your conclusion depends on facts we do not know: whether you have a spouse, whether anyone in your house wants to go back to school, what your state does with property tax, what your health coverage looks like now.

We are not going to tell you the answer, and you should be wary of anyone who does it in an advertisement. What one more condition actually does to a combined rating is arithmetic rather than opinion, and the VA Math Calculator will do that part in a minute. The VA decides ratings; you decide what is worth your time. What we can do is make sure the numbers are in front of you before you decide, instead of after.

How to find out whether you already have it

Read the decision letter, not the percentage.

Look for the words permanent and total, or a statement that no future examinations are scheduled. Some letters say it in a sentence. Others say it only by what is missing — no re-examination date anywhere in the document.

If yours is ambiguous, the answer is in your C-file, and an accredited VSO will read it with you for free. That is a twenty-minute conversation that tells your family whether three or four of the benefits above are already theirs.

Bottom line

P&T is not a bigger version of 100%. It is a separate finding about permanence, it can sit on top of TDIU as easily as on a schedular 100%, and it is what most of the family benefits actually depend on.

If you are already at 100% or on TDIU, the useful next step is not another claim. It is finding out what your decision letter already says — and what each rating threshold carries on the way up.

Accredited VSOs handle all of this for free and are good at it. Find one at VA.gov.